What Size Solar Panel Needs To Run 40L Engel?

If you are a traveler or love camping, this blog will help you figure out what size solar panel you need to run a portable fridge.

When you are camping during summer, a portable fridge is an important part of your camping. Also, you can get the benefit from the summer sunlight by using solar panels to power-up your portable fridge.

In this blog, I am going to discuss Google’s most searched question “what size solar panel do I need to run 40L Engel”

So let’s roll into the topic.

Here, we will use Australia’s most popular portable fridge, Engel 40L.

What size solar panel needs to run 40L Engel?

This portable fridge supports 220 volts AC & 12/24 volts DC power, DC Power Consumption Variable from 0.5–2.6 AMPS, and Power consumption in watts 50. (Source)

That means this Engel 40L portable fridge needs 50 watts per hour to power-up all functionality.

Now consider,

We have a solar panel with 300 watts. That means that the panel will produce 300 watts per hour on an average sunny day. But one thing must remember that a solar panel is a maximum of 15–22% efficient.

Calculate the 300 watts solar panel power output with 20% efficiency:

300 x 20%

= 60 Watts

That means on an average sunny day, a 300 watts solar panel will produce a maximum of 60 watts of power every hour.

So, a 300 watts solar panel will be enough to power-up the 40L Engel portable fridge.