Alpicool Battery Bay - P18 review

[roadtripper]

While the discount is on I'm considering an Alpicool fridge. I had wanted the T36 dual zone so I could freeze but the space with all seats in the Caravelle is not enough so I'm looking at the P18 which looks to be the dimensions of our existing long serving CampingGaz thermoelectric one that fits fine.

I note that many of the Alpicool units has the ability to take a 175wh battery, but finding them seems hard and they seem to be as much as the fridges. I like the idea and convenience but at £1 a wh seems poor value compared to investing in a proper second battery system.

If I'm not going to use the battery the bay does seem to take up a lot of space in what is already quite a compact unit.

So:
1. If you have the P18 how do you find it?
2. If you have an Alpicool battery how well do they work and would you advise finding one?
3. If you have a battery capable Alpicool can you use the bay for anything else like cable or adapter storage (I assume it comes with some sort of lid?)
4. If you own an Alpicool is the cable socket likely to be on the end of the side of this one - none of the images anywhere seem to show it!

 

[roadtripper]

So I went and bought it before the end of the offers.

Letting it run for a few days in the kitchen to check it beds in OK.

The battery bay does come with an outside cover that clips on. Sadly the mains adapter is fractionally too large to store there but it does take the 12v lead just. The instructions say it comes with a cover for the battery terminals, but it doesn't and I suspect those are live so keep that in mind if using the bays.

 

[roadtripper]

The power connector is on the back of the compressor section, which might be annoying it you need to slot it between things. However this is also where the small fan to mainly vent the heat is so you'd need to take care of that anyway.

I find it baffling in tons of pictures and video in the adverts and on vendor sites I could not find one view of this side!



There is also a DC jack rated at 12v-50v which the manual makes no mention of at all beyond "solar input" - I guess it's up to me to figure out jack size and polarity. Seems little use without the built in battery.

The battery bay does annoy me. On one hand it's a neat feature, if you mostly need a battery for the fridge then having it's own battery and a solar input is very neat when camping.

On the other hand it takes a good 2-3 litres of space which, on an already small fridge, is a lot to loose to just air.

I'd be happier if you could get hold of the batteries and if they were cheaper. Sub £100 I'd probably put one in as the main reason I've gone for this is to have a more efficient fridge for when we are on day trips that I'm happier leaving on the single van battery. It's own battery for a few hours would be ace. However at £150 plus it makes much more sense to get equivalent sized general purpose batteries even if less convenient.

 

[roadtripper]

So a mini review of some testing in the kitchen to let the compressor bed in a bit.

• On MAX there is a bit of high frequency edge to the compressor hum but on ECO it's just a low drone
• MAX and ECO don't alter the cut in and out profile, just on ECO the compressor and cooling fan run slower
• Control panel temperature is clearly from the cooling circuit rather than the fridge - this means it's not that accurate while warm things are actively cooling
• Temp profile works by stopping at the target temp and starting when the temp has risen 2 degrees
• Once cooled temperature on the control panel in the fridge to light freezer range (10 -> -10) seems accurate
• While you can set a target of -20 it doesn't seem to get much below about -12
• If you want to actively freeze ice packs (our use case) then setting -20 still useful as it holds the compressor on for longer rather than frequent stop start
• Once cooled with stuff in the insulation seems fair - I froze two 500ml ice packs in it and turned it off and 24 hours later internal temp was still below freezing

Long term I am pondering about removing the battery bay and solar feed wiring and using the space to hold a mains PSU.

 

[roadtripper]

So I said I wasn't going to keep looking for a battery but I had reasons to look at www.autoterm.store yesterday (the heater matrix in the XC70 is blocked and is a pig to change so was pondering a diesel heater) when I noticed they have this fridge badged as "Boo" not "Alpicool" and also they had an option to add the battery for £69...

They also have the battery on sale currently stand alone with 10% off, and the code tread5 currently gives an additional 5% - and that's cheaper than I can find them on ali et al by the time delivery and duty is included even though it's a UK supplier - £90 delivered.



