COOL RUNNINGS – Make Your Fridge Run Cooler

There’s nothing better than having your Adventure Kings 60L Fridge/Freezer running beautifully in the back of your 4WD. Here’s a couple of easy tricks to help it keep everything perfectly cold

Righto, let’s start with the obvious.

Fridge Covers!

A dedicated Adventure Kings 60L Fridge/Freezer Cover are easy to use and simple to get a hold of at around $50. The idea behind them is to keep direct sunlight away from the fridge, and to also keep the cool temperatures insulated inside the Adventure Kings 60L Fridge/Freezer. Get one that’s specific to your model and it will also protect your fridge from knocks and scrapes – bonus

Do it yourself

It might not be the classiest thing in the world, but making your own DIY fridge cover made from a cheap parts-store windscreen cover actually works surprisingly well at keeping fridge temperatures down. It’s never going to rival a proper fridge cover for insulation, but the material is designed to reflect sunlight – and that’s half the battle

Shade

Moving further down the “I don’t wanna spend much money” line, is the simplest thing you can ever do to help your Adventure Kings 60L Fridge/Freezer – park in the shade! We’ve tested it, and proven than a vehicle parked in the shade with the windows down can be 25°C cooler than one parked in the sun with the window up.

That’s a massive difference in ambient temperatures, and we’ve seen it make the difference between a fridge that cycles on and off, easily holding °C, and one that’s running flat out, struggling to stick to 4°C.

Icebox

The less you open your fridge, the more it has an ability to keep the contents cool. To that end, it’s a seriously good idea to still run an icebox like the Adventure Kings range of Icebox’s wherever possible. Throw cold drinks in it at the beginning of the day that have been chilled in the fridge over-night, and even without ice they’ll keep nice and cool right through til the arvo. Then, instead of opening the fridge every half hour for a bottle of water or a can of Coke, you can leave the fridge well alone to do its thing

Wiring

Nothing stops a fridge running at its best like incorrect wiring. Fridges don’t draw massive amounts of current – around 5A on startup and settling to anywhere between 0.5 and 3A continuous – but that still needs some proper wiring to make it run properly. At a minimum you need to be looking for 6mm twin-core, especially if the wiring is running all the way from the engine bay to the rear of the vehicle

Plugs

Ever melted a fridge plug and wondered why? Hours of shaking and rattling around in the back of a 4WD can rattle just about any cigarette socket loose. Merit-style plugs are better, as are the twist-lock ciggy plugs, but they still have the potential to lose proper contact with the socket. Hard-wiring a fridge cable means you never, ever have to think about whether it’s going to rattle loose again

Ventilation

12v fridges run a condenser as a heat-exchange – the same principal as your radiator, or the condenser on the back of your fridge at home. To work efficiently, the condenser needs proper airflow to extract heat away from the cooling fins. Chocking the back of the vehicle full of gear is natural, but it’s hurting how your fridge runs. Do your best to leave space around the fridge – or for the ultimate, Get yourself a set of Titan Rear Drawers, it’ll make it a lot easier to slide the fridgein and out with its included fridge slide, too!

If you had to pinpoint the 4WD accessories that have made the biggest difference to how we head offroad in the past decade or two, without a doubt on the top of the list would be the mighty 12v fridge. Having a fridge in the back of your 4WD is a deadset game-changer. It means you’re not a slave to the availability of ice. It allows you to head bush for longer with plenty of good tucker. And there really is nothing like pulling into camp at night and grabbing a coldie out of the Adventure Kings 60L Fridge that’s been humming along at 0°C.