Right then. Big moment in the HugoBus "kitchen" this week (and by kitchen I mean the mark on the carpet that used to smell faintly of our old cool-box and now smells of absolutely nothing... just a warm patch, at one end?!).
For my 57th birthday we "upgraded" to the Alpicool NLS55 — a dual-zone compressor fridge, which is a fancy way of saying Hugo (and us) have got a proper fridge bit AND a proper freezer bit, and it doesn't care what the weather's doing outside. No more "is this cheese fridge-cold or just outside-in-October-cold." A real fridge. A real freezer. In a van. We've arrived.
So here are some mandatory "sales" pics to get a feel for this "large" unit.
This is a proper upgrade for us. Our old fridge was a Mobicool Q40 — a sturdy, sticker-bombed big thermoelectric box that had done us proud and looked brilliant doing it. But thermoelectric fridges are thirsty things, and off-grid it just couldn't keep up. Even with a 100W solar panel and a run of genuinely sunny days, we'd be watching the battery drop faster than the temperature, and it meant we simply couldn't go away for more than a long weekend without coming home to a flat battery. Lovely fridge. Wrong technology for how we actually use Hugo.
And that's really the whole point of this one. The Alpicool isn't just "a fridge that's a bit better" — it's the thing that should finally let us go properly off-grid. The plan is to run entirely off our CTEK powerbank and the 100W Mobisolar panel, and only dip into the 100Ah leisure battery if we genuinely need to. On the hot, sunny days — when the panel's doing its best work — we're hoping to just leave the fridge running 24/7 without a second thought. On the cooler, duller days, when the panel's barely bothering, the plan is to switch it off overnight and let it coast, rather than quietly bleeding the leisure battery dry while we sleep — and we still have lead acid 100Ah, so that's only 50Ah of actual usable power. Whether our cunning plan actually survives a week away remains to be seen.
Now, it's early days with the Alpicool — we haven't taken it away yet, so consider this Part One of what's going to be a proper road test once we've used it in anger for a week, on both EHU and solar. But it's unboxed, it's running, and it's already taught us a few things worth passing on, apart from loving having a good size fridge space AND a small freezer compartment, each with its own (reversible) lid.
First one — it starts off at 13kg empty... so you think how heavy that standard coolbox is fully loaded with cider, oh and food. Loaded, this ends up as a 2 person beast (or don't fill it with the heavy stuff until it's in the van). Us old people need to think of our backs.
The second one's a bit of an odd one. The temperature display on the Alpicool is... optimistic, let's say. Both fridge and freezer sides want setting a fair bit lower than the actual temperature you're after, because — allegedly — it's reading the temperature near the compressor rather than what's actually going on inside the compartment. So the display says one thing, the thermometer we've popped inside says quite another. Once you work out the gap and set accordingly, it behaves itself perfectly well. Just don't take the dial's word for it — trust your thermometer, not the fridge's ego... we're probably setting 5°C less on the display to get the real world temp. And that's indoors, without the joy of sun and heat to deal with.
As we build our "temperature" confidence, we got some proper results. Ice creams solid, not like rocks. Ice packs frozen. Everything in the fridge side sat at a lovely, sensible fridge chill, not "hmm, is that ok". So it's not that it can't do the job, it's just that it fibs slightly about how it's doing it.
Third thing — it's deep. Which is great for capacity and less great for the "oh for goodness sake, where are the sausages, was it near the cheese?" moment when everything's loose and you're excavating down to the bottom like it's an archaeological dig, feeling the hard-earned cold erupt out like a volcano. So we've gone in with a set of airtight boxes to keep things zoned and liftable, rather than one big edible Jenga tower. Small effort now, considerably less swearing later.
So — early verdict: promising, slightly fibby about temperatures, but we're well looking forward to having an "ice cream" just when we fancy. It's carrying a lot of hope on its shoulders as our ticket to proper off-grid trips. The real test is whether the CTEK-and-solar plan actually holds up over a full week away, hot days and dull ones alike, without us ever having to raid the leisure battery. We'll know soon enough.
More on this one soon...
Rob & Pippa xx 🚐🧊