Fridge (and accessory) recommendations (3 Viewers)

[linuxgod]

If you start simple, you can plug the portable battery into your car's 12V plug. If you are driving most of the day, it will charge (slowly but it will charge). Having a 160W - 200W portable solar panel will charge the portable battery when you are not driving the car.

Doing the math: if your 1000 GZ has a capacity of 800 Watt-Hours, and you can run the fridge for 1.5 days (36 hours), then your average draw is roughly 25 Watts. Assuming you cannot use alternator charge or solar charge for 12 hours (night time), you will deplete your battery by 300 Watt-hours. In order to recharge your battery the next day, you would have to run the truck for 4 hours (100 watts charge - 25 watts draw = 75 watts net charge, 300WH/75W=4 hours). Then your solar panel can further charge your battery when the truck is off as long as the panel produces more than the 25 watts fridge draw.

This would be the simplest setup.

If you want to charge the portable battery faster while driving, you will need to do the DC-DC converter to go from the car 12V to 24V to charge the battery. This will require large power wire run from your car battery to inside the truck and is more complicated. Or you would need to install a permanent solar panel on your truck and run the wires to the portable battery so it charges while driving and while stopped.

Yeah agreed, start with a cigarette lighter plug. I already had the rear fuse block wired up so adding an Anderson plug and a cheap 12-24 Dc converter off Amazon in-line was easy

 

[TeCKis300]

@linuxgod might have missed this elsewhere, but how do you power your fridge for extended trips like your Moab trip with that Bluetti? I have a GZ Yeti 1000 and it's good for 1.5-2 days normal usage. I'm thinking through a ~8 day trip next year and not sure how I should set this up. I have the yeti 12v car charging cable, don't have portable solar yet.

I have these exact pieces. You don't need anything more than what you have for this setup to work great, if you want to prove it to yourself before upgrading anything more.

Just run a 12V extension from the cigarette lighter ports up front. The Yeti 5/10A charging cable, likely only able to work at 5A (because of voltage drop), will work just fine to keep up on road trips.

Lots of options to up the charge rate, but honestly it's not really necessary for most overlanding trips where there's lots of driving time.