Solar Requirements for Fridge

[robertwh]

I'm brand new to solar and am getting confused.

I am trying to figure out what my needs are to power my home (renting an apartment) if the power goes out (which it does frequently where I live).

So, let's just start with the fridge. I understand I need to buy a Kill A Watt to get the most accurate info, but just to validate if things are even in my current budget, I'm trying to ballpark things. If the label on the fridge reads 110-137 VAC 60 HZ 11.6 AMPS, does that mean it's 1276 Watts (110 * 11.6)? And then I read somewhere that a fridge usually runs for about 8 hours a day so that would mean 10208 watt hours needed, which in turn would mean I would roughly need 25K watt hour battery capacity and 4K watt solar array?

This is of course all assuming all of the data from the energy audit spreadsheet based on where I live.

Are my calculations correct/am I missing something?

 

[Cyanlite]

1276 is probably the maximum draw it will ever have.

Refrigerators use compressors occasionally, when it turns on it is probably then pulling the full 1,276 watts for a few moments to cool things down. Most of the time it's just spinning a cooling fan to spread around the cold air, that's probably 100-300w.

Get a Kill-a-Watt and measure the kWh for a 24 hour period to be fully sure.

 

[rmaddy]

If the fridge has a 33% duty cycle then the 10.2kWh/day usage is a reasonable starting estimate. Using the kill-a-watt meter for a few days will give you much more accurate results.

For 10.2kWh/day usage, you need double that in battery power for a lead-based battery. So a 21kWh lead battery would be the minimum to get through one day. Multiply that times the number of days you might need to run the fridge with no power and no solar (the power could be out due to a storm which could mean little to no solar).

If you use 10.2kWh/day and there is roughly 5 good solar hours per day then you need about 2kW of solar production. In the winter when you might only get 1.5 hours of solar per day then you need more like 7kW of solar production. That could mean 10kW of solar panels in the winter due to the low sun angle.