A couple of years ago, I took my two sons on an epic summer trip across the country. We ended up driving 13,000 miles that summer with our travel trailer and made many epic memories.

To keep costs down, we wanted to cook for ourselves rather than eat out all the time. We had a fridge in the trailer, but we would be leaving that in the campground much of the time. It is hot and dry out west in the summer, and our itinerary was mostly National Parks, Historic sites, and other outdoor locations. I started looking at coolers for our van.

I quickly realized that buying ice every day, or every other day, for 2 months would add up to a significant amount of money. So I began to explore some alternatives...

I ended up with this: The Domende 54 Quart Portable Freezer.

One of the driving forces for choosing this one, is that is was the biggest one I could get that fit in the space between the front seats in my van. It fits there perfectly. It comes with an AC and a DC cord, so it can be run by the dashboard power when we are driving. Perfect!

The next conundrum was- what do I do when we aren't driving? Even though the Domende says it will shut off before it drains the entire battery in your car, I just couldn't trust that. We were going to be in some mighty remote areas, and I didn't want to risk being stranded in the wilderness without any phone service by my own hand. So, I looked around and cobbled together this system:

It begins with this box. I considered making one myself, but I ultimately ran out of time before my trip, and buying all the plugs would have been more expensive. I wish this one had more cigarette lighter plugs, but I can wire some up to the other side of those grey plugs when I get a chance. I really like being able to replace the batteries, rather than buying a Jackery-style system where I have to get a whole new one if the batteries go bad.

Here's a view from the top:

There has been an explosion of these since I bought this one- Google "Portable smart battery box" to see a selection. What you are buying here is a plastic box that is prewired for the battery you choose to buy. Depending on your budget and power needs, you can get a marine battery, or AGM, or Lithium to drive your needs. I bought 2 AGM batteries from Harbor Freight out of their solar power section. I felt like they were a good value.

In this view, you can see the two batteries; they are wired in parallel, so the power is the same, but the working time is longer. So now I have a battery that runs the fridge on eco mode all day in the van on a 100+ degree day. But how to charge it?

The box has clamps on the front where I could hook the charger, but we were going to be charging this every night, so I wanted a system as simple as I could make it. So, I bought a charger for AGM batteries at Harbor Freight and wired it inside the box. It fit in there with the batteries perfectly.

A few things on chargers- they need to be rated for the kind of battery you are charging. They also need to deliver enough power to recharge the battery in the amount of time you have allotted to charge it. In our case, overnight. We never had any trouble with that and this setup, but if you choose different batteries, you may need to choose a different charger.

Now that we had a fridge, and it was powered while we were driving by the car, and when we were out adventuring by the battery, what were we going to do with the fridge overnight? Well, I can tell you we weren't taking it out of the van for sure. We also needed to power the battery charger at night. So this is how that worked. We had a short, flat extension cord- the flat fit out the van door frame with less wear on the insulation. No need to electrocute yourself! This plugs into the battery charger (battery box needs to be off to charge). We also had a DC/AC cord to plug the Domende in, we felt that swapping the AC and DC cables on the unit every day risked too much wear and tear.

So, once we reached a campsite, all we had to do was make sure the battery box was switched to off, unplug Freezie from the dashboard, plug Freezie into that converter, and then put the plug outside the door of the van. Then we plugged an extension cord into our power box at the campsite and ran it over to the van, and plugged it in. Freezie would keep everything cold overnight, the battery would get charged, and we would be ready for our next adventure with sandwich fixings, cold drinks, and snacks waiting for us.

It would also be possible to charge the battery using an inverter while driving. You need to be sure to match your inverter to your battery charger. We carried one for that reason, but we never used it. Our next upgrade will probably be to get solar charging for the battery working.

Last, but not least, even these batteries were a little pricy, and batteries like to be used. So I bought the battery box something called a battery maintainer. We keep it plugged into the garage. It provides a very small amount of power to keep the batteries happy while in storage, protecting your investment.

Let me know if you enjoyed this piece, and I would love to see you and your Freezie on a road trip sometime!