A little tip on coolers

Your Hot Dog Guy!

Well-Known Member
Joined
Mar 15, 2008
Location
winston-salem,nc
A lot of you will know this already but for the ones that don't this might help a little. It never fails when we set up somebody asks "why is there a bottled water in with the Pepsis and Mt Dews? Well we freeze the botteled water and place a couple on top of the ice and contents to preserve the ice. We have never had one to bust and they really help keep things cool. I've tried a lot of different things to bring the coldest drinks on a hot day to our customers. And yes towards the end of the day they get sold. We packed our coolers on Wendsday in preperation for The Farm this past weekend and Saturday afternoon a guy pulled out a water bottle still half frozen!
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Another little thing I have had good luck with is the aluminum foiled bubble wrap at Lowes in the insulation department. I have a cooler built into the Hot Dog Cart, this is mounted about 3in. from the burner box for the steam table which we keep between 160 and 200 degrees! Yeah, great design! I put the insulation inside the cooler and it helps a lot. I tried to place the insulation between the burner box and the cooler but it did not work.
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Maybe this will help keep your stuff cooler this summer when it starts to get hot.:beer:
 
This works well, I've been doing it for years...


If upgrading coolers, take time to really research them, you'd be surprised at what you learn. I spent a little too much $, last minute, for our wheel around "tailgate" cooler. Its a POS! I think a rubbermaid container would do better... But, I also spent some average $ on an igloo cooler (from WalMart) and to my surprise, it has worked amazingly well! At the Flats race, I bought 2 bags of ice and had some drinks and food in it. It sat in the sun mostly by my tent all weekend and Sunday I still had a couple pieces of ice left in there. My other coolers would have lost the ice on the first day.

Next cooler: Yeti.... :D
 
Block ice is the ticket. Freezing water bottles like Terry mentioned is an easy way to get it, too. We'll do it with 1qt gatorade bottles refilled with water. They'll keep for days.

And don't drain the water.
 
I use the same, sun drop bottle gater aid, what ever. Works better as far as last longer. In my big cooler, I use half gallon and full gallon milk jugs. Have never had anything go bad while away and always have ice left in them when I get home.
I had a cooler on the back of my Jeep, it was just double walled plastic, no insulation at all. I could not get a full day and it was all thawed. Recently bought the same size cooler, also a Coleman, and it IS insulated, and keeps drinks and ice a lot better. It's a 22 QT I think, $20 and I am happy with it for the trail.
 
rockcity said:
This works well, I've been doing it for years...


If upgrading coolers, take time to really research them, you'd be surprised at what you learn. I spent a little too much $, last minute, for our wheel around "tailgate" cooler. Its a POS! I think a rubbermaid container would do better... But, I also spent some average $ on an igloo cooler (from WalMart) and to my surprise, it has worked amazingly well! At the Flats race, I bought 2 bags of ice and had some drinks and food in it. It sat in the sun mostly by my tent all weekend and Sunday I still had a couple pieces of ice left in there. My other coolers would have lost the ice on the first day.

Next cooler: Yeti.... :D
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We have four brands of coolers and I agree, a Igloo is the ticket. Also the Igloo's we have has a concave lid and is stronger than a Coleman flat lid. We have four Xtreme Coleman's and they do very well. We tried the wheeled things and, yes they are crap. We bring some things in a small cooler that we pack and stick the packed cooler in the freezer! Works real good! If you are camping out, cover your coolers with a moving pad, you might be surprised how good it works. A silver tarp works even better, sit the coolers on it and then cover with the rest of it. The foil bubblewrap on the inside is worth trying also. Just trying to pass on some things we found out.
 
Down in Baja, my buddy Stu packs 3 of the big deep sea fishing size cooler with all our grub for the pits. He puts his ice in the big zip locks. Works well and you can pack it in and arround where you need it. My dad used to freeze 1/2 gallon jugs, but they take up a lot of usable space. I had thoughts about running a/c lines and a condenser into a console cooler in a prerunner. Would be kinda' coolish.
 
We freeze 6" blocks of ice and package them individually in plastic shopping bags (Food Lion, Walmart, etc.) which keep the blocks from sticking together. When packing up for a long weekend (3-5 days) we pack a large white Igloo marine cooler with a layer of canned drinks on the bottom and cover them with a layer of the ice blocks, and fill in the spaces with cubed ice. We usually get two layers of the ice blocks in that cooler. Then we pack a Coleman cooler with a layer of drinks on the bottom and finish up with our food and as much ice as we have room for. At the campsite we keep the white cooler in the shade as much as possible and don't open it unless we need more ice for the other one. Works well for us... and we very rarely buy any ice.
 
How do you make the blocks of ice? Tupperware container?
 
Water in a gallon zip lock bag.
 
I use new water bottles, as they melt you can drink them. What do you do with the ice blocks when they melt? Sorta like when I went to Moab, I carried 2 gallons of water and anti freeze mixed, man that was stupid.
 
Yup I do the same thing with freezing bottles of water, or large freezer bags.
Isn't that some law of thermodynamics, the rate it will melt being related to the thermal mass? Just like broken up ice thaws quickly.

When prepping for a long day of wheeling, I'll often freeze a bottle of Gator aid too. That way I have a cold drink at the end of teh day. Problem is you have to wait until its all thawed or you get 2x the electrolytes per swig...
 
RatLabGuy said:
Yup I do the same thing with freezing bottles of water, or large freezer bags.
Isn't that some law of thermodynamics, the rate it will melt being related to the thermal mass? Just like broken up ice thaws quickly.

When prepping for a long day of wheeling, I'll often freeze a bottle of Gator aid too. That way I have a cold drink at the end of teh day. Problem is you have to wait until its all thawed or you get 2x the electrolytes per swig...
Click to expand...
Heat Transfer really. Basically a relation of surface area and thermal mass. A sphere has the lowest possible surface area per unit mass. Anything with corners acts like a fin and transfers heat more effectively, so water bottles are a pretty good shape.
 
I use the frozen water/gator aid bottle trick for years and It works great. I also like to put a bit of cold water in the cooler so that everything stays nice and cool. Like a cold blanket.
 
fwiw scientists now say you shouldnt drink bottled water that has been frozen...shrug..i do it, not sure id sell it.
 
Ron said:
fwiw scientists now say you shouldnt drink bottled water that has been frozen...shrug..i do it, not sure id sell it.
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What is the basis for their reasoning?
 
I tried that for 1 weekend and took it back! We have two of the Coleman 70qt. with no wheels that does a very good job for less $$$
 
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