Well, for $500 you can buy a Whynter elite. It’s exactly the same thing as the powder coated Snomaster, I wonder both. They are exactly the same. The two speed Whynters have a snomaster compressor.
I did a bit of side by side testing, so I know for certain that Dometic outperformed.
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Don't get me wrong because I really wanted the Snomasters and bought 2 of them, I bought the 95L Expedition series with the 70mm wall thickness and the 35L model for every day stuff, The 95L hit my 115Ah Battery so hard that is was down to 11.9v under load within 3 hours when in the Auto setting to see how it's cool down would go, and yes it was fast in achieving it's target temp in round 70-80 minutes and then went in to standby mode until it needed to power up again and the 35L shares the same compressor and can use a massive amount of power even when running on AC,
I ran side by side tests between the Snomaster 35L and an ARB 47L and the ARB 78L and the Snomaster 35L used way more power than either of them, This just does not make any sense because being only a 35L fridge even with the same motor as the larger models it should of out performed them purely because it had a much smaller area to cool down, but sadly that is not the case, Yes it is very fast at cooling but that is the only thing in it's favour,
I have never seen any other 4x4 fridge eat as much power as these two snomasters can, I was worried about my 78L ARB but it leaves either of these two snomasters for dead. And anyone contemplating buying one of these fridges especially the larger models You will need a Duel Battery setup with at leased 100 to 160w of Solar just to keep up with the fridge,
IE I had the 95L hooked up to a fully charged 115Ah deep cycle battery running it on Auto because I was comparing it's power usage compare to the ARB's because they only have to Auto mode, And After 2 and a half hour I had to switch on the AC workshop Battery Charger to the 9/10Ah Mode so I could keep on doing the DC power Draw test. The 95L was chewing between 7.2 and 8.9 Amps per hour During when it was running, So based on using 50% of my 115Ah Power It would of eaten the battery in 7 to 10 hours because it was cycling 3 to 4 times an hour, As it was I had to hook up the Big Charger to the battery once the voltage while it was running had got down to 11.9v,
Bottom line is these are very pretty Fridges but for Off Grid or Boon Docking in out of the way places Snomaster are the last fridge I would choose bar none, Yes they are fast but that come at a huge price in terms of power consumption and as such owning one of theses really requires having it's own pair of batteries and it's own solar panel rated over well 100w minimum and keeping the rest of your gear on a separate system because there is no way can you run their fridges on the same system.
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