On hot days, you need to be able to rely on your fridge to keep your food and drinks icy cold

Yep, nothing will spoil the perfect camping escape like a camping fridge that won’t run right! All that ruined food and hot beer – that’s no-one’s idea of a good time. Thankfully there are a couple of things you can do to make sure your 12v camping fridge runs cold, even on super hot days – and the good news is, these are all cheap fixes that won’t cost you much at all!

When you’re camping, the last thing you want is your fridge to stop working

The first steps to getting your dual zone camping fridge to run right starts in the shed! If you’re going away for a weekend and you jam your fridge full of warm beer and room-temperature food at 4pm, the camping fridge/freezer is going to be working overtime to try and pull everything down to a cold temperature. If you’re only driving an hour up the road and pulling into camp early evening, your fridge will be running flat-out that first night trying to cool everything, and by the next morning your battery will have taken a beating. Instead, plan ahead – pack your fridge the night before you leave, and plug it into your wall socket overnight to allow it to bring everything down to temp before you hit the road. And while you’re at it, if you’ve got a 240v battery charge, chuck it on your deep-cycle battery overnight too, to ensure you’re leaving home with a completely full and fresh battery!

The hotter the day, the hard your fridge has to work if you’re constantly opening it

One of the most common fridge complaints is a camping fridge that won’t run properly due to low voltage. The cause of this can be a couple of different things, so I’ll run you through a bit of simple problem solving. If you’ve got a multimeter, now’s the time to dust it off!

But first, a little trick that involves NO tools at all, and solves the problem about half the time! Most fridges have an adjustable low-voltage cut-off that senses how much power is left in your  battery, and turns the fridge off if the battery gets too low, to prevent damage from draining it too far. If you get an error light and you’re certain you’ve got plenty of juice in your battery, check that the low-voltage cut-out isn’t set too high. For most fridges the medium setting is perfect – it’ll let your fridge run as long as possible without risking over-draining your battery. The high setting cuts the camping fridge freezer off early, useful if you want to preserve as much battery power as possible and you’ve only got drinks and non-perishable food to keep cool. The low setting is for when you REALLY need to keep everything cold as long as possible, and you’re not as worried about draining the battery. Almost all 12v camping fridges have this feature – check your owner’s manual for more details.

Set your solar panel up at camp as soon as you get there to keep your fridge topped up

Okay, so your low voltage cutoff is set correctly but your camping 12v fridge still won’t run. Now let’s check the battery and the wiring to the fridge. Disconnect your fridge and any other accessories connected to the battery and let it settle for 10minutes. Grab your voltmeter and set it to DC voltage and auto-ranging, and probe the battery first – black to negative, red to positive. If the battery reads less than 12.0V with nothing connected to it, then the problem is a flat battery – plug in your solar panel or go for a drive for an hour to get some juice back into it.

These little fellas are worth their weight in gold! This is a digital cig socket voltmeter – plug it into any cig socket and it’ll read the voltage available at that socket. With nothing connected to the battery, read the voltage at the socket you plug your fridge into. If it reads more than 0.3v less than the reading you took at the battery, that means the wiring from the battery to the socket is undersized and losing power – very common if you’re relying on factory wiring. Think of it like connecting a drinking straw to a garden tap – it’s severely limiting the flow of electricity.

Having the proper wiring run to where you’ve got your fridge mounted is crucial to camping fridge performance

The solution is to wire in a proper heavy-duty circuit for your portable 12v fridge/freezer, bypassing any under-sized factory wiring. Basically, if you run the right cabling from your deep-cycle battery to where you want to plug your camping fridge in, you can guarantee the wiring will never be an issue! Not sure what size wire you need? My mate Cahn’s just put together a cracking video on wiring and voltage drop – click that link up there to check it out!

Still no joy? The final step is to get the multimeter out and check that the fridge cable hasn’t got a broken wire, or that the inbuilt fuse hasn’t blown. Just plug the cable into the socket, and then use your multimeter on the same settings to probe the end of the plug. If you’re not getting power, check the fuse, and closely inspect the wiring for damage to see where the problem could be.

Fridge covers add an extra layer of insulation to your fridge and keep the direct sunlight off it

A fridge cover isn’t just a good idea to protect your portable camping fridge against knocks and damage – it actually adds substantially greater insulation to keep your fridge running colder! Check this out – this fridge has been sitting in the sun for about an hour. The outside of the cover reads 34 degrees, while the outside of the camping fridge body itself reads 14 degrees – a huge difference! A fridge cover does two things to make your fridge run better – it keeps the direct sunlight off your fridge, and it keeps the cold from escaping. DEFINITELY a must-have!

If you can keep direct sunlight off your fridge, it will naturally stay cooler

And talking of direct sunlight, here’s a neat little trick I’ve been using in my vehicles for years. A windscreen sunshade taped to the rear side window stops sunlight from beating in directly on your fridge, AND there’s the added bonus of a bit of extra security since you can’t see in either! Just use a bit of double-sided tape to mount it.

Here’s something that a lot of people get wrong – and I’ve been guilty of it too at times. Try and avoid over-packing the back of your car when you go away! These vents on the side of a portable camping fridge are crucial for venting the heat that is produced by the fridge when it’s running. If you block the vents, the heat can’t escape and you end up with a fridge that runs inefficiently, not being able to properly cool its contents. Keep a minimum of 10cm of space around your fridge’s vents at all times!

The more you open your fridge, the harder it has to work to keep its contents cool

Heading away for an extended camping adventure? One way to make sure your camping fridge runs efficiently AND your battery lasts as long as possible, is to keep your drinks in an icebox! When it’s hot, you’ll open your fridge constantly for cold drinks, and every time you do, you let out the cold air. Keep your drinks in an icebox and leave your fridge for the food, and you’ll prevent your fridge from working as hard. This trick works particularly well if you’ve got a big family!

And finally – you just can’t beat solar power when you’re camping for a clean, green and silent way to keep your deep-cycle battery topped up. This is a 200w blanket that produce around 10 amps of power every full hour of sunlight. The trick here is to set your solar up as soon as you get to camp, instead of waiting til your battery is flat! That way, the solar panel will keep the battery topped up the whole day, instead of trying to play catchup with an already flat battery.

A camping fridge is an amazing investment in making your next camping adventures the best one ever! These tricks will ensure the investment pays off big time – because warm beers and soggy food aren’t anyone’s idea of a good time. Got any other tips for making your fridge run better? Chuck em up in the comments!