I have it in the back of my mind that I've read somewhere about the need to use over rated wire to feed a fridge. Can anyone shed any light on this?
If its a compressor fridge you need bigger cable to stop volt drop a 2/3 way fridge its not so important as the engine is running when on
12v fridge draws around 7A.....2.5mm^2 cable will be more than enough...it's a short run so V Drop is negligible The heating element in RM type fridges is basically a short circuit, so reduced voltage just means reduced heat http://www.club80-90.co.uk/pages/downloads/tech/ElectroluxRM122.pdf http://www.aeicables.co.uk/literature/CurrentRatings.pdf
Thanks OK so I didn't dream this, yes it's a compressor fridge. I remember something about someone recommending speaker cable from Halfords
the waeco compressors consumption is around 40W....so 40W/12V = 3.3A ie less than the absorption type.....so cable rating can be less
The compressors need a big cable around 6mm due to the sensitivity to votdrop over the length of the run
Seriously? 6mm^2 is good for 50A....the type of cable you'd use for alternators..... How longs the run? figure it out.... not disputing you but that seems like an awfully big waste of copper to me
Hears the chart for cable size from the waeco manual length of run along the bottom cable size on the left the cable run needs to include all the way back to the battery I tend to run a dedicated cable from the battery just for the fridge I was the same as you but had one that kept cutting out fitted a bigger cable and was fine
My fridge didn't work properly until I tried some domestic thick cooker wire stuff which i stripped out of some twin 'n' Earth. That was just a jury rigged experiment. As the fridge worked properly with that wire I used the same heavy duty big boy's wire to go from the LB to the fuse box and then from the fuse box to the fridge. All the other feeds from the fuse box for lights, water pump etc are 'normal' thinish car type wire. Sometimes I get so technical I scare myself.
Holy Sh*t Sauce! They must be sensitive I could wrap 2.5 round my bus twice and still not suffer Voltage drop....
I know but after looking at a few with issues it has always fixed it by fitting bigger cables You are dealing with 0.1v making a diffrence the cut out on the fridge is 10.4v and cut in is 11.7v
Yeah....I've just been reading up about compressor fridges...every day's a school day good general article here
I've got an earth post beside my leisure fuse box and I've bought all my earth cables back to that one point. It saves a lot of messing around drilling loads of holes and trying to trace a possible bad earth later on.
I'm ashamed to say that even though I'm an electrician I too made the mistake of installing 2.5mm wire thinking it was over-kill for such a small load, but totally ignored the instructions which came with the fridge. Imagine my surprise when it didn't work! When I bothered to calculate the volt drop over the 3m length and read the instructions it all became obvious, 6mm is required! So glad I'm not alone with making this error.
