When it comes to dealing with your camp cooler, there are some common mistakes people make and some great solutions for how to make your cooler last at least a day longer—probably days longer—in the field. This can help eliminate annoying ice runs, soggy food, and unorganized coolers.
The first thing I want to talk about is a rookie mistake that I see done often: not pre-cooling your cooler before you go out on your adventure. When you skip pre-cooling, it’s like sending this cooler out into battle against the sun, but it wasn’t prepared. All you need to do the night before is take what we call “sacrificial ice”—ice you’re willing not to use again—and some water, throw it in the cooler, and get that cooler to take on those cold temps. So, the next morning, when you throw your fresh ice in, it’s not melting, trying to get that temp down.
A big mistake that a lot of you are making even before you pack your cooler is buying a cooler that is too small for your needs. Something to keep in mind is that a larger cooler has better ice retention, and that’s because you have a larger insulation-to-surface ratio. But many times, these coolers are expensive, so I find people either going out and buying a cooler smaller than they need due to price. However, what I’m seeing more often is that either people don’t understand the magical two-to-one ratio, or they’re not following it correctly.
Imagine your cooler like a seesaw, and it has to find its balance point. When it dips out of balance, you’re getting towards that hot point. This happens when you do not follow the two-to-one ratio, which is two parts ice to one part food and drink. When you do not follow this guideline—which many of you don’t, as you’ll see here in a bit when I show you an actual example—you’re sacrificing your insulation, which ultimately sacrifices your ice.
So, here’s what an actual two-to-one ratio looks like if you follow it to the T. And that’s really what it is. Do you actually follow it like this? Are you like me today and surprised that you’ve been breaking the rules a little bit?
One thing you can mess up, but I have five or six other things, and all in combination, it’s probably knocking down the efficiency of your cooler by half if you continue to do things wrong. This next one is probably one of the biggest debated topics in the outdoor cooler world: to drain or not to drain? That is the question. One major mistake is draining your meltwater unnecessarily. Imagine this cooler as a camel trekking across the desert, carrying those water reserves. If he eliminates that water, he’s essentially defenceless out there. Water, if you didn’t know, has a higher thermal density than air, which means that it’s going to lose that cold longer—it’ll hold it longer. If you remove that water every time you open this lid, you are taking all this open space and filling it with new hot air. Whether you have a high-end cooler like this rotomolded Canyon cooler here or a budget cooler like this Igloo cooler, you’re probably not getting near the ice life you should. I’ve opened a lot of people’s coolers over the years on adventures, and so many of the same mistakes are taking place in everyone’s coolers. I’ve been making these mistakes as well, but once I learned these methods, I saw the light. So today, I’ll be showing you nine things you’re probably doing wrong.
The ice is going to have to work to bring down the temperature, which leads me to the next topic: the next mistake. That is taking this big, beautiful insulated cooler and opening it, shutting it, opening it, and shutting it. We all know that the more we open our cooler, the more we allow hot air into it. But what can we do about this? Even if you pack your cooler like a seasoned fishing guide in Alaska, if you open and shut it all day long like most of us do, all that hard work is going to go out the window.
But I have a solution for this, and it’s not just minimizing how often you open and close your cooler. It’s a two-cooler system. Many people forget the cardinal rule, which is to separate your food and drinks. Imagine your cooler like a magician’s hat—the more magic tricks you pull out of it, the less magic the hat becomes. Unfortunately, we learned that as adults. As a kid, it always seems to hold magic. The same thing goes with your cooler. If you keep reaching in and out of it, you are going to let in all that hot air. Separating all your drinks into, say, your budget cooler—the cooler you find at the yard sale next door—works because drinks don’t need to have as good of insulation since they do not spoil.
Having two coolers allows you to consolidate. For example, when you have one giant cooler like this (and it’s not even that big) halfway through your trip, this cooler is going to have a lot of open-air space. What you do is take this cooler, now that it has been depleted, and move that ice and those items (those drinks) into the second cooler. Now you’ve consolidated and filled in that air gap, and you’re going to have longer, better ice retention for the rest of your trip.
