I have a Campingaz fridge, the sort that’s a chilled cool box, it runs on mains or 12v. It works fine on mains, with a hookup, but I’ve noticed that when you try to run on 12v, it runs for a second and then shuts down, even with a fully charged leisure battery. It is fed by a switched cigarette lighter feed. The male lighter plug, attached to the fridge, shows a green light for a second, then that goes red as the fridge shuts down. Can anyone give me a clue as to what’s going on? They only seem to sell 12v OR mains versions of this fridge now, and I’d like to keep using it or a similar fridge, but it has to fit in the same limited cupboard space.
If you are using a cigarette lighter plug, if these get slightly corroded on the tip, they develop a very hot spot. Then the spring in the tip gets so hot that it loses its temper and collapses. So the contact gets worse .. It also damages the socket by local melting of the flat metal plate that the spring loaded tip pushes against.. I expect if you look at the plug on the end of the coolbox lead it may be corroded and maybe melty.. So you have a significant voltage drop used in heating the connector. So the coolbox shuts off with low voltage. Either bad connection in the plug or further upstream of the cool box in the leisure 12v supply, something has suffered from heating and oxidation and is now a bad connection.. or even the flexible cable going into the box has broken internally through flexing over the years. If it has gone bad this way, I would try and find some other 10 amp rated connector for disconnection. I use some old 2 pin Bulgin Buccaneer connectors that are NLA at sensible prices, but make a solid pin in socket connection that cant be confused with a mains socket . The cigarette lighter socket was never really intended for doing more than providing 10 amps to a heater element for long enough to light a cigarette.. Not doing 24/7 duty at 6 amps.. Look up e.g. Powerpole connectors or IP67 2 Pin / 3 Pin Waterproof Outdoor Plug Wire Connector Adapter. For this we have to thank all those low voltage garden LED installations.
Thanks, I’ll order a couple of IP67s. I briefly thought about cutting out the fag lighter connection altogether using solder and shrink wrap, but then I can only ever connect the fridge to that switch.
Yes, its probably best to have a connector so you arent totally restricted to keeping only the coolbox attached to the bus.
I don’t know Zed, but I bought some plugs as suggested by Mike, and I have a fridge that works on 12V again, result! Thanks Mike.
Mine wouldn't even work connected directly to a fully charged battery, I think it was very deliberately set only to work if your alternator was raising the voltage above 13V.
