Equipt FAQ: Can I Run My Fridge On An Inverter?

Video Transcript

Hi, this is Paul with Equipt. One of the questions we get asked quite often is, can I run a fridge in my vehicle using the inverter that is built into the back of the vehicle, or an inverter in general? The answer is probably not a good idea, and here's our reasoning for that.

The fridge in the back, the National Luna fridges, as well as other fridges on the market, are in essence 12-volt beasts. That's what they want. You can plug them into a 120-volt outlet, sure, that's possible. In fact, you can plug it into the house outlet all the time, not a problem. But what they're doing is taking that 120-volt AC current and converting it to 12-volt DC current to run the machine. They're a 12-volt machine.

So, with that being said, if you have an inverter in the back of your vehicle, if you plug the fridge into that 120-volt inverter, what you have is the vehicle generating a 12-volt current into an inverter, which is raising it up to 120-volt AC current to be plugged into by the fridge, that's taking it and dropping it back down to 12 volts DC to run the fridge. Incredibly inefficient, and it runs your battery down twice as fast as just simply plugging it into the 12-volt system. It's just not necessary to do that.

In a lot of aspects, the vehicles that have them integrated into their system are switched power, and so when you turn off your vehicle, it's not going to run that anyway. There are other circumstances that might not be good for integrated inverters in that machines like the National Luna fridges and others, you've got to have a pure sine wave inverter for the fridge to run correctly on that power. It's dirty power otherwise, so you want to make sure that that's happening too.

If it were me, I would say no, don't use an inverter in any vehicle to run a fridge. You're just using power excessively, and it's not necessary to do so.