I am getting out of here to find a better filming location because this thing is coming in hot. All right, we are out of the rain. I can still see the humidity from it, but the next one—before getting to the big ones—this is just a little one, but I see many people doing it, and that’s not prepping your food before putting it in the cooler. Don’t skip this step! Prepping your food properly can make a huge difference in maintaining the temperature and organization of your cooler. That night before take-off, the excess packaging will get waterlogged and take up space. Then, my biggest tip is to take things and put them in resealable containers or bags. The next one is so simple, but I don’t know if I’ve ever gone in someone’s cooler and seen this done thoughtfully, and that is, don’t neglect the power of frozen food. Think of frozen food as your ice blocks. Frozen food actually counts in your two-to-one ice-to-food ratio, meaning the frozen food is the ice. So, if there’s any food that doesn’t need to be consumed on day one, beforehand freeze that. And not as a square or a sphere; try to make it all in one nice plane so this flat frozen food can stack nicely in your fridge, not only saving you space but also giving you additional insulating and cooling power.
After all that frozen food, please look at your cooler like a well-organized Kingdom with very strict rules: nothing enters this Kingdom that isn’t refrigerated. Everything the light touches is our Kingdom. That means don’t pick up things at the last second and throw them at room temperature the night before. Bring everything down to a refrigerated temp. That way, when you throw it in this pre-cooled fridge, no ice has to work to cool down any of your items. Please don’t make the ice work more than it has to.
I talked about frozen food being your black ice, but don’t forget regular block ice. This can easily be made in the bottom of a bread pan or whatever container you have, or you can buy it at your local grocery store. But what block ice does is it has less surface area than cubed ice, so less air is getting around it. Block ice lasts longer than cube ice, and it’s just another necessary layer to your system.
See this commercial freezer here that you see the boys digging in. Commercial freezers typically freeze at or just below the freezing point, so make sure you buy your ice the day before, take it home, and give it a deep freeze in your freezer before throwing it in your cooler. But that’s only part of the ice equation. Consider your cooler as a masterful blend of ice. Now, the block ice with the surface area is great, but you still need that cubed ice to wrap around your drinks and your food, filling in those air gaps.
So, do you leave all that cubed ice roaming freely? You can. Many people will take that and put it into sealed containers throughout their cooler so that their food doesn’t get water damaged or so they can have fresh ice for drinks later. For me, I drop about three-quarters of my ice in here and let it roam free, and then the rest I put in containers so I have clean ice in the field. Because I keep mentioning that warm air is the enemy of your cooler, and I don’t expect you to not open your cooler up during the day. That’s just, who wants to be afraid of their cooler?
Reusable ice packs placed on top of your food load, your drink load, and your ice load are going to put a barrier in place to hold that cold air and keep that hot air out. So, you can use flexible ice packs to kind of bend over; you can use multiple ones, or you can take out sections and leave some in there to hold that temperature in. They’ll throw a wet towel on it, and that actually protects you from air moving through. What you’re doing is getting the properties of evaporation. You’re getting evaporative cooling taking place.
What goes below the ice packs is actually the most important, and that’s packing a cooler. That’s another mistake many people make. Packing a cooler is like a house of cards; if one layer of it is wrong, the whole thing comes tumbling down. This is a quick summary of what you just learned. At the bottom, you’re going to have your block of ice and your frozen food. Then, because it counts as ice, you can layer cold food next to refrigerated food. Then, from there, a layer of ice, and I mean a layer of ice as thick as your layer of food. And that’s where a lot of us fail, even in this video example, because I ran out of ice. My ice was not even thick enough. Then, there is a layer of food, then a layer of ice, then a layer of food, then a layer of ice, and then those ice packs are the cherry on top.
Just notice how little food I was able to fit in that giant 45-quart cooler, and I did not have enough ice. It shows that most people are putting way too much food for the size of their coolers. And then there’s all the issues with transport. How many of you have seen somebody take a cooler freshly packed and put it right in a hot car trunk or on a carrier on the back of a vehicle or up on the roof or in the bed of the truck? If you can make space for it, put it inside that controlled temperature-ed vehicle.
Then, you get out to camp, and you’re going to need to put it under a tree or a picnic table. How many times have you seen a cooler right on the seat of a picnic table up, on top of a picnic table, or just sitting out in the open? Some people even put Reflectix on the top of the lid or insulate the entire cooler. Sun and heat are your enemies and even the colour of your cooler matters. When picking a colour, if you pick a darker colour, just like a teardrop trailer, you don’t see teardrops with the tops of the roofs a dark colour. Well, I hope you don’t because you don’t want any colour absorbing the heat of that sun. A nice light cooler is also going to help you keep everything the way it should be.
