Cool box/leisure battery? Camping dork needs advice

[KatyMac]

Kind of a camping dork

I've been doing 2 days with an ice box no problem in my vintage caravan

But I'm doing 5 nights

Can my leisure battery power any sort of powered ice/cool box? If so what - i also charge phones & have 12v lights

If not what do I need to buy borrow?

How many ah is your battery? A common coolbox works at about 50 Watt/hour, so at 12Volt it’s about 4.2 ah/hour. 10 hours would take up 42 ah.
A compressor fridge can stand longer - but not 5 days. Mine uses 10watt/hour at 32ºc ambient for 5ºc set inside, so that’s 0.8 Ah/hour.

You need a camping fridge that runs on gas

Or a pitch with a hookup for electricity.

We charge our battery from a solar set up. Even on a cloudy day, it maintains the battery level for our camping fridge.

If you can share some more specs it would be possible to work out. Need to know the battery capacity, draw from the lights in amps per hour and any charging potential you have like solar or a hook up.

Sites that have tents often have a freezer just for freezing ice packs so you can rotate those to keep a non electrical box cool. That might be the cheapest option. For 5 days with no power we used to batch cook and freeze meals that would slowly defrost and keep everything cool then top up with fresh milk. A gas powered fridge would be another option.

Hmm I'm at festivals so no electric or hook ups or freezers for ice packs

The battery is an ES450 exide g40 marine and leisure battery 40Ah

A solar panel would be a dream (not much money atm)

I have an inverter but rarely use it

I can't have gas in the caravan as the insurance says no (as I transport my stock and its flammable)

Thanks camping people

Is there enough info about the battery?

What do you need to refrigerate? I usually just try to take things that don't need to be kept chilled.

I do freeze a whole pack of bottled water and put in the cool box to slowly defrost and keep the small number of fridge things cold. Butter etc. I also take a pint of milk frozen and a pint not frozen.

Otherwise I take tinned / dried food. But generally eat at the festival food stalls tbh.

in My (all be it fairly extensive) experience camping electric cool boxes are shit. They keep things fairly cool but not cold. They use loads of power, are heavy and large (due to the electrics).
We now have solar and a camping fridge (different to the cool box as it’s an actual fridge) it’s brilliant, but expensive and cumbersome. Dh is a fan, but I think the thing that outdoes it (for short camping trips of a few days) is a polystyrene box from the local pet shop (they give them away for free). I freeze water bottles , either drink when they defrost or take the labels off (so I know not to drink!) and refreeze.
it keeps things as cold as the fridge and is much easier to move about and manage.
if you don’t fancy a tatty polystyrene box!! Spend money on a decent cool box, like a yeti, or one of the higher end colmans.
i tend to have more success using two coolboxes, one for food that stays closed apart from meal times and one for drinks that’s opened and closed frequently (as that’s the killer).

2 cool boxes is a great idea thanks, I'll see if I can grab one

I freeze my drinks too

Starting to get a plan

Honestly, even in winter the solar panels keep the battery fully charged.
granted we use much less electric in the winter. I’m a complete convert, they are great. We’ve had two issues over about 10 years.
1 the panel melted as our roof is black and I think it was during Covid heatwave so it wasn’t moving, parked in full sun. We’ve had no issues with the replacement as they’ve improved them in that time

2 you do have to make sure it’s vaguely clean. Ours only gets cleaned once or twice a year.