Equipt FAQ: Why Does National Luna Use the Hella Style Plug?

Video Transcript

Hi, this is Paul with Equipt Expedition Outfitters. One of the most common questions that we get asked regarding the National Luna fridge line is why does National Luna use the Hella or DIN style plug on their power cords for the fridges.

The United States uses cigarette lighter sockets in just about anything you can imagine. The rest of the planet has several different varieties of sockets that they use. If you go to Europe, Australia, Africa, they use the Hella style socket much more commonly than we do here in the United States. And I think that's a shame because I think that plug is a really good plug.

If you look at a cigarette lighter plug, a male plug, you've got your pointy end here and then you've got these two little slivers of metal on the side. Most of the time they have some type of spring load to them, and we're providing current across those points to generate enough current to run a fridge. The analogy that I use is that using a cigarette lighter male plug is similar to trying to drink a soda through a cocktail straw. Is it possible? Yes, but it takes a lot more energy to do so and a lot more time to draw that fluid through that straw.

The Hella plug style, if you look at it, has 360 degrees of copper contact on there. Now, what that allows this plug to do is to transfer current much more efficiently across the wires. If you think of the current stream from battery to fridge as one constant line, what you want is that current to go efficiently across there. If you come across some type of pinch point in that line, wherever that becomes tighter or less efficient to do, that's where it's going to stay until it gets to the fridge.

For a cigarette lighter male plug, the ability to draw enough current across those two little slivers of metal on the side of that cigarette lighter plug versus being able to draw the current across 360 degrees of copper contact is a game changer. It allows the fridge to run on the power that it needs to efficiently without anything encumbering its ability to run that power.

Fridges run to startup power for, you know, startup's going to be about four and a half amps. Running one of these fridges, depending on the voltage available, it's gonna run anywhere from two and a half up to four and a half amps. That's a significant amount of current. It's not like you're trying to plug in a cigarette lighter to run, you know, the charger on your phone. It's a very, very low average. These are energy consumer machines, so you need to have that amount of current capability across the connection to your fridge for the fridge to run correctly and to avoid circumstances where there will be low power readings on your fridge when it's actually not the case. You have plenty of power supply, but the current's not able to draw through there efficiently enough for the fridge to run correctly.

So, National Luna provides the power cord with the Hella style male cord, and in the fridge, they provide you with a Hella socket spring-loaded lid on it to be mounted in a panel in the back of your vehicle. This is the way they suggest to do it. They've been doing this a while, so I trust them, and this is what I use in my own vehicles. It's worth the time.