12 volt car refrigerators

WesternRoadtripper1
Fri, 13 Dec 2024 05:22:36 +0000
General Discussion

I’ve occasionally contemplated buying a small 12 volt portable refrigerator/ freezer for my road trip car,15-20 quart size. I now use an ordinary Coleman ice chest, starting each trip with a pile of “blue-ice” blocks which otherwise live in my home freezer. Of course, once I’m on the road a few days, they are warned up and no longer useful for the remainder of the trip. So I have to rely on buying ice every few days.

Now I’m wondering if there might be some value in having a frig/freezer on board to freeze additional blue ice blocks and exchange those with the ones in the ice chest. (I don’t think I’d go for a larger 12 volt refrigerator).

The benefits would be (1) I’d have more space in the ice chest for food with fewer freezer blocks in the ice chest, while the other half are in the 12v “freezer” and (2) I would have eliminated the annoyance of buying block ice which melts in the ice chest after my blue-ice blocks are depleted. BTW, the space a small “freezer” occupies would be about twice the space used by all of my no-longer cold and therefore totally useless blue-ice blocks.

This makes me wonder about the additional drain on my electrical system in freezing the blue-ice blocks from the cooler. Is the drain on alternator or battery trivial, or could it have consequences? My original Toyota alternator was recently rebuilt by a nearby professional shop for a modest and tolerable price, and it’s easy enough for me to swap out myself if/when needed.

Using it this way, with the portable frig in freezer mode, I assume it would freeze the blocks solid in a single day, which means I might only need to run the freezer every second or third day.

Is there any negative side to this resulting from using the alternator a bit more than originally designed?

21 posts - 8 participants