Equipt FAQ: National Luna Fridge Tips & Tricks

Video Transcript

Hi, this is Paul with Equipt. We get questions quite often on what's the best way to use my fridge or how to efficiently use the fridge that's in my vehicle. I've had a lot of experience with the fridges and I've come up with a short list of tips and tricks that I think will help maximize your fridge usage, specifically in relation to battery consumption. How do we maximize the battery consumption with the fridge use?

A couple of things to start with: first of all, we want to talk about loading your fridge. Two ways to do this: one, I would say get everything that you are going to put in that fridge cold to start with. Make sure that it's cooled down to the temperature that you want it to be instead of taking warm items, putting them in the fridge in your vehicle hooked to a battery, and then expecting those to cool down. That is going to consume an incredible amount of energy to do so. It's taking things from a certain temperature and cooling them down to a lower temperature, and the fridge is going to have to run pretty hard for a long amount of time to get those things cooled down.

So if you have the ability or the time, make sure that everything that you're putting into the fridge for your weekend adventure or your travels is as cold as possible to put them in there. The other option would be to take your fridge and hook it up to 120 volts power, load it with what you want, and let the fridge run overnight if you're heading out in the morning for your adventure. Fill the fridge the night before, hook it into 110 voltage. These machines are all 12-volt animals, okay, so it will take 120 volt, 250 volt, quite honestly they're a world fridge. You can hook into most any AC power and cool it down using the electrical grid instead of the battery in your vehicle.

If you put all your stuff in there warm, hook your fridge up to the battery in your vehicle, go in for the night, get up in the morning, you might have a dead battery. The fridge would have to run very hard to do so. So for energy consumption, make sure that you fill it with cold things or cool the fridge down with 120 volt before you ever leave the house. That way your battery's topped off and your product is cold, and you're ready to rock.

The next thing I would say is take a look at your travels and if it is possible, stage the interior of your fridge for your activities. What I mean by that is if you've got a four-night stay, you've got four dinners in there, four breakfasts, some lunch stuff, stage those items in your fridge for their use. Put the last night's dinner at the bottom, the second to last night's on top of that, and stage the items so you minimize the opening and closing of this fridge. Every time you open that lid, you lose some cool. Every time you leave that lid open for a while, you lose some cool. And every time you do that over a period of time, taking things out, I've got to get that thing that's down at the bottom of the fridge and then you got to put all the things back, that takes the coolness of the interior of that fridge, throws it right out on the ground, and then the fridge has to start over, turn on, cool down, and do the whole cycle over again.

If you can minimize the amount of activity in opening and closing this fridge, that is going to help your fridge run less, and if it's running less, it's saving energy. And that's what we're after right there, is to save as much energy as we can with the battery.

The next thing that I would say is it's really key here, I think, and it's the one thing that I do a lot of and it's really worked well for me, is temperature management. What I mean by that is that we want our fridges to run at a certain temperature to keep everything cool. The National Luna machines are on a Celsius scale, okay, so the numbers that show up on the screens here are Celsius numbers. How do we work with that? First of all, zero on a Celsius scale is 32 degrees Fahrenheit or at the freezing level. Our fridges in our house usually run somewhere between 32 or, excuse me, 36 and 40 degrees Fahrenheit, so that's going to be somewhere in the range of 2 degrees Celsius to 3 degrees Celsius, maybe 4.

So what I do is I want all my contents to run at 2 degrees Celsius. I set my fridge at 2 and let it do its thing. But when I'm going on my trip, what I do is if I'm going to be in the vehicle for an extended period of time driving, four plus hours, whatever it might be, I will go to the controls and I will set the temperature in that fridge down three or four degrees Celsius from that 2-degree level, so between zero and minus two. Now, what that does is that allows the fridge, while you're driving the vehicle and you have ample power to supply to that fridge running during the time your vehicle is on, that allows your fridge to cool everything down inside there to a lower temperature.

Now, there's not enough time for it to freeze anything, it's just not going to be enough time for that, that takes time and lower temperatures, quite honestly. But if you cool everything down, say from 2 degrees Celsius to zero or minus one, minus two, you get to your location where you're going to be spending the night or a couple of days. When you get there, turn that temperature back up to 2. Now, what that does is everything that is in your fridge now has to come up in temperature up to that level and then raise some before the fridge will ever kick on to cool down again. That buys time. Time without the fridge running is battery consumption savings. You can get anywhere from four to eight, 12 hours in some instances of battery consumption extension simply by changing the temperature of your fridge while you're driving.

While you're driving, the fridge can run all it wants to because it has ample battery energy to consume while the energy is being replenished by the engine. That will really, really help out, especially in situations where your auxiliary battery system or your main battery system, for that matter, is not as large as you want it to be for those instances. So time-temperature management is really key to any fridge, not just the National Luna industries, but any fridge that you're using out there. It's really key to use that.

The last one thing that I would suggest is what I call a one in, one out. Meaning anytime that you take something out of the fridge that you have something that you could put back into that fridge in its place, do so. Whether it's a beer out and a beer in, awesome, beer out and the water in, great, or a soda in and a water out, whatever that might be. If you have something else that you need to cool down in that fridge, it's going to be a lot easier for that fridge to cool down that item when it's one at a time incrementally than empty all the fridge out, go to bed with the fridge empty, wake up in the morning and start loading things in there to cool down.

That's perfectly fine if you're going to start the truck and drive all day to allow that fridge to run and do that. Otherwise, what you're going to end up having is the fridge running too hard to cool down a lot of warm stuff at one time. If you're going one in at a time, the fridge can manage that without much trouble at all.

So those items: load cold or load and cool, stage the things in your fridge so that you're minimizing the amount of times you're opening the fridge, temperature management, reduce the temperature while you're driving, and raise the temperature when you get there, and try the one in, one out idea. Those are some ideas that I have found to be proven ideas for travel with refrigerators in your vehicle to extend the battery life in your vehicle.