Our car fridge set up

While it’s not an essential for some people, we’ve found that the convenience of having the car fridge with us is something that we just don’t want to live without now.  It makes everything from a weeks-long adventure to a quick trip to the shops a whole lot more painless.

We’ve opted for our 55-litre Glacio car fridge for a couple of reasons. First, for the quality and price this is one of the best fridges around. There was one bigger consideration though – size. After a very careful measure, it turned out that this is the biggest fridge that we can fit into the available space in the car. The drawer system makes the floor higher than standard, so height is slightly restricted, and with the slide that’s built into the drawers, we could only go so wide and so high before it’s off the side and rubbing over everything else. The cargo area in the Prado also isn’t as long as in some larger wagons, so we need to be careful of that too. The Glacio fridge fits in perfectly, and at 55 litres, it’s more than enough to keep what we need cold.

Thanks to having the drawers and slide in the car already, all we had to do was wire it up and tie it down. We’ve used our 1.0m Fasty Strap cam-buckle straps for this, and they worked fantastically well. They are smaller than other comparable units thanks to the cast-iron buckles, but each one has a 400kg lashing capacity, which is more than enough to keep to fridge in place.

With this in now, we’ve only given it a vary quick work out on our Easter trip. The fridge stood up well, lasted great on the new battery system (even without any additional solar input) and everything was kept fresh and cool. We have been using it since for the basic day-to-day things like keeping the shopping cold, which is great when you need to do more then groceries in a day.