One of the most important features to consider when upgrading your RV or camper is the camper RV refrigerator. This essential appliance is crucial in keeping your food fresh, drinks cold, and meals ready while on the road. Traditional RV refrigerators, often powered by propane or 120V electricity, have been a staple for years, but the shift to 12-volt, compressor-based fridges is becoming more popular. These modern camper RV refrigerators offer superior efficiency, more reliable cooling, and a variety of added benefits that can enhance your RV experience. In this article, we’ll explore why switching to a 12-volt camper RV refrigerator is a game changer for full-time travelers and weekend adventurers alike.
The first thing we have to discuss is this compressor-style refrigerator’s performance. It is more like your residential refrigerator in your house, and it has way better performance than an RV absorption-style refrigerator. So what does this mean for me? It means fewer frozen vegetables, fewer frozen eggs, and less surprising food spoilage. What I mean when I say “surprising” is that in our previous fridge, everything would look good, and then suddenly, some veggies would spoil due to condensation or something related to heat or humidity.
What we mean by that is in a compressor-style fridge, behind this fully stacked food we have in here is a fan in the back, which helps evenly distribute the air around the refrigerator, as opposed to the RV-style where the coil is in the back where all the cold air comes from. It relies on gravity to bring the cold air down, so next to the coil, it’s extremely cold; stuff will freeze. On the bottom down here, things could spoil, like meat. So if you’re in a home, you usually don’t think about where you need to put certain items for performance purposes—like you don’t think about putting vegetables in a certain spot and them freezing, or meat in a certain place and spoiling. You might pay attention to where you put your meat for sanitary purposes, like if juices drip or anything raw, but that’s about it.
Before we had this fridge in the RV, I always put my meat on the top shelf, and I still do; that’s just an old habit. And then I don’t have to worry about anything else. I can mix and match my containers. I know people have multiple RV hacks for their refrigerators, where you put 12-volt computer fans in there and things like that. Still, I think that it’s kind of ridiculous that we have to take a brand-new refrigerator and hack it so that it actually works or cools properly.
When we were in our van for the first three years of our RV life, we did have a 12-volt fridge, so 12-volt fridges are something that we’ve had before. We knew that we liked them, and we knew what to expect from them. We also used a 12-volt fridge during our vehicle-based overlanding stint when we lived in our truck and rooftop tent, which was also great to have. Now, getting into this travel trailer was the very first time we had gas absorption, and it took us a little time to get used to it and figure out its quirks. I want to think we did that fairly well.
We saw it struggle most when we got into the Florida Keys in April. In April and May, we were in Florida, so it was getting hot and sweltery, with a lot of sun, heat, and humidity. That is where we saw the refrigerators struggling. In particular, I noticed a lot more spoiling greens, and it took more work to keep my produce fresh, even when it was brand new. We also saw our freezers struggling, so the gas absorption in that high heat was icing up bad quickly. We had inches of block ice in the back of it, and it was so much that it was like dripping water in the front of the freezer.
Now, with this new style, back to the 12-volt again, I don’t have to defrost; there’s no ice buildup, and it’s great not to do that monthly chore or sometimes even more than monthly if you’re in those hot areas. Another big deal for us in getting a 12-volt fridge is the ease of operation; we’re used to having a 12-volt fridge.
We never thought about the compressor fridge. It was just on and worked, like when you’re in your house—you don’t think about your fridge, you don’t have to switch it on and off or put it to propane or worry about it being level or anything. It just works. And there are enough variables with RVing that I don’t want to think about one more: the fridge. So just having it on and operating 24/7, working like it should, cooling like it should, not frosting up, not dripping water from the freezer, not having hot and cold spots—it works.
Again, with the cost of a 12-volt fridge, if you already have an RV gas absorption fridge and it works fine for the way you RV or camp, it might not make sense to upgrade to a 12-volt. But a lot of new RVs are coming with 12 volts now. New RVs come with a couple hundred watts of solar power as standard, and there are options to get lithium batteries right out of the gate. And that brings us directly to our next top point: increased space. We get about 25 percent more space in this unit, and I haven’t busted out my ruler to compare how the freezer got larger versus the refrigerator space got larger, but most of that space is in the refrigerator.
