electrical efficiency
Quote:
Originally Posted by grizzly7
any reason you cant connect to just one battery, giving 12volts?
how could you find out if the fridge or the seperate inverter converted 12volts to 240 more efficiently?
i have 24volt and 12volt sockets in my camper, and 240volt uk mains sockets for when i'm plugged into a campsite. the fridge is currently a caravan type thing with a normal door, but i'm thinking that a top loading engel type thing would be more efficient, durable although a little pricey!
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Uneven loads on 2 batteries in series is not good. It will shorten battery life or could even destroy it. A friend of mine ran his 12V car radio on 1 battery (24V LC) and the other battery exploded under the bonnet. Always use a 24/12 converter to power 12 appliances.
I do have a 12 Volt compressor but I run this evenly on both batteries. While using it, it runs half the time on the one and half the time on the other, just to keep the batteries equally loaded.
A fridge directly on 12 or 24V is always better than via an inverter. The electrical efficiency of an inverter is about 80 to 90%. That means on a 300 Watt inverter, 30 to 60 watt is lost in heat only. That is equivalent to a very bright light bulb!
cheers,
Noel
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