A couple of years ago, I was lucky enough to do a big trip around Australia. I spent the better part of a year travelling anti-clockwise around the country in my old Landcruiser with my camper trailer in tow, and I clocked up 42,000km. I would have gone for longer except I had a few BIG repairs to the old Landcruiser that sucked all my funds dry and I ran out of money! The point of this yarn however is not to talk about that – but rather to talk about one of the most useful bits of camping gear I carried on that trip – being a second portable camping fridge that I ran 24/7 as a freezer.

Sure, I had a big dual-zone camping fridge, but I found that especially up in the hot Top End, I was filling both compartments with food and with drinks that I wanted to keep chilled at fridge temperatures. However, I was still spending a lot of time really remote so wanted to run a 12v camping fridge that I could set right down to -18°C as a freezer, keeping meat and veggies frozen so I could camp right out off-grid for weeks at a time.

I can’t recommend this setup enough for big trips! I highly recommend something along the lines of the Kings 60L single zone camping fridge – it gives you heaps of internal space to fill with meat and veggies, and because it’s got a Secop compressor inside, as long as you keep power up to the batteries, it’ll run as a freezer day after day after day!

Running a dedicated camping fridge as a freezer, I was able to vacuum seal three weeks worth of meat in Cairns plus top up with a few luxuries like a couple of packs of Zooper Dooper ice blocks right at the bottom of the 12v fridge. The entire time I was up the Cape, I was eating like a King! Each night before bed I’d pull out what I wanted to eat for dinner the next night, and transfer it to the dairy compartment in my main dual zone camping fridge. Because this is designed to run just a little warmer than the main compartment, it’s the perfect place to defrost a couple of steaks or some rissoles over a 24 hour period, and they’d be ready to cook by dinner the next night.

And I can’t tell you how good it is to be sitting at a waterfront campsite at the very tip of Cape York, in 35 degree heat, knocking back a couple of ice blocks out of my 12v fridge that’s been running at freezer temperatures for weeks! Go on, laugh all you want and tell me I’m soft, but I’ve never met a single person who in that situation would say no to an ice block. After all, who needs roughing it when you can do it in style?

Okay, sure, running a second 12v fridge does mean that you’ve got to step up your 12v game considerably. However, I had four deep cycle batteries in my setup – two in my camper trailer running the main portable fridge for camping, and two in the back of the old Cruiser powering my portable 12v fridge that was running as a freezer. It was all being charged by a 25A DC Charger, and me being the ants-in-my-pants kind of camper that I am, I was typically keen to keep driving and exploring by the 2^nd or 3^rd day anyway, so there was always plenty of driving time to keep the batteries charged up.

I did have 250w of solar power mounted to my roofracks to keep the batteries brimmed up when I was camping, but here’s the funny thing – running a second portable 12v camping fridge as a freezer doesn’t actually suck as much juice as you’d think – for two reasons.

Firstly – unlike my main 12v fridge that was full of cold (but not frozen) drinks and food, I wasn’t opening my second camping fridge very often – in fact apart from the odd ice block here or there, it was only getting opened once or twice a day. Less opening of your camping fridge means less cold air escaping and less hot air getting in, so it doesn’t need to run as often or for as long.

Secondly, if you do the old trick of keeping your 12v fridge completely full, then the thermal efficiency of a big old chunk of frozen food actually works to your advantage! What I’d do is, as I was emptying my portable fridge running as a freezer of food, I’d try and keep the empty spaces as full of bottles of water as possible. I’d chuck one in at night when the ambient temps were lowest, and by morning it’d be frozen solid – and after the first initial power drain of getting the bottle frozen right down, you’d then find that your 12v fridge would have a much easier time of keeping the entire contents frozen.

Running a second portable 12v fridge as a freezer is a lot more achievable than you’d first think, and it’s one of the best modifications to my camping setup that I made for that entire lap around the country. Of course you don’t need a second 12v fridge for camping if you don’t physically have those space requirements – you could easily do the exact same with a Kings dual zone camping fridge, running one side as a fridge and the other as a freezer. But take my word for it – it’s an amazing setup, and you can have that advice for free. Well, maybe I might charge you a sneaky ice block on a hot day at camp – sounds fair to me!