So, the freezer itself will start there. I can get more food in this freezer, even though they’re the same roughly cubic square feet. It’s because that back doesn’t fill up with ice. We would get that ice on the back, which automatically takes up a couple of inches. In addition, I couldn’t pack that freezer as full as I would like because if I had packed it full, the air couldn’t circulate, and then the food wouldn’t freeze. So, what’s the point of having a freezer if the food’s not frozen? It’s all going to go bad. So I would decrease what I put in there, and in this one, because it does have a fan, I can fill it more to its true capacity on what it’s intended to hold.
So, I feel like I get more in here, even though the space didn’t necessarily increase, but I do think that the space in the fridge increased by a lot—about 25%. That makes a huge difference, especially when you’re eating many fresh vegetables and have just a bunch of stuff in here. You take for granted having refrigerator space until it’s taken from you, and so I’m excited to have it back. Being able to do more food prepping and grocery shopping makes your trips last slightly longer—I love the space. I think that’s probably my overall favorite out of all of these—the extra space.
This new refrigerator is ten cubic feet, and the previous fridge with this travel trailer was eight cubic feet. The beautiful thing is that it fits in the same footprint right here, which Aaron will go into more detail during his installation discussion. One of the main reasons we wanted to switch was because of the power consumption. You guys have heard me complain numerous times about our old fridge that would use about 300 watts of power while on electricity. Not only does it use 300 watts, but it also uses it consistently, so trying to run your RV gas absorption on the 120-volt electric really takes a lot of battery power.
When we first got our RV, I thought I could run that fridge off of our battery power, and that 300 watts is roughly 25 amps of power. If you think there will be a hundred amp-hour battery in four hours of traveling, which is quite a bit of power. Most of you know we have a large electrical system with 1200 watts of solar on the roof and 810 amp-hours of lithium batteries. So I was blown away that we couldn’t run our gas absorption fridge off that large electrical system. It just took way too much power.
We’ve always had 12-volt compressor-style fridges in the past. Our van had a round of five cubic feet 12-volt fridge with 300 watts of solar on the roof and 400 amp-hours of lithium batteries, and that was plenty to run that fridge. We never worried about running out of power in that setup with the van. So, moving to this larger Dometic DMC 4101, which is ten cubic feet and runs on roughly 150 watts of power, the key is that it’s a variable compressor. So, that’s the max power, which it rarely ever sits at. It usually uses more than 100 watts down to 50 watts of power.
And because it’s so much more efficient, like we discussed earlier, it cycles on and off and doesn’t run constantly like our old absorption fridge did on electricity. I mentioned in a previous video that I did a little experiment—I shut our solar panel charging off, and when we were on a travel day, our RV was only running off of the 50 watts of power from the 7-pin from the truck. And after four hours of driving, our battery was still at 99 percent. So that means that 50 watts of power constantly coming from our car was enough to run the fridge and any other small draws that were being used on the RV, like the propane detector or any of those residual draws you get from an RV, parasitic draws.
Like the absorption fridge, this compressor fridge also struggles slightly in high heat, but not performance-wise. It’s more energy consumption. So, as the heat and the temperature go up, the fridge runs more than it typically would if it was a little cooler out. Now, I don’t have the exact power usage from this fridge, and I don’t have an easy way to test it for 24 hours, but I want to give a few examples of how it’s working for us, and our 1200 watts of solar and big lithium battery bank is plenty to run a fridge like this. Still, suppose I had to make an assumption. In that case, I think if you had 300 to 600 watts of solar on your RV roof and, you know, a good battery bank, it doesn’t have to be a lithium battery bank, but a good size battery bank so that your fridge can run overnight and be charged back up the next day by the sun, I don’t think it would take very much to run this 12-volt fridge. Now, of course, on propane, a propane fridge uses less 12-volt power, but it uses quite a bit of propane, and that’s also a subjective term because some people think a propane tank that lasts them all summer long is not a big deal. But coming from our perspective, we are full-time on the road, so our fridge runs full-time, and if you have it on propane, that’s much propane.
