- How much power do you need for overlanding?
- 2,232 Wh of delivered energy over 3 days, drawing 160 W if every device runs at once. 12V camping fridge (45L) alone is 44% of that energy, so it is the load worth measuring first — the rest of the manifest barely moves the answer.
- What decides whether a station can start this setup?
- Nothing in this manifest has a motor or compressor start above its running draw, so the 160 W continuous figure is the real inverter requirement. That is unusual — most outage plans are gated by a startup spike rather than by running watts.
- Does running the DC loads on 12 V actually change the result?
- Yes. 12V camping fridge (45L) is planned on the station's DC output, which skips the inverter conversion entirely. The same hardware on an AC outlet would draw the same work from the battery plus the conversion overhead, and over 3 days that difference compounds.
- Should I size around the fridge or around the dish?
- Neither on its own, which is the honest answer. They sit 24 Wh apart on a 744 Wh day, so the usual advice to find the dominant load and plan around it returns two answers here. What separates them is control: the dish gives back 75 Wh for every hour you leave it down, and the cold box has no comparable dial — its consumption is set by ambient temperature and how often the lid opens.
- Does a longer trip change what I should buy?
- Less than you would expect, because the panel covers most of the day. A fourth night adds 744 Wh of draw and 560 Wh of harvest, so extending actually costs 184 Wh — about a quarter of what a night appears to be worth. On a plan shaped like this, duration runs into food and water long before it runs into electricity.
- Do the lanterns and camera charging matter at all?
- No, and saying so plainly is the point: it sends the effort somewhere useful. Together they are 120 Wh, about 16% of the day, and the two lanterns alone are 60 Wh — roughly what the dish spends in forty-eight minutes. The attention on this plan belongs to the cold box's ambient temperature and the dish's on-hours, and nowhere else.