Ask the Cryptogonners: Run Freezer Off Van and 12v Inverter?

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Ask the Cryptogonners: Run Freezer Off Van and 12v Inverter?

October 11th, 2015

Awake Goy

Ask the Cryptogonners: Run Freezer Off Van and 12v Inverter?

October 11th, 2015

Yesterday, we were given a chest freezer!

In the past, we used to keep the meat from our homekills in a chest freezer at my mother and father in laws’ house. That freezer is now in our garage, so we will be keeping the meat over here.

Regular readers will know that we routinely experience power outages here in the Far North of New Zealand. (There was another one yesterday.)

The substation that serves my inlaws’ place has diesel backup, so they have much shorter outages over there because Top Energy just spins up the generators. We never worried about keeping the meat over there. Out where we are, though, we’re usually the first to lose power and the last to get it restored. The record length of a blackout at our place is six days.

Ok, it’s not an option to lose thousands of dollars worth of meat due to a blackout. The obvious way to make sure that doesn’t happen is with the use of a generator. (Or, in the event of an EMP attack/zombie apocalypse, 200 litre barrels and lots of salt. *grin*) Honda makes the best small generators, but they cost the most.

There are lots of cheap Chinese made lucky dragon generators out there that cost about 1/4 of what a Honda costs. There is also a middle-ground option that uses a Honda engine and lucky dragon everything else, but costs half as much as a Honda. That one has a system warranty of two years and coil warranty of five years. All the rest have one year, the minimum required in NZ.

The generators I’ve been looking at are in the 2kw to 2.6kw range.

I used a Kill-A-Watt type device and learned that my freezer needs 1450 watts to start the compressor. It uses about 100 watts while running. (If you don’t understand why the startup load is so high, see locked rotor current.)

I really don’t want to buy one of those bottom of the barrel generators.

Within about three years, we’ll buy a battery system for our house that will have backup functionality. So really, what I want is a bit of insurance against an extended blackout until we get our solar system batteries.

As bad as power reliability is here, most blackouts don’t last longer than 12 hours and wouldn’t have much impact on a chest freezer. Past a day, especially in summer, we’ll need a backup plan.

So:

How about a 12 volt inverter connected directly to the battery terminals of our van? (Don’t try this with the cigarette lighter plug.) There are lots of 1000 watt (2000 watt peak) units out there for under $100. They even come with the car battery clamps attached. They’re all lucky dragon, but at those prices, maybe buy a few. I mean, if they’re all tested and working ok beforehand, it would be really bad luck to smoke three of them on the big day (when only one needs to work).

I’d love to hear from someone who has actually tried this: Car/Inverter/Freezer. What I’m interested in is stories of success or failure by people who knew their fridge or freezer startup power requirement, used an appropriately sized inverter and kept the length of extension cord to a minimum.

My guess is that the fly in the ointment for this cunning plan could come down to whether or not the inverter is actually capable of peaking to 1450 watts for the fraction of a second it takes to get that compressor motor spinning.

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