Recently I posted here looking for cooler recommendations, and someone helpfully responded by linking to a canadian company i'd never heard of before, recreational barrel works.
They make a variety of accessories primarily to help you organise and improve functionality in your food barrel.
www.recreationalbarrelworks.comI bought a number of their products. They sell "barrel buckets" which are round nylon type material buckets with top handles (the versions I bought also had zippered lids) that fit perfectly through the mouth of your food barrel. Since the inside of the barrel is a larger diamater than the mouth, once inside there is a gap around the perimeter of the bucket, and to use that space the company sells what my family called "barrel belts", which are a belt shaped run of zippered pockets that fits perfectly in the perimeter gap. We bought several of each in different colours, and my entire family agreed it was a million percent improvement over previous trips with the food barrel. No more rooting through the barrel to find that one little bottle of water flavouring, no more pulling out a hundred items to find one single thing, no more canned goods falling onto bread and squishing it, no more wasted time and delays as you look for certain ingredients while the dinner you're cooking burns. I was able to organise everything into the colour coded barrels and belts, and it was always easy both to find and to access anything we needed.
But most important was the coolers, which are the same size and shape as the buckets but are blue and somewhat more rigid because of the foam insulation. They feel like a standard soft sided cooler, and have a zippered top that opens half way.
There were no tests or ice-time claims on the website, so the first thing I wanted to do was run my own test. Mostly this was for me to follow-up on another suggestion in the other thread: to use frozen water bottles instead of blue ice packs. So I wanted to test and see if there was a real difference between those. But also I wanted to get an idea how long these coolers would last. I was hoping for 4 days. Our standard trip is to add an extra day to a long weekend and take 4 days, so it would be nice to have a cooler that lasted the whole trip.
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I'll post my test in this post, and then our recent trip experience in the next post.
First I prepared the water bottles. I froze a number of 1.5l bottles of aquafina. I put 2 in the first cooler, and reasoned that if I were leaving enough room for food that 2 was probably the most I'd use. Then I added a third bottle to simulate the cold and frozen food I would normally add. I weighed that cooler on the bathroom scale and found it to be 4lbs. Then I filled the other cooler with 4lbs of blue ice packs. I figured this was a rough way to ensure that each cooler was starting out with about the same amount of frozen stuff in it. I was surprised though that the 4lbs of ice packs seemed to take up a lot more room in the cooler than the 4lbs of water did.
Then I used a laser thermometer and shot a couple times into the middle of each cooler and averaged the results.
The first readings for Day 1 AM were -19.5* for the water bottles, -19.8* for the ice packs.
I parked both coolers out of the sun on the bricks in front of the woodstove in our kitchen (it was not lit, of course!).
I didn't touch them again till about 12 hours later in the evening, when I took PM readings in the same way.
the Day 1 PM readings were water bottles (WB) -1* and Ice Packs (IP) -1*.
The next morning, on day 2, I repeated the readings again.
Day 2 AM: WB 1*, IP 2*.
Again I left them alone all day, and the evening readings were:
Day 2 PM: WB 5*, IP 7*.
By the evening of Day 2 I noticed the water bottles were all melted, and the ice packs were soft and thawed.
In the morning of Day 3 we saw a huge jump:
Day 3 AM: WB 16*, IP 15-16*.
By the evening of the third day we had settled out at room temperature, so I stopped the test then:
Day 3 PM: WB 20*, IP 20*.
Looking at those results, two things seem clear to me.
For one, it definitely makes more sense to use frozen water bottles than ice packs. While the performance of both was about the same and so you don't actually see an improvement in cooling ability, the fact that they take up less room and provide you with fresh water as well makes it the more advantageous option.
The more troubling issue though was that neither option lasted for the 4 days I was hopeful for. The FDA recommends that coolers keep food at lower than 5*, which means that either method would have kept food safely cold only till the evening of the second day.
I'll admit I was disappointed that it appears that these are only 2-day coolers. For ease of access, organisation, and fit in your food barrel. These are definite winners though.
I emailed these results to the folks at recreational barrel works, and they sent me a friendly reply with some suggestions for how best to pack the coolers on an actual trip, such as packing tight, etc.
The next week I had another idea. I struggled a bit and managed to fit the first cooler entirely inside the second one. Then I put the same frozen water bottles inside. I set the cooler in the same place, and started monitoring the results in the same manner. This time the results were much more impressive. Being effectively twice as thick you might expect the cooler to perform twice as well, but the improvement appeared to be more than double! I had to leave for anothe trip before the test was done, but at the end of day 3 the temperature was still -1* and the water was still frozen. When I got home 4 days later, on day 7, the temperature was still 17* - not cooler range any more, but still cooler than room temp! This suggests to me that the folks at recreational barrel works could have a seriously good cooler on their hands if only they would change the design to double the foam insulation. I emailed them again, and while they replied politely, I did not get the impression they are considering that, which I think is unfortunate.
Next up, trip experience!