I have been using a compressor chest fridge & while they are great performance wise, the lead battery is just not practical as far as I’m concerned.
Especially in the long term like 3-4years and above they are simply too unreliable & cost too much to replace. Their performance just deteriorates slowly & some times they quickly die not being able to hold a charge.
So for long term cost & maintenance is the absorption 3-way lpg fridge better? Or kinda the same?
This comparison is a 1:1 comparison, like long trips in the same spot & not travelling from place to place-which the compressor & battery is far more suited.
Our caravan has a three-way fridge and we only use the battery option while we are actually travelling (the car’s alternator is doing the work) or for short stops. Obviously, mains electric is the one where available, but otherwise, we use the LPG option. The cos/energy ratio for LPG far outweighs batteries, and the gas can easily be swapped, while a battery takes hours to recharge.
All my RVs (6 so far) have had propane refrigerators. I’ve never had to do maintenance on any of them. Admittedly they don’t run for years at a time like those in a house, but they’ve all run for 2-3 weeks continuously on long vacations. I allow them to switch from propane to electricity when we have hookups, but they frequently run for a week or more on propane when we’re dry* camping. On one lengthy trip we spent a week in a Disney World hotel, and I left the RV in the parking lot. The fridge did just fine** running only on its onboard propane and batteries.
*For non RV-ers, dry camping refers to camping with no hookups at all. Just the self-contained batteries/tanks/etc. in the coach.
**I left an upside down ice-tray in the freezer section to act as a failure alarm. If cubes are still frozen in the tray, everything’s OK.
On edit: I did have a fuse blow in the fridge’s control unit. I had to replace that to get it running again, but that’s the only failure I can remember.