Out with the old and in with the new!

[Frenchy]

One of the things that gets important when you're going on the trail or even on a long road trip is making sure you have a place to keep certain things nice and cool. That leaves you with the options of a ice chest or a powered cooler of sorts. For me I decided to go with a powered cooler. To be more specific I actually got a 12 volt fridge. It was close to 3 years ago that I got my first fridge used. That fridge is a Dometic CFX335. Overall that fridge has been wonderful and has suited my needs for the most part. It first started life in my Pathfinder and sat in my frontier for the last year and a half. Overall I'd have to say it is an excellent fridge to consider especially if you find a good used one.

Well thanks to a sale over this last weekend I decided to go to FrontRunner and purchase the new Dometic CFX535 as it was the best price I have seen in quite a while. I was actually considering one of these fridges since it is a upgrade over the previous generation. These upgrades include better vacuum sealed compartments, a latch mechanism that's much easier to latch, a variable speed compressor that's supposed to be more energy efficient and a nice sleek gray and black color. The nice thing is it's the same exact dimensions of the previous generation. This makes it nice if you already have a CFX 3 series and want to go to a CFX 5 series.

Only time will tell on how well this new fridge is going to do. I plan for this one to stay in the truck and it should do just fine for what I intend to do with it. As for the old fridge you ask? That's going to go in my work van. It's already a little beat up. Why not put it in the work van where I can have some cold drinks and keep a nice cold lunch ready.

All in all I will say that I do like the Dometic fridge. It's definitely an excellent option for those in the market and still looking.

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[Frenchy]

After running the fridge for a week I now have a general update.

Do you remember that the old fridge is a CFX3 series and the new fridge is a CFX5 series. Both of these are the same size as well in a 36 Liter capacity.

This update has to do with energy efficiency. For my vehicle I do have a 100 amp hour lithium ion battery for the house batter. For most uses it's not a bad size to consider. Some may actually need more but it depends on the application. One of the things I don't have with this battery is solar powered. Because of that I'm very limited on how far I can go without driving the vehicle.

With the old CFX3 series fridge I could do three solid days before having to drive the vehicle to charge the battery. With the new CFX5 series fridge I can now go a solid 5 days before having to drive the vehicle in order to charge the battery.

How was I able to calculate all this? Quite simple. Thankfully Dometic has a nice app that will connect to the fridge and give you a power readout for our day and weekly time frames. For the daily average on the weekly time frame I would normally use about 24 AH each day on the CFX3 series fridge. On the CFX5 series fridge I use about 16.8 AH each day. Because lithium ion batteries should not go below 80% if you can avoid it means I have a solid 80 AH of capacity before I am starting to damage the battery. Taking the AH Reading and dividing the capacity by that reading gives me the day count of what I can do. Even then I'm technically pushing it with 5 days.

That all said it is proof that the new CFX5 series is more efficient.