It wasn’t a walk in the park, but the new refrigerator is in! We have a trip coming up very soon and are feeling a great sense of relief that we have a working refrigerator. I returned the dorm size (just in case) refrigerator to Home Depot today, still in it’s box. I wasn’t going to return it until the new one was installed and working for at least 24 hours!
We bought the Homelabs 7.6 cubic feet residential refrigerator with freezer. With our lithium battery set up, solar power system, new generator plus the ability to plug into a power source at a campsite if they have it, we feel good about having this residential refrigerator. We rebuilt the floor the fridge sits on and once we had it in where we wanted we thoroughly braced it. We lined the vent door with waterproof weather striping to protect it from cold and hot weather and we have foam on order to frame it in snugly to keep air that could come through into the living area.
I’ve put my bins in already and am thrilled the door shelves have their fronts! Can’t wait to fill it up and hit the road.
#gmcmotorhome #eleganza2 #drivewayrepairs #diy #newfrigerator #oldrefrigerator #vintagefridge #vintagemotorhome #makeitfit #makeaplan #betterherethenthere #chippedpaint #cleanup #fillitup #icecreamforcamping
Our New Neighborhood 2023 
Your Homelabs fridge appears to be the same as our Avanti fridge which we installed in 2014.
http://www.gmcmhphotos.com/photos/g6634-all-electric-fridge-by-avanti.html
A couple of things to note, this fridge does not have open condenser coils on the back of the fridge. They are enclosed on the sides of the fridge. So you need to leave some room between the sides of the fridge and the enclosure for heat to dissipate. I’m sure this design is not as efficient as open condenser coils on the back.
Also, be aware that if the fridge compressor is running when you change power sources, the compressor will stall and trip the compressor overload breaker. I didn’t read how your inverter/shore-line switch-over is handled before writing this, so this may not be an issue for you. For the first several years, I manually switched from shore-power to inverter and back. To prevent compressor lockup, I added a power-up delay timer to the compressor. If the fridge lost power, the compressor would not restart until about 10 minutes after power was restored.
We now have a Samlex EVO-1200 Inverter/charger/transfer switch. This unit synchronizes its inverter to the power line to provide near seamless switch-overs between shore power and inverter and back, so compressor lockup is not an issue. We have a 150W solar panel with 200AHr of LiFePO4 battery and a Victron MPPT solar controller. We can go about 48 hours on battery power providing the solar panels get some amount of sun. The LiFePO4 batteries are new to us this summer, but we had only one weekend outing this year to try them.
Anyway, we love our fridge!
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