I put a regular Coleman coolers to the test in this 7 day ice challenge. How long can a regular cooler hold ice? The results will surprise you.
Hey guys, Ryan here from huntingwaterfalls.com and this is my ice test challenge for the Coleman wheeled cooler 38 liters or 40-quart cooler. This is just your standard Coleman wheeled cooler that you could buy online or from any store. Nothing really special about this. But, I have pre-chilled it 24 hours before, which is probably overkill, but I did it with my roto molded coolers so I wanted to do it with this one just to give them a level playing field. But, anyway, I've got it filled to capacity with ice and 6 of my favorite beers in there.
So we're going to see how long this cooler keeps ice for.
I'll be opening it 5 times a day to simulate real world use. And I'll checking back every single day with you guys to let you know how the cooler is progressing and how it's holding ice. I expect, given the conditions here, that it's going to hold ice maybe 2, maybe 3 days, maybe a little more because I'll be keeping it in the shade and it is filled to capacity with ice, but we'll see how we go.
We can see that ice has dropped a decent amount, but not massively. So, it's still holding up really well. It's been 48 hours. We can see that there's been a decent amount of ice loss. It's still holding ice really well. This ice is basically in a big chunk at the moment. But, I would say that's dropped about a third. About 70 degrees today, ice holding up really well. I can see another 2-3 days from this one, actually, given how it's doing currently.
Here we are with the Coleman regular cooler – the wheeled cooler on day 3. I've broken up all the ice and if we go ahead and have a look at that, we can see that these beers – some of them have been kept on the surface, some of there aren't. This is mostly water now. There is still a bit of ice. If I go all the way down, there is ice all the way down. But, it's a slurry mixture of water and ice, not just ice. So this will go another day, another 2 days, maybe. But, I'd be very surprised if this lasted more than 2 more days.
So here we are at day 4 for the Coleman wheeled cooler, just your standard cooler. And if we go ahead and open this, we will see that there's actually ice all the way to the bottom. But there's definitely not enough surface tension to keep the beers on the top and most of the beers are on the bottom. There's ice all the way down. My hand is really cold, but it's probably mostly water now with a bit of ice. But, I can see this lasting another day in these temperatures.
Here we are at the end of day 5 with this Coleman regular cooler and I'm very surprised how well this cooler has done. Obviously, we've got great conditions for this cooler – being kept in the shade, 60-70 degree days, so not very hot at all. But if we go ahead and open this, let's see if there is still any ice in there. And we can see that, yes, there is still ice in this cooler. But, if we have a look at the surface, you can see that the ice is almost gone. It's mostly water, couple of handfuls of ice. I would say that by tomorrow, all of this ice would be gone and we'll just be left with cold water.
So here we are on day 6 and this is our Coleman regular cooler. We've had great conditions for this cooler. Temperature is around 60-70 degrees, been kept in the shade all day. And if we go ahead and open it, we can see that it has run out of ice. I checked it last night, it still had some ice in it. But this morning at 6:00 AM, the ice was all gone. So we can see that there is no ice left in this at all.
If we go ahead and use our thermometer, we can see that the water temperature is around 44.9 degrees, 44.7. If we go ahead and look in celsius, that's about 7 degrees. This water is still very cold. I could happily drink these beers and they would be nice and cold. But I can imagine that by tomorrow, these are going to be quite warm.
Here we are on day 7 with our Coleman regular wheeled cooler. As we already know, there is no ice left in it, but I thought it'd be interesting just to show you guys the temperature. So if we go ahead and have a look at the temperature here, we can see that it's about 52 degrees fahrenheit and it's about 11 degrees celsius. So the temperature's gone up a fair bit since it lost its ice yesterday.
The water is still cold but it's not icy cold. I could still drink this, it would be fine, but it's not going to be as nice as getting it from a cooler that still has ice in it.
So that's going to finish up our ice test challenge for this Coleman regular cooler. Really surprised with how well this cooler did, holding ice for over 5 days. Obviously, it had really good conditions, being 50-70 degrees each and every day as well as being kept in a nice shady spot. But still, I did not expect it to hold ice for 5 days or longer. So it's done really well.
I will be repeating this test in summer when temperatures are around 90 degrees or higher every single day and we'll be putting this bad boy in the sun to see how long it's going to keep ice for. So, really impressed of how well it did in these temperatures with these conditions. It was mainly full of ice. But, now I think it is time to go ahead and crack one of these beers. It's Friday afternoon and we're going to call it a day.