While it's dedicated to the fridge its £0.52 per watt-hour compared to £0.72 for the little Beaudens power pack I use and about £1.00 for the 50ah LiFePo leisure battery + DC-DC charger install I'm considering.

And while in some ways less flexible I can move it between the Caravelle and the XC70...

And my perfectionist streak was twitching not being able to use the space for something useful...

Will update with some testing when it turns up.

 

[roadtripper]

So it's arrived and on test.

Things to note in early testing:

• When in the fridge it will power up and charge, there is no option to have it in the fridge and "off"
• The display changes from the incoming power voltage to the internal battery voltage, and the battery level meter animates to show charging
• Apparently charging is slow if the fridge is running, which seems to be the case so far. Operationally that might be annoying but I guess we will have the box in the motel on power over night so
• Annoyingly the same voltage protection levels seem to be applied to the internal battery as incoming power. That's a pain in our use case of just wanting it to run the fridge while parked on day's out, either we leave it on high (to protect vehicle battery) and it doesn't use as much of the internal battery as it could, or we change it to low but forget and it drains the vehicle battery...

 

[roadtripper]

Features of the battery itself.

• Brief press of the switch will show the battery gauge
• Long press turns off and on when the fridge is running off internal power only
• It does have a 3amp charge socket. Not sure where I would get a lithium charger with that and with only one battery I can't see many times charging out of the fridge would be useful, but nice to have the future option

 

[roadtripper]

So a surprise discovery from noting the display had a very tiny Bluetooth symbol is that this fridge works with the Alpicool app and it's actually not bad at all.

Certainly it makes switching modes much simpler than remembering all the button combinations and would make switching voltage cutoff profile when leaving the van and let it run on the internal battery much easier.

Also allows access to a fewer deeper config items like the temperature corrections that may prove useful.

 

[roadtripper]

So on the test I have 2 2litre milk bottles in the fridge, a carton of juice and one of my normal thermometers (they were handy from the weekly shopping!)



The documented battery charge time from empty is 8 hours and that seems about right.

The fridge has been running on internal battery now since midnight in our house using the ECO setting and has used about 40% of the capacity with the target temperature of 5 - which it's holding fine.

One thing to note is that about 10 hours in the fridge went into the F1 fault state due to battery voltage, but this was set on the HIGH protection setting.

There is no direct indication on the display that the internal battery is in use, however the lower voltages are a reasonable clue.

On the battery there is a large indicator that is bright blue when the battery is ON but which is bright green when that battery is under charge, so that's a good indicator. Also there is a small set of 4 blue charge level indicators, these animate when charging with the non animated ones showing how charged the battery is. Interestingly the battery has 4 levels of indication (25-50-75-100) the control board 5 (20-40-60-80-100) so they don't always agree!

 

[roadtripper]

So end of the test at about 9am this morning. The fridge had gone into the F1 low voltage state again on the M protection setting and the battery was showing 40% on the fridge panel but 25% on the battery itself at about 7am. I put it into the L protection setting but somewhere between 7 and 9 the battery shut down before the fridge did and it was completely off. Internal temperature was still 6 though.

So I'm grudgingly impressed with the runtime, having got a reasonable thermal mass in there the battery gave about 30 hours of cooling on ECO with a 5 degree target in 20 degree ambient. Admittedly I didn't open the lid much but I was cross checking the indicated temp with the independent fridge thermometer I had inside.

Other things I did having discovered it works with the app is to set a few of the advanced parameters:

• Start Delay - was 0min now 3min - thinking here is if the compartment warms slightly with the lid open to get stuff in and out this gives a couple of minutes to stabilise rather than kicking in straight away
• TC Shutdown - was 0 now -1 - the compressor will kick in 2 degrees over target (Left Hysteresis) but will now hold until 1 degree under target. I'd rather have a bit of longer compressor run as it's the start up surge that tends to kick in the voltage protection. Camping I tend to target 5 degrees as a trade off between ultimate food life and energy - for this fridge it needs to keep stuff a day or so not all week.

 

[roadtripper]

So, a summary for anyone considering the same fridge which may also be applicable to other sizes of Alpicool.

