David,
I too faced this dilemma as I had never owned a fridge like this before. There is no doubting the best thing to do is see different sizes in person, I however, was not in that position. Here is what we did. Get the internal diameter specs for the fridge from equipts website. Cut out pieces of paper to that size (two, one for the fridge, one for the freezer), place them on your bench, and then start 'filling' them up with items you would take camping. This will help a little with the sizing.
A few important points though:
- It is amazing how little freezer space you really need if you take all the meat out of the packets and put them zip lock bags. Unless you have a large group, 10L is quite doable, even taking ice containers and maybe some icecream.
- You will learn how to cope with any size you have. The bigger the fridge/freezer, the less you have to 'learn'. The more fresh foods you can take, and the more beer you can keep cold at any one time. If you went small, you would 'learn' to take a lot of dried food stuffs (rice/couscous/tortillas etc), perhaps use long life milk in 1L containers, with one in the fridge and others outside waiting to be put in when you run out of the first. Drink wiskey instead of beer, or margaritas, saves a lot of fridge space, and you can use ice from the freezer
- Unless you are seriously isolated, it is often easy and pleasureable to pick up fresh local produce every so often on an extended overland trip anyway, another reason to go small. Who wants 2 week old lettuce?
- Power consumption goes up a lot the larger you go because it wont stay full. A full fridge, is a happy fridge. If you are going to do ANY extended hot weather trips (Baja, Death Valley etc), these National Lunas will work well, but they will start to pull hard, especially when not full of food. Unless you have a very good battery and solar set up (large marine and 120W solar), extended hot weather trips will require you to run the vehicle significantly. This is were a smaller size excels, the 50L is perfect in this example
- You may be different, but I LOVE the fridge and freezer combos. I never even considered a single fridge or freezer unit.
- The national luna units are the only products available in North America that offer a fridge and freezer option that is electronically controlled. Set the temperature and forget. The Engel combi is not. Personally it would annoy me to use a manual thermostat.
- A 74/90L Weekender (they are the same external size) is big. You will need a Land Cruiser or equivalent size rig to haul it around in the back and not feel like you are just wasting space. With the 74/90L Front Runner fridge slide, you take up more than half of an 80 series rear cargo space (in width)
In saying all that, we went with the 90L Weekender :sombrero:
It is the only National Luna with a larger Fridge compartment than freezer AND both can be controlled individually. We have not field tested it extensively, but we are going to have to buy some freezer packs to fill up the freezer. 40L of freezer is seriously big! Our rational was it is large enough to support a family for extened trips. We are only two now, but we expect this unit to last a very long time. Also, we considered that any drawbacks in size and subsequent power draw could be negated with solar panels. We just bought two 60W powerfilm panels to go along with our Diehard Platinum group 31M and National Luna split system.
I would recommend the 50L to anyone unless you do a lot of very cold weather camping (the freezer unit is held at 4 Deg C below the fridge from memory, so if the ambient outside temperature is lower than your fridge setting then the compressor will not run, and your freezer will come up to the temperature of the fridge - however this only happens between 0-4 Deg C ambient temperature. A very narrow window, and how much camping do you do at that temperature anyway? [remember, if it gets below 0 Deg C everything will freeze anyway, so only 0-4 Deg C matters for this unit]) or unless you have a lot of mouths to feed. I honestly think you could feed a family of 4 for 10 days with a 50L. It would require the 'learning' techniques I outlined above, absoutely no luxuries, but it could be done.
Hope that provides some insight.
Ash