Who is way smarter than we are at this type of stuff? They say your fridge runs roughly 61 hours off one gallon of propane. So, in a 20-pound propane tank, which is 4.6 gallons, that would be somewhere around 11 days, I think, which might be great if you’re going on a trip for a week or you’re kind of a weekend warrior. But for us, with this big electrical system, it makes way more sense for us to have a fridge that we can run off of that system and not worry about getting propane. It’s not necessarily just the cost of the propane; it’s the hassle. Finding propane is a pain, and we don’t like doing it.
This next point is subjective. It depends on your preference and style, but we love the appearance of this new 12-volt fridge. We love the stainless steel—it’s like a brushed stainless steel. The logging is very clean, and these side handles are also very clean. So what you end up getting is this nice, bright appearance. The refrigerator that we had previously, the gas absorption one, was high quality and made well, but it was a paneled wood-looking thing that was very dark. We struggled with all of the brightness in here, trying to brighten it up, so having the stainless steel helps a ton, and it just looks more modern to us. I think that the older—well, it’s not old. I believe the brown wood panel version seems slightly more dated. But again, that’s just our personal opinion.
And this does stay pretty clean. Having a brushed appearance helps with the fingerprints. Having the handles on the side also helps with fingerprints, so you get used to grabbing it here rather than putting your paws all over it. But it is easy to clean. All I do is use a microfiber and just plain water. Oops, this could have worked better. All I do is use a microfiber and plain water and give it a squirt—usually, it’s right here that gets the fingerprints.
Of course, we needed to start by emptying our old fridge’s contents; I went to the back to shut off the propane and start on the electrical. We cut power to the refrigerator by removing the 12-volt fuse from the breaker panel, and then we were safe to remove the 12-volt wires from the back of the fridge. The factory wires in our RV were 12 gauge, which was good news because that meant we didn’t have to run any larger wires to handle a larger amount of amperage that the new 12-volt refrigerator would draw. You know what size gauge and how long the run you should use. The fitting that fit our propane line was a 3/8-inch flare fitting, a cap style or a plug style, and because this is flared.
Next up, getting the old fridge out of the cabinet was as simple as removing some trim and a few mounting screws. We also removed the front doors to help alleviate some weight and make it easier to carry out. The new fridge has a width of about 24 inches, and our door is about 24 and a half inches, so I was concerned if it would even fit out the door. I’ve heard some horror stories where people needed to remove the trim around their RV door or take things out through windows, but thankfully, this fridge squeaked right out of our door.
After the successful mounting, we needed to tackle the electrical part, which consisted of a 12-volt positive and negative and an extra chassis ground. I did have to add some extra wire onto the factory wires to make it up to our connection on the new fridge, but I just used some heat shrink connectors and a couple of lengths of extra 10-gauge wire I had lying around. Then, it was time to put the fuse back in and turn on the 12-volt. Everything worked immediately out of the box, and you can see here that it ran at around 150 watts of power. That also includes some of the small residual draws in our RV, but everything worked right on the first go.
I put a little thermometer in the freezer to see how quickly it would come down to temperature. It only took about an hour, and the freezer was about 30 degrees. So, the performance on this thing is great. As mentioned, when we get into extremely hot weather in the upper 90s, the fridge still works great and has no performance issues. The only thing is that it uses more electricity as it’s running more often.
In conclusion, upgrading to a 12-volt compressor-style refrigerator in your RV or camper can significantly enhance your on-the-road experience. The reliable, efficient cooling and uniform temperature distribution ensure that your food stays fresher for longer, reducing spoilage and offering peace of mind while traveling. No more worrying about frozen veggies, spoiled meat, or inconsistent cooling caused by outdated absorption fridges. Whether you’re a full-time traveler or a weekend adventurer, switching to a 12-volt fridge is an investment that will improve both convenience and comfort. So, take a step toward a more efficient and hassle-free RV experience—your taste buds will thank you!