What’s Hot In Jeep Coolers
Take the guess work out of purchasing an ice chest for your Jeep excursions. Here’s a review of all the most popular ice chest models.Take the guess work out of purchasing an ice chest for your Jeep excursions. Here’s a review of all the most popular ice chest models. Portions of this article originally appeared in the Jan/Feb 2014 issue of Drive Out. The journalist was Gerrie Van Elden.
Take the guess work out of purchasing an ice chest for your Jeep excursions. Here’s a review of all the most popular ice chest models.
When you are going on an adventure in your Jeep, having the right Jeep parts to keep your food, beverages and other perishables cool is important. An ice chest is useful and more affordable than a camping refrigerator. It use to be that ice chests were only used to store beer on the picnic table during barbeque days at the park, but that time has long past. Ice chests are considerably more useful now, especially to the off-road enthusiasts. Some tour operators even use heavy-duty ice chests to keep their clients fillets cold. They just keep refilling the cooler with ice. If it works for professional tour operators, it can work for you. You just have to understand and use some of their techniques.
In this post I’m going to go over things one needs to consider when deciding on what ice chest to purchase. I’m also going to go over some techniques for getting the most out of your ice chest. I will discuss the results of the test. Then in the slideshow at the bottom I will give a mini review of each ice chest.
How Are You Going To Use Your Ice Chest?
Choosing an ice chest may seem as complicated as choosing the players for your fantasy football team. Do you pick the power players, who may also be prone to injury? Or do you pick the consistent players who may not bring you as many wins? When it comes to ice chests it is important to consider how you will mostly be using the box.
If keeping drinks cold at the 4th of July barbeque is really all you need from the ice chest, then you can go ahead and purchase a small, less expensive model and simply keep it out of the sunlight on those picnic days. The ice you put in may have melted by the time the barbeque is over but the drinks will remain cold.
How Exactly Are Ice Chests Constructed?
Most ice chests are made with an inner wall and an outer wall made of hard plastic, fiberglass or steel. Inbetween the walls there is insulation. Typically this is made of foam, polystyrene or some other sort of plastic. Whatever the material is, it is used because it is a poor conductor of heat.
Things To Inspect When Choosing An Ice Chest
Volume
Ice chests come in sizes from 2.5 gallons to 52 gallons. But that gallon measurement is determined by how much liquid can be poured into the ice chest. So you can pour 52 gallons of milk into a 52 gallon ice chest but you can not fit 52 gallons of milk into a 52 gallon ice chest.
Thickness
The wall thickness and lid thickness go a long way in determining how well an ice chest can keep things cold and for how long. Thicker walls are typically insulate cold better and for longer than thinner walls but there are exceptions.
Closure
Many of the larger ice chests have a clip or some other mechanism that keeps the lid closed in an air tight fashion. It is air that brings heat into the ice chest so when hot air is kept out, cold air is kept in.
Techniques To Get The Most Out Of Your Ice Chest
By packing your ice chest smartly, you can greatly extend the amount time beverages and food are kept cold. These are not “secret” techniques, but I see people doing the opposite all the time so I figured a refresher would not hurt.
Keep it closed
Remember when your mom use to tell you not to stand in front of the refrigerator with the door open. Well she was admonishing you not to waste electricity by letting warm air into the refrigerator, thus making the fridge work to produce more cold air.
The same applies to an ice chest. When the lid is open, outside, warmer air comes in, thus lowering the overall temperature. So it is best to open the lid, immediately get what you want, then close the lid back up.
Here are two tricks I use. The first is to use more than one ice chest. I have one ice chest just for drinks. This one will be opened and closed more frequently. Then I have a second ice chest just for meat and other food items. This one will not be opened as frequently and therefore will keep cold longer.
The second trick is for the beverage ice chest. It takes two pieces of wax paper, some tape and a sharpie or one of those metallic ink pens. I tape a piece of wax paper over of the top of the ice chest. Then I take the sharpie and I write what items are inside the ice chest on the wax paper. I write the items on the wax paper in the same place they are located in the ice chest. So if the word “Coke” is written in the upper left hand corner of the wax paper, that is where someone would look for a Coca-Cola once the ice chest is open. I then take the second piece of wax paper and tape it over the first. This keeps the ink from getting wet and smudging to illegibility. This way people can decide what item they want to pull out of the ice chest before they open it. This helps keep them from rooting around in the ice chest with the lid open just to see what is inside.
Plan Ahead
Keep your ice chest items refrigerated before you put them in the ice chest. Meat should be frozen hard and other items should chill in the refrigerator for at least four hours. You should cool the ice box itself before you use it. You can do this by bringing it into the air conditioned house from the hot garage the night before you plan to use it. It also helps to put a few blue bricks in the ice chest the night before you plan to use it to cool the air inside.
Pack From The Bottom
Cold air descends. So put the items on the floor of the ice chest and put the ice on top. As the ice melts the freezing water will run in-between all the items, helping to keep them cold. Make sure to use air tight, waterproof containers for all the food you put in the ice best. Meat should be vacuum-packed, if possible.
If the ice chest is being used for a fishing trip or a camping trip and you need to keep perishables frozen for longer than a day, use dry ice. Wrap it well in newspapers or paper bags and avoid direct contact with your skin, with the food and with the interior of the ice chest.
Testing the Ice Chests
Eleven ice chests were evaluated. They were grouped into under 40 quart capacity and over 40 quart capacity. The smaller ice chests are great from keep beverages frosty for a few days. The larger ice chests are great for keeping meat and other perishables chilled.
A sixteen ounce water bottle was placed in each cooler when the coolers were at room temperature. The bottles were rigged with electronic thermometers suspended on wires. The wires were connected to a unit outside of the ice chest that took temperature readings. The bottle was placed smack dab in the middle of the ice chest and an additional four frozen water bottles were placed around the main water bottle. To the smaller capacity ice chests we added 4.5 pounds of ice. To the larger capacity ice chests we added 9 pounds of ice.
The point of the test was to measure how long the ice chests could keep the water temperature from rising to room temperature again after it was chilled by the ice. We started out with room temperature because if we had put a frozen water bottle in the ice chests we would not have registered a temperature difference until the ice had melted.
Since the wire to the electronic thermometer went outside of the ice chest, it was never necessary to open the ice chest in order to take a temperature reading. The chests remained closed during the entire test.
After five days the temperature in all the ice chests had risen above 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Meat can not safely be stored above 40 degrees Fahrenheit. The test was conducted in a garage where the temperature never rose above 86 degrees Fahrenheit.
The sixteen ounce water bottle only reached the minimum temperature 24 hours after the test began.
Conclusions Of The Ice Chest Test
Conclusions Of The Ice Chest Test
See the full screen slideshow of the ice chest test conclusion
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