We bought the ARB chest-type fridge / freezer for use in our camper van. The ARB line came with a better reputation and a higher price tag than the Dometic. It arrived with a cracked piece of corner plastic. I expect this was done in assembly with an over-tightened screw. I have not contacted either the vendor or manufacture, but reading on the reviews, this seems fairly common and a hassle to try to get replaced.The Bluetooth link for the phone is a great plus. You have to scan a sticker to download and install the app, which allows you to setup and monitor the temperature inside the unit. It was up and running in just a few minutes after taking it out of the box.I tested the temperature with a remote temp sensor and the temperature of the bottom of the fridge and freezer were very close to the indicated temperatures on the fridge display. I set the temp to about 25F and checked to see how long it took to freeze a water bottle in the freezer section. It took more than over-night, so I set the temp to 15F and added another bottle. IT still took much longer than I expected. There is no air moving around in the compartments, so there is lower heat transfer from the botton of the freezer to your food than you get with a household freezer. This means it does take a good bit longer for items to freeze solid. If you put solid-frozen items in the freezer, you can expect them to stay frozen, but taking fresh ground beef or water in a bottle will take a long time to reach solid frozen temperatures. The fridge side works great and keeps salads, drinks, and other fresh foods fresh and cold.This unit is big! It takes up a lot of room in a van and you should account for this. We would probably have chosen a smaller solution if we had the ability to put it in the van before actualizing purchasing it. We'll have to make do, since we've already born the price. ARB does provide a metal slide that might help, but it costs more than $470!!... and requires another $36 in straps to make it work!!! If you purchase the slide and strap, you are now into this for more than $2000 for a very small fridge/freezer!!!! That's about twice the cost of a good 25 cuft side-by-side from Lowes!!!!! The slide moves along the wrong axis (long axis rather than short axis) for our use, so would be worthless for our setup. Any way you look at it, it's expensive in money and space to keep food cool in a van.A word about efficiency. The documentation says it draws about 3 Amps with the compressor running, which should be about 36w at 12v, but my battery monitor shows about 47w, or about 4 amps with the compressor running, and it runs quit a bit of the time to keep the frozen stuff frozen. So, a 100ah battery would be depleted after 24 actual hours of compressor running time. Obviously, the hotter it is in the surrounding air, the more the compressor will have to run and the shorter the battery life.On the plus side, it's dual powered, meaning it can use either 12V DC or 110v AC power. So if you have it inside your home, it can use your house power or on the road it can use your 12v battery. In an RV it can use either, so it works driving down the road on 12v and back to 110 when you plug into shore power... all without doing anything.So far, we are happy, with the exception of the size and still feeling the sting of the price, but neither of these are the fault of ARB.
