Background: my wife and I purchased a 21ft Winnebago Micro Minnie last year after going on a single test trip with a rented Airstream Bambi towed behind our Volvo XC90. Unfortunately, the Volvo wasn't capable of handling the actual weight of the Winnie, so we upgraded to a 1/2 ton RAM 1500 truck with the towing capacity for a much larger trailer. It isn't a surprise that 4 months and 3 trips later, we upgraded to a 2910BH which we have been in love with.

We park her on a boat ramp that is 4 deg front-to-back which wasn't a problem for the refrigerator on the shorter Winnie. Unfortunately, I destroyed the cooling section of our refrigerator before the second trip while cooling her off because I didn't realize "5 degrees front to back" was actually from the perspective of the refrigerator, not the trailer. C'est la vie.

We decided to get the JC Refrigeration 12v conversion so we wouldn't have to worry so much about leveling and so we could run it for any longer trips we might take. They do a good job telling you the energy needs, but I couldn't found out how much energy my truck alternator could provide via the 7-way. So I wired in a Victron SmartShunt before our last trip back.

Long story short: the refrigerator uses around 6AH and the fin fan another 1AH. We had a 90 minute drive home plus about 30 minutes have battery time for teardown / setup. Total net energy usage during the drive home? 2AH. The 7-way was charging the battery at 8.5amps sitting in my driveway.

Please post any info you have to help out all of the other people interested in switching to an inverter refrigeration that might be worried about energy draw.

BTW: been learning a ton from this site!

Michael