Refrigerator power source

[BirdingRVer]

My little 17 ft travel trailer has a small 3 way refrigerator. It will automatically move from shore power to propane to DC power depending on what’s available. While towing it runs on DC power. Do the much larger refrigerators in the Montana’s work the same way?

[Cat320]

Nope.

Back in the old days it was standard to have three way refrig power. Now Montanas just have two way...A/C and propane. According to figures from an old TT manual, a standard refrig used for one hour will consume 1500 BTU of heat from the propane tank. When compared to the 91500 BTU available from each gallon, and there are seven gallons in each tank...it's not much.

[BirdingRVer]

So, what is the recommend way to deal with the refrigerator when towing. No power source or propane? I have always read that it is dangerous to have the propane on when getting gas, going through a tunnel, riding on a ferry or if you are in an accident. Since my only trailer had three way power I never worried about the issue.

[Parrothead]

Grant
This has been discussed at length here not to long ago. You might try doing a search and find the rather long thread. Bottom line I think was most of us travel with it on propane except where required to turn off propane (tunnels, fueling, etc.). We always leave ours on and have had no problems. We fuel unhooked 95% of the time so fueling is not a factor for us. We plan our trips for one tank of fuel. This gets us well within our 200-250 miles per day we like to travel.
Happy trails.................................

[ols1932]

It depends how long you're going to be on the road. When we travel 5 hours or less, we leave the refrigerator off. I'm reluctant to use propane while traveling in case of an accident of some kind, God forbid. We've never had any cooling problems with our refrigerator when leaving it off.

Orv

[BirdingRVer]

Thank you all for your responses. Rather than see this thread re-hash a recent thread I will search for and then read the other thread.

Grant

[Cat320]

We run with the propane on, that's the way it's designed to work and be used.

[sreigle]

We also run down the road with propane on. As for an accident being a problem, the newer propane bottles have a device that shuts off the flow when it exceeds a certain rate. That's why sometimes there is a problem when the valve is opened too quickly on the offside bottle. If there's an accident the propane will shut down almost immediately if the line is severed or even springs a leak.