Portable Refrigeration and Mobile Backup Power For Traveling and Home Use
If you would like to have the most basic backup power system for your home to avoid your refrigerator or freezer defrosting, and keep lights running if the power is gone for 1-5 days, we will show you a great setup that is
easy to put together. It's compact size will also let you put it in the back of your mini-van, SUV or truck to run a mini fridge and just about anything else off-grid for a limited period.
We were not financially compensated for this post and the samples were provided to us for review purposes. The opinions are completely our own based on our experience with the products.
Portable Power
Have you ever wanted to get a gas generator to keep as a backup for your house power in case the power goes out, but have found that keeping it maintained, fueled and ready to go in case you actually need it a little overwhelming, then we are in the same boat.
A few months ago, we lost power and I went to power up the almost new and only used once gas generator I has sitting in the garage to discover it would not start no matter what I did. I'm not great with engines, so it's needless to say that the power
came back before I was able to get it fixed and running again.
Our family also loves to go on road-trips in our minivan or crossover SUV and need to bring along a car refrigerator as our son has food allergies and can not easy eat food from roadside restaurants, so one late night looking at youtuber's refurbish a
van for living off grid a few days at a time an idea struck us.
Why not build a Lithium battery based power system that was small enough to be portable while still having enough power to get us over any shorter domestic power outages.
LiFePo4 (lithium iron phosphate) 12v batteries seems to be the best solution for easy storage of electricity and can be very easily combined into a good size system without much technical knowledge. They like to be charged to 100% for storage and looses
almost no power after being stored for a few months.
A typical good quality 100 Ah (Ampere Hours) that will store 1.2 kWh (Kilo Watt hours) costs around $600 on Amazon. This is enough power keep a large home refrigerator or freezer going for about 24 hours.
Our choice was to get two of the Aolithium 100Ah 12V LiFePO4 Batteries with Bluetooth that lets you check state of charge and usage statistic on your cell phone .
These LiFePo4 batteries are also easy to connect in parallel to add more power to your system and since they are 12v there is no chance of being electrocuted while working with them. Just do not short circuit the two poles as this will melt any wire not
having a circuit breaker on it.
The system we put together is a compromise of enough power to be useful for a 2-3 day power outage at home to avoid having to discard all our perishable food that needs refrigeration and small enough to through back into our minivan when we go on road trips.
With two 100Ah batteries connected in parallel (200Ah*12v = 2.4 kWh) housed in a plastic container we have about 2.5 kWh of electricity available.
For charging the batteries you can get very powerful chargers that will fill them in a coupe of hours, but these also are expensive. We went for a
Victron Energy Blue Smart IP65 12-Volt 5 amp Battery Charger
with Bluetooth that is highly
recommended and contains a lot of safety features preventing you from doing anything that can hurt your batteries. It will take 1-2 days to charge the two batteries completely, but for our use that is not an issue.
For discharging the batteries, we have mounted regular car cigarette lighter power adapters to the batteries as this allows us to plug in portable refrigerators or a 110v inverter that will let us power household equipment. You can get inverters from
$30 to several hundred dollars depending on your needs, but we just got a 300w basic inverter that does a great job powering basic non-power-hungry equipment and lights.
For convenience, reliability and portability the Aolithium 100Ah 12V LiFePO4 Battery is an awesome choice and we award it a 6/6.
Portable Refrigeration
One of main reasons we put this setup together was to have portable refrigeration on long road trips. We have found the perfect solution for keeping food and drinks cool when traveling in the BougeRV 53 Quart Portable refrigerator/freezer. It fits
effortlessly in the back of both our mini-van and our Tesla Model Y. Both our cars have a 12v outlet in the back, so while driving we keep it plugged, but when parked for more than a short stop or overnight we just move the 12v cigarette lighter
plug over to battery bank.
We tested running the BougeRV refrigerator/freezer in a controlled environment at normal room temperature and the total runtime as a refrigerator set to 40 degrees F (or 4 degrees C) with a halfway filled interior and an already stable cool start
temperature, it lasted about 150 hours (or 6 days) with our 2.4kWh battery pack. This averages out to about a 16 Watt continuous draw.
When we ran it as a freezer at room temperature and set to 0 degrees F (-18 degrees C) with the same contents it lasted about 50 hours (or two days). This averages out to about a 50 Watt continuous draw.
We typically run it as a refrigerator, so it will easily run for a full week in the back of the car as long as we remember to move the plug over to the cars 12v outlet when driving.
You can also visit the
BougeRV site here to buy it directly.
The BougeRV 53 Quart Portable refrigerator/freezer (that now also can be delivered with a small built in battery and built in wheels) is great for anyone that travels and need to keep food cool or even as a spare chest freezer for your garage.
GistGear awards it 6/6 as it has worked reliably and flawlessly for us.
Accessories
We also have a
595Wh OUPES portable powerstation
that we take on shorter weekend trips to power the portable refrigerator. It will last around 24 continuous hours under the same conditions as we tested our large battery bank under.
So this may be a much more affordable solution if your trips are shorter.
The last part to our adventure into powering things is the large powerpacks ability to power our home refrigerator, lights and computer in an emergency. For this we have a couple of these
GELOO 300W inverters
that lets us plug in
regular 110v equipment and power select home appliances. For our use this has only been used to power our kitchen refrigerator/freezer, TV and internet connection during relatively short power outages. The great benefit of using such a portable
setup as describes above is that we just carry it in from the garage where it usually lives and drop in the living room and run a few extension cords to what needs power. There is no need to run cables from the outside like you have to do if you
power up a gas generator and no ongoing maintenance plus worrying if the generator will start when you need it.
A gas generator as we have reviewed
here
certainly can power your house much longer, but it may not be something most people want to manage the maintenance of and also keep flammable gas sitting around,
especially if you live in an apartment or a place where having and running a generator is not practical.
All these products has made a huge difference on our road trips as well as allowing us to keep food from spoiling during power outages and together they are a winning combination.