I Bought the Cheapest 12V FRIDGE on Amazon for Living in a Van

everyone welcome back to my next video today i want to talk about the economics of one of these 12-volt compressor fridges and i want to look at two different ideas first is the idea should you get one of these or should you get ice and we'll talk about the economic practicalities of each but then the second question and i think that a question that i've completely just changed my mind on is do you spend the extra money and buy a higher quality name brand so we'll talk about those two questions first the question of ice should you buy one of these if occasionally you want something to stay cold then you can buy a nice chest use it for storage and then occasionally empty it out and buy some ice that works great i'm out here to live my highest quality possible life i'm not out here to prove how little i i can live on or or show up how much hardship i can take i want a high quality life and everything that means high quality life to me i want to have so for example i want cold foods i want to be able to have foods that i enjoy even if they're cold i don't want to be restricted by just what i can buy and eat that doesn't require refrigeration that's that's not for me a high quality life now i understand for a lot of you it is i'm not arguing with you i'm just saying i'm you and i are different in that way i want it cold pop i want to be able to keep yogurts because i really like yogurts i want to be able to have cold meat i want to what i want more than anything else is i want to be able to cook up three four five meals and all at once do all the clean up once do all the cooking once i don't enjoy cooking i certainly don't enjoy cleaning afterwards and then i want to eat those meals for four maybe five days and that means refrigeration so no question my mind i've always had and will always have refrigeration again if you if it you don't need it thumbs up simplified your life save yourself a lot of money but if you do then should you get an ice chest or should you spend the money for one of these now now this is a 12-volt compressor fridge let me just define what this is um they can easily run off solar if you have 200 watts of solar you can easily run one of these i've been doing it for years and years and so i know for a fact that if you have a 200 watts of solar and you're not using you could use so much other stuff that it wouldn't work but the average person can get by with 200 watts in the winter you'll get less out of the 200 watts but this will come on less so it balances out 200 watts of solar will get you by on one of these real well solar is no problem they have such a low draw most of them draw around 50 watts about 4 amps but they're only coming on uh two four six six hours a day at at four amps that's 24 amps well even if you just have a single battery uh you're probably gonna get by with that because a lot of that will be during the day when it's hot and you're replenishing it if you have enough solar you're replenishing it as it comes out so should you get an ice chest or one of these now let's talk about the disadvantages of an ice chest well first off there's buying ice and if you run out of ice it's an emergency trip to town to get ice and it's storing ice in here and food and i have thrown away over the years that i've used an ice chest which is a lot before i had solar i only used dice i've thrown away a lot of food i've probably thrown away hundreds maybe thousands of dollars worth of food because it got contaminated and got wet and i threw it away or or i couldn't get into town quick enough and it all warmed up and i was i was afraid to eat it and i threw it away because i got i thought it got too warm so there's a lot of waste in food you're buying ice i figure you're going to spend a minimum of five dollars a week on ice that's probably two bags of ice now believe me i've been in a lot of remote places where it was two dollars a bag would have been cheap really cheap and that's assuming two bags a week is enough and in the summer when it's 80 90 degrees outside it is not enough you'll use more than two bags i'll guarantee it even if you're using blocks blocks last a lot longer blocks are harder to find they usually cost more a minimum of five dollars a week and i think a much more realistic average year-round is ten dollars a week but we'll go with the low number five dollars a week times 52 weeks a year is 260 dollars well it just so has happened that this fridge costs 269 dollars so if you can come up with 269 dollars you will have paid for this thing in one year in ice i will guarantee you that and you already have the solar so economically it only makes sense now i think i where i go i go out and camp in the middle of nowhere it's not two dollars a bag first it's a 10 20 mile trip to the nearest ice and that's gas i'm burning to get the ice every two three days every two three days or once or twice a week at at minimum and then when i get there i've paid five dollars for a bag of ice in a little store in the middle of absolutely nowhere i think this thing at 269 dollars that's what i paid for this um free shipping uh i think this thing could pay for itself in six months it will certainly pay for itself in the first year then after that it's free you you just because you're not buying ice anymore so to my mind the economics work uh if you don't have the 269 dollars that doesn't change the fact that you would be far better off with one of these than you would be in uh buying ice so that raises the question of should you buy a cheap one and this is 269 and this is pretty cheap you can get them for less you can get them as low as 200 bucks should you spend 200 to 250 on one of these or should you spend 500 to 600 for a medium quality brand or should you spend a thousand for a high quality brand so there's three different tiers in my thinking there's three different tiers of fridges there's this bottom chinese no-name fridges so this is a joy to this okay that's chinese no-name that's that's the bottom line so they're chinese no-name they're smaller you don't know who made any part of it you don't know who made the compressor you're just uh you're just guessing and you're buying a fridge hoping that lasts now a step up above from that are are the high name high quality brand name to me the big one is dometic and i have owned personally i've owned one dometic fridge