Great fridge, I have the next size down, the CR-1065, love it. I run mine off of a 105 AH primary with a 70AH backup powered by up to 235 watts of solar ( 135 moving + 100 more parked ). I love how quiet it is, the LED light inside and the separate freezer compartment.
Now, a word of caution in regards to the freezer. I talked to both Dometic / Weaco and Engel about this particular concern…
When the compressor is running, it cools from the freezer on down, but the thermostat is in the middle of the fridge. So if your fridge is super insulated like mine is, 1" thick multi-layer reflectix everywhere except the fan and adjoining goodies, the fridge will stay at the set temp longer, but the freezer *will* start to thaw. The way I found this out was while camping in cooler temps, say, 60 in the day, 40 or less at night, the thermo was set at 5-6 ish and the fridge stayed at 32-36-ish depending on how often it was opened. When the compressor stopped running the freezer was at 5-10F but as the night progressed and the fridge temp held, the freezer temp rose to about 30F, too warm for ice cream bars which indeed partially melted, IE, mushy. In one test at home the outside temp was 30F in the day, 15F at night. I ran it at a full blast setting of 7 until the compressor shut down. The fridge got down to 27F and the freezer to -5. Then I pulled back the power to a setting of 5 and watched what happened over a few days. In 4 days, the fridge was at 34F and the freezer was at 32F.
So I called both Dometic about my fridge and Engel regarding their more open bay SR-48 and SR71 series to see what the deal was. The overall consensus was that the freezer will keep ice, poultry, other items frozen, especially when the compressor is on a more frequent duty cycle, but ice cream especially in bar form needs to be at 10F or lower, not always attainable with this type of two zone fridge / freezer. At least the Dometic has the insulated door on the freezer while the Engel SR series does not.
It makes me wonder if I were not better off with less insulation so that the compressor would come on more often as it cools the freezer very fast, it's not like I lack the power to run it. I remember my Hagen Daz bars being frozen solid on a 85 degree day but melting with beefed up insulation on a 40 degree day..? Who knew?
I ran these temp tests with this dual zone
thermometer which works very well.
This was of particular concern for me due to the fact that some of the rare black and white film I use that needs to be frozen costs over $50 a roll on ebay *if* you can even find it.
I would be interested to hear your results with the freezer when the compressor is not in heavy duty cycle mode.
), here was my install description:
