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An electrical question (or two)

Posted: November 22nd, 2015, 2:00 pm
by saDgit
In the 12S supplementary towing socket pin 6 (pin 10 in a 13-pin system) is a switchable (i.e. it's only live when the engine is running) 12 volt supply which is designed to maintain minimum cooling in a camper or caravan's 3-way absorption fridge when neither gas nor mains electricity is available, i.e. when travelling.

I'm proposing to fit a compressor fridge into my camper so it will only ever run on a 12v supply from the camper battery. Under these circumstances that switchable fridge feed is redundant. My question is: is it worth connecting that feed directly to the camper battery as an additional source of charge? Would it make any significant contribution or is it's amperage going to be so low that it's not worthwhile? I'd appreciate your thoughts.

(We had a compressor fridge in our previous camper but it never occurred to me to find out what had happened to that fridge feed. Doh! :oops: )

Re: An electrical question (or two)

Posted: November 23rd, 2015, 6:03 pm
by Toshbins
We were questioning types of fridge, as our only experience of fridges is a compressor one in a boat. It uses quite a lot of juice, so needs the engine running for a long period every couple of days or so. If you have big solar panels, a generator, or running 240 volt charger plugged in, then you should be OK. See also Gary's answer to our fridge thread.