and it lasted me five years and then it failed and i threw it away but i've had numerous friends who who've owned dometics and they have failed after one two three four years five years uh so and they're going to be the small ones i bought a 25 quart and it's going to be 400 450 double this basically it's just gonna be about double this uh for about the same size and then you can buy uh the dometic and i bought a truck fridge there's uh there is indel b there are a number of of middle tier brand names uh names that you know they they're using a good compressor and they're chinese ones too in that middle tier they're going to be between 400 and 600 dollars for a between 40 and uh and 60 quart and then you've got the top tiers and that would be arb and ingle and they're 900 bucks and up the cheapest angle on amazon right this minute is 915. the cheapest ar b that i saw was 980. so these are top-tier brand names 900 bucks and up an arb 60 quart thousand thirty four dollars so they're they're big and expensive and my thinking has been to buy the middle tier because you'll get enough cert enough lifetime that it's worth buying those not buying the cheap ones and it's just so expensive 900 to 1000 bucks to buy one of the high quality ones i've known numerous people who've owned ingles and i have never heard of a single person who bought an ingle that had it fail they are the king of 12-volt fridge reliability but it's almost five times as much as this will it last five times longer than this will and my answer is it probably will not i can't imagine that it will last five times longer so and and who among us has the 900 to 1 000 bucks to put out up front to buy it my here's my bottom line when i think about the economics of the three tiers i have decided to buy cheap ones because i believe the cheap ones will last me as long as the middle tier i really do i hate to throw buy something knowing it's going to die and i'm going to throw it away but i bought my dometic because i thought it was a high quality product and it would last me forever it lasted five years and then i threw it away it's in the dump and then i bought a winter and i i sold the winter after three years so it lasted me three years so that's good and then i sold i it would only fit in the trailer it couldn't fit in my van it was too big it was a 60 quart and it wasn't going to fit in the van with me so i had a cargo trailer that i lived in and so when i sold the cargo trailer that the winter went with it and i replaced it with a truck fridge so i've been in a truck fridge now uh for the last three years three years or four years i forget which and it just failed and it's in the landfill now uh the problem is you can't practically get these things fixed so i bought the truck fridge uh i paid how much was that i paid 550 for the truck fridge and it was fifty dollars for shipping so i paid six hundred dollars for the truck fridge it was an in dell b which is a good brand name it's italian it had a dan foss compressor my thinking is the ant dan frost compressor will last longer it will be better well it wasn't for me my experience has been universally that the medium tiered are you're lucky if you get five years and you might probably get less that's been both my personal experience and the people that i talk to so i'm just done with with the middle tier the dometics the truck fridge if it's going to fail after a year to three years probably then uh i'm gonna buy a cheap one which i think will get me one to three years and then uh and then i'll throw it away now one you might be saying to yourself well bob those are all a big freezer those are much bigger fridges those are all 40 to 60 quart this is only 26 quarts well here's the funny thing about it when i went and emptied my uh truck fridge into the 20 quart it took everything out of it and it wasn't full i was low fortunately i was low when it died on me they're this much taller and the bottom is so hard to work with that i fill the bottom up with stuff to raise it because i don't want to go all the way from from the bottom here up to about here and have to dig down to get all my stuff so i filled the bottom in with other things and i i won't try to explain to you what it is but i lost about the bottom four inches and i usually didn't use the top three or four inches and so the bottom line was i was probably using about the same 26 quarts because this 26 quarts and this one will be 100 usable so if you want cold foods cold beverages then this is far better use of your money if you can afford the 200 to 300 you'll be far better off with this than an ice chest you'll pay for this it's first year i can almost guarantee it at 200 to 300 and from there on in you save money on ice it's going to be much cheaper in the long run than ice i promise you that i think you could pay for itself within six months to a year at the absolute most if you get one for less than three hundred dollars which one should you buy which tier the low tier and just expect to be throwing them away the middle tier to expect them to last longer and then be amazed when they don't or the top tier uh where you pay a lot of money and with an eagle you get something that lasts a very very very long time well you have to answer that question for yourself my answer is i'm going to buy one of these i think it's going to be worth it even if it's cheap chinese junk because i think it may not be junk i think it's pretty likely that it will last long enough for you to be pleased you have bought it now i'm an environmentalist and i don't like this idea of buying cheap stuff just knowing that i'm going to throw it in the way but if i spent if i've consistently spent 600 and still ended up throwing away that failed because stuff is still in that landfill i've still put two fridges in the landfill and i don't know about the third one but i'm almost certain it's in the landfill by now thanks so much for watching and listening and hopefully you've learned something if you did like us on youtube subscribe to the channel hit that thumbs up button and we'll talk to you on the next video [Music] you

Channel: CheapRVliving

Views: 194,070

Keywords: live, living, car, van, RV, Full-time, nomad, gypsy, camper, camp, boondock, travel, snowbird, caravan, tiny, house, tribe, RTR, adventure

Id: -Q_78o4PZ78

Length: 13min 53sec (833 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 01 2021