General

ECO is certainly the mode to use. At 20 ambient it holds fridge temperature fine and is a lot less intrusive than MAX

I think setting Start Delay and TC Shutdown is a worthwhile tweek to stop short cycling.

You can set 3 temp offsets to correct in the freezing region but I don't think I'll bother; I'm going to use this fridge as either fridge temp or flat out freezing ice packs. I can't see anyone needing accurate -18 for long term freezing storage.

Battery

After being initially sceptical I'm grudgingly impressed. Downside is that in fridge charging is slower than I would like, definitely one to pre charge before a trip of you can. I still think I would prefer more space in the fridge instead of the battery bay, but for £90 the integration is pretty slick and convenient.

Operationally I do wish that the fridge would have one set of battery protection settings for the internal battery (which I'm happy to be drained) and external battery (absolutely not!) as that seems a very obvious default and easily doable in software.

Also the fridge doesn't seem to be great at failover switching. When I tried pulling the external power I often got an F1 code and the fridge stopped rather than it switching to the internal battery. I'm not confident of you used the internal battery as a sort of UPS it would work.

In terms of run time on battery I got 10 hours of runtime on the H protection level which used an estimated 30%.

I then got a further 20 hours of runtime on the M protection level. Switching to the L protection level didn't really give much more maybe an hour so I would estimate this probably used 80% of the charge maybe a little more. I think at low charge levels the battery can't sustain the voltage with the startup surge that an external leisure battery probably could.

Battery advice

• Pre charge the battery before a trip with the fridge control panel OFF if you can, pre cooling on mains probably won't give enough time for a full charge.
• Leaving battery protection on HIGH would work fine to just keep the fridge running for a few hours on road trips (our use case)
• Changing battery protection to MEDIUM would be wise for certainty or longer runtimes - but remember to change back if you are a single battery vehicle.
• There is no point in using LOW with the internal battery.
• When leaving the fridge running make sure it has switched over to the internal battery properly, don't just unplug and assume as it may fall into the F1 state.
• When storing the fridge take the battery out. If storing for a while (over winter?) I'd advise letting the battery run down in HIGH protection as this will drop the state of charge into a better storage region.

 

[roadtripper]

I said I wouldn't bother to do more testing but then... turns out I did.

I did get one unexpected F6 code just after the first set of testing so I'm currently doing an extended "burn in" type test before the easy return window at Amazon closes.

So I've been running it with a couple of big ice packs, bottle of water and the fridge thermometer up and down the freezing range to work the compressor.



Also top tip - if you think the compressor is suddenly really really rough check your dividers! I added a little folded over PVC tape either end to cure that.

As I'm doing that I've been moving the target from -3 to -9 to -16 to target the correction ranges.

Currently I have the following advanced settings in the app and it's behaving well and mostly agreeing with my other reference thermometer:

 

[psulli16]

Thanks for a brilliant real life review. I’ve just seen this available

BOO Portable 40 Litre fridge/freezer - Mains - 12V - 24V (optional internal lithium battery)

 

[roadtripper]

I believe that's the same company (with different trading/website name) that I got the battery from so yes the "Boo" brand looks like a badge on some "Alpicool" branded models.

To be fair it's more of a bench review than a use review (well kitchen worktop) but glad it was useful.

I realise I didn't update but for the record I didn't get any further F6 codes in an extended test.

 

[roadtripper]

So first real roadtrip using the P18 in anger this weekend.

And I'll say I think I was wrong about the battery, it's not as daft an idea in practice as it seemed and I'm now really glad I added it.

Yes it's quite steep if you don't get a good deal.
Yes it takes up a lot of the space especially in an already small fridge.

But... It's amazingly useful to just move the fridge about as you are packing and loading knowing it's looking after itself.

When we got to the place we were staying the fridge wasn't that big. I hadn't thought to bring the mains power brick but as the battery was fully charged after a 3 hour drive we just left some stuff in it on battery for the first day.

Then coming home I had the fridge pre cool itself for half an hour or so on battery, then loaded it and the van and didn't really worry about hooking up to van power until we left.

And overall it's been much much quieter than our peltier version.