- How much power do you need for a refrigerator and chest freezer?
- 2,232 Wh of delivered energy over 1 day, drawing 280 W if every device runs at once. Refrigerator (full-size) alone is 68% 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?
- Refrigerator (full-size). Its sourced 1,200 W startup demand, arriving while the other devices keep running, sets a worst-case moment of 1,300 W — well above the 280 W running total. A station sized only to the running figure will carry this plan right up until that device restarts.
- Why is every load on this plan running through the inverter?
- None of the devices in this manifest has a manufacturer-supported DC input, so each one pays the DC-to-AC conversion cost. Where a device does offer a native 12 V cord — camping fridges especially — using it is the cheapest runtime you can buy.
- If I can only power one of them, which should it be?
- The freezer, on every axis that matters. It is 720 Wh a day against the refrigerator's 1,512 Wh, so it costs under half as much to run, and frozen mass buys hours of margin that a merely chilled cabinet does not. The refrigerator becomes the box you open sparingly and, if this looks like a long one, empty into the freezer. That decision is worth more than the difference between any two stations here.
- Why is the running load so small when the plan feels so big?
- Because compressors spend most of their lives switched off. Two cabinets together are 280 W while both are actually turning, which 78 of the 79 sourced inverter ratings supply without effort — the energy comes from doing that for twenty-four hours, not from doing it hard. This is the plainest case on the site of a plan that is almost entirely about capacity and barely about output.
- How much does the duty-cycle assumption move this number?
- More than on any other plan here, because there is nothing else on the manifest to absorb it. The refrigerator is modelled at 35% duty and the freezer at 30%, and 2,232 Wh is true only while both hold. A garage in August pushes both up; a cold house pushes both down. Elsewhere on this site that error gets diluted by lamps and routers — here it simply is the answer.