Hello
I am looking to purchase a deep cycle battery and battery box for a camping fridge and solar panels.
Looking for advice/deals on this. Located in Qld.
Cheers
Looking for Deep Cycle Battery + Battery Box
dogboy on 23/01/2019 - 17:29
Comments
Hi,
A battery may not be able to completely power your camp fridge. I have a batterybox setup with 12v sockets for charging phones/providing lighting. It is great at that but it didn't go well when we tested a car fridge. Mind you it was a crappy brand one so you may have more luck.Anaconda has the boxes I believe then you need to byo battery. Don't skimp on the box. Make sure it is watertight etc.
I will be running 2x 135ah AGM batteries in my camper of which you should only use 50% to keep your battery in top condition.The fridge i will be running uses less than 1ah per hour so therefore without even connecting to the car or solar it could run for 6 days.
What fridge? From my experience not many reasonable size fridges can achieve that in the real world, in Australian conditions.
Some of the Waeco are down to around.7AH running at 5 degrees in an ambient temperature of 32 degrees obviously this will not happen with regular opening. A mate runs a 65ltr as a freezer and uses 1.2ah only opening once or twice a day
What size fridge? Do you already have a solar panel and controller? If so, what size?
The obvious cheap choice would be $344 Kings 98Ah AGM battery and box from 4WD SupaCentre.
Depending on your car, or how you want to charge it, you may be interested in a DC DC charger too - modern alternators generally don’t output enough voltage to charge deeply depleted batteries…
All of that said, I’m also in the market for a deep cycle battery, and I’m shunning the Kings one in favour of a “brand name” one like a Century. I also want a regular wet cell battery (not an AGM) because I want to put it under the hood. Occasionally N70 size Century deep cycles come up for $170 from SuperCheap/Repco/etc… Food for thought.
Odyssey or NorthStar batteries (unless you want lithium).
Do you need a battery isolator on the box? Or DC DC charger on the box? etc. Or do you have one already installed on your car starter battery?
Posting to follow this.
(I'm also looking at Lead Crystal batteries but they seem a bit too good to be true - or at they worth the price bump?)