Dometic CFX3 35 vs CFX3 45 on a power station

On power, these two are close enough that it shouldn’t be the reason you pick one. The Dometic CFX3 45 is rated a little higher than the Dometic CFX3 35 for daily energy use, so the 35 runs a bit longer on the same battery. A bit. Choose the fridge that fits your vehicle and the way you pack, then size the power station for that one.

We’d have liked to put the 45 up against an Iceco too, but we don’t have verified Iceco figures yet. So for now this is Dometic against Dometic.

Where the numbers come from

Both figures are Dometic’s own, published as amp-hours per hour at 12V. We turn them into watt-hours per day, and that daily figure shows up in the notes under each table below. Dometic tests both fridges at the same hot-day condition you’ll see in the Mode column. The US page for the 35 gives it in Fahrenheit and the page we used for the 45 gives it in Celsius, which is why the labels look different. Converted, they match to within a degree.

These are rated figures, not something we measured. A cooler day, a fridge that isn’t opened much, or a warmer setpoint should all bring the real number down. Parking in full sun and opening the lid every ten minutes will push it up.

Runtime side by side

Same three stations for both fridges: a small one, a mid-size one and a big one.

Read the two tables row by row and the gap stays small at every size. The station changes the answer far more than the fridge does. On the EcoFlow RIVER 3 Plus either fridge runs a little under a day. On the EcoFlow DELTA 2 you’re at 78.5 hours for the 35 and 74.5 hours for the 45 on the 12V port. The Bluetti AC200PL more than doubles that.

The 12V DC rows beat the AC rows for both fridges because the 12V port skips the inverter. If your station has a car port, plug the fridge in there. For the rest of the CFX3 range, see how much power 12V fridges use per day.

Will the 12V port handle it?

Every station in our data has the same 12V car port limit, so one station is enough to show it. The check uses Dometic’s rated DC input, which is the most the fridge should draw while the compressor runs.

Both fit under the port limit. We don’t have a startup figure from Dometic for either one, so the tables say the surge is unverified. A compressor does pull more for a moment when it kicks on, and we can’t check that part on paper.

So which one?

The one that fits. The daily energy difference is small enough that it won’t change which power station you need, and we don’t carry interior volume, weight or dimensions in our data, so check those on Dometic’s product pages. If you’re still picking a battery, the 12V fridge runtime table covers every station we have data for.