travelling on the ferry
We are taking our first family caravan holiday to Holland in April this year and have a 12 hour ferry crossing from Hull to Rotterdam. When the fridge is set to run off the battery, how long does the battery last? Will the fridge still be cold when we get off the ferry at the other end? I'm also assuming it wouldn't be a good ides to put anything in the freezer box? Thanks for any advice!
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As AD says 1) If you can load the fridge / freezer and power the 'van up at home it will last a good couple of days if you don't open the door very much !
2 ) Not sure if you can power the fridge from the leisure battery when on the ferry but, depending on the type of fridge, the current drain would be quite high and providing you have followed 1) above its not really worth the effort.
3 ) The same applies on the return journey -- you really don't want to get home with warm Gin & melted choccys do you
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The fridge will be off on the ferry. The only way to power it is on gas and it is a requirement of carriage that the main gas bottle is off with no gas appliances in use.
I would agree with what others say in that as long as the fridge and freezer is fully cold and frozen then food should be ok. What I'm not sure about is that when operating only on 12v from the towing vehicle, my fridge will only maintain temperature in which case I wonder whether that could be an issue when you have a days drive ahead. is that why David freezes milk containers?
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We do the same if we go on a ferry taking more than 2 hours. We generally have the freezer full on leaving UK anyway, then we freeze down milk if we are doing Hull Rotterdam before leaving home.
If only doing a Channel crossing there is no problem.
This year we are doing Harwich to the Hook, 7 hours, so we will have the freezer well packed, but may not have frozen milk as we will be away from home 12 nights previously.
not quite decided yet.
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Worth knowing David. Last time I did Hull to Zebrugge I went with an empty fridge. It was a total pain and cost me a fortune for meals at sites whilst travelling down....they knew they had a captive audience!
May encourage me to try the Zebrugge route again
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When we used to use the longer crossings we always packed our fridge with as much frozen stuff as we could. Small packs of orange juice were our choice, because can fill all those spare spaces between things, and when defrosted can be stored and drunk as required.
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Even on the 2-night Bilbao crossing everything in the freezer was still solid when we arrived at the first site (Riaza). A real pain when we were hungry and looking forward to shepherd pies! (We don't even power the fridge on 12v when towing)..
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Assuming you mean Dover to Calais area?
We are crossing the channel in May and the fridge will be off for at least 12 hours-it's overnight to Roscoff!!
Its not a problem for us though as we don't take any frozen food other than mince for spag bol and lasagne.
Our van is in storage so it would be impractical to 'pack the fridge' and we cannot run the van fridge beforehand to cool it, so we just fill a cool bag with what we have in the fridge, waste not want not, drop in an ice block or two and then put that into the beer fridge that we take with us and runs off 12v in the car.
When we get to the first stop we transfer the food to the van ASAP so that beer storage is not affected!
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