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PostPosted: September 21st, 2021, 7:12 am 
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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.com

I 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!


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PostPosted: September 21st, 2021, 8:35 am 
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The trip we took was a quick one into massassauga park for the last weekend of summer. That's not a long weekend, despite my opinions, and my wife could only get one day off, so this was just a friday-sunday trip where we stayed on one site.

I packed the coolers friday morning putting two frozen water bottles in each and then filling them up with cold stuff. One cooler got all the frozen stuff, like the hot dogs, while the other go more of the "fridge" stuff, like condiments, cheese and lunch meat. That's probably not the best division for keeping the cold the longest, but it made the most organizational sense to me. Both coolers were comfortably full.

As a side note, this being my first time using the organizational products from recreational barrel works, I may have been a little too optimistic about how much my barrel could hold. I had 2 coolers, 2 buckets, and 2 belts, as well as a bottle of wine or two. The one bucket had all the canned goods. The other had stuff like oatmeal, hot dog buns, meat sticks, etc. Neither was really full, so I hoped they'd all fit. But when I stacked them all into my 60g barrel, the top cooler was sticking out a good 4"! We were late leaving at that point, and I was in no mood to start repacking things, so I promise you, I simply put the barrel lid on and sat on it! My son thought it was hilarious. I got the barrel closed, though we did have very flat sandwich buns all weekend!

Friday night everything was still ice cold, and the water bottles showed no sign of thawing.

Saturday morning I got out the bacon and eggs and everything was still good. I'd say the water bottles were about half thawed.

By saturday night the hotdogs were thawed and ready for the fire, and the water bottles in the "fridge" cooler were thawed but still felt quite cold, while the "freezer" cooler still had some ice in its bottles.

Sunday morning all the food still seemed good. My yogurt still felt just as cold as it always does. I consolodated the coolers at this point. The "freezer" cooler still had a little bit of ice floating in its bottles, so I fit all the remaining stuff into that cooler. The two water bottles from the "fridge" cooler now were free to give us handy drinking water for the paddle home.

Sunday evening we arrived home and I unpacked. The water bottles were totally ice free, but everything still felt good and cold, even the left over lunch meat, and I didnt feel any need to throw anything out.

So over all i'd say they performed very well for our trip.

Given the results of my test though, and the trajectory things were going, i'm not so sure I would have been able to trust that yogurt and lunch meat had we stayed a fourth day.

Bottom line, I think i'm happy with them, and I think the lesson is that if packed and managed well you can stretch them to three days. Thats less than i'd hoped, but the shape and functionality of these coolers is otherwise worth it.

In the future, i'll either plan our menu around having cold food only for the first three days, or i'll look into finding a way to modify these coolers.

I dont know about manufacturing, but I suspect it wouldnt be that hard to make a foam insert that could be easily put into the cooler to double the insulation thickness. I actually suggested this to the company, I think they could sell it to existing cooler owners as a "trip extender" accessory. Assuming they dont pursue that, though, I may look into making my own as I saw others suggest in the other thread.


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PostPosted: September 21st, 2021, 11:29 am 
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Joined: August 28th, 2021, 7:49 pm
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Location: Vancouver, BC
Thanks for the helpful review, @Callee. I’ve been thinking about picking up some of these accessories lately too. It’s helpful to know a bit more about the coolers in particular.

A couple of quick questions if you have a minute:

- How rigid are the coolers? Strong enough to keep fruit from getting crushed? (Provided you don’t sit on the whole mess :) )

- The buckets seem to come in two versions: with lids or without. Any reason to choose one style over the other?


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PostPosted: September 21st, 2021, 5:48 pm 
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Joined: October 19th, 2004, 5:49 pm
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Location: Ottawa
Callee,
You may wish to try to line the 60l barrels with a layer of closed cell blue foam matt. The kind that some people use for a sleeping pad. I cut a round piece for the bottom and the top of the barrel and a single piece that I use to line the sides of the barrel. The Ostrom coolers still fit into the barrel and it just adds a little more insulation. Of course keeping the barrels out of direct sunlight and even adding a wet towel cover for evaporative cooling are other small steps that may add a day or two positive impact.

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PostPosted: September 21st, 2021, 6:11 pm 
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I have lined my own brand barrel organisers with Reflectix, works pretty well to keep cheese and butter from melting. I’ve also made full on foam lined versions but nothing is going to come close to a proper cooler. As one of the keys to keeping things cold is to cut down on air exchange it might be better to break down critical food stuffs into smaller portions and package them in sealed bubble mailers with small cold packs. That way the cold air around the package wouldn’t be disturbed until the item was used.
Or you could down the route we’ve more recently taken and switch to entirely freeze dried meals!

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PostPosted: September 21st, 2021, 7:26 pm 
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Callee wrote:

Given the results of my test though, and the trajectory things were going, i'm not so sure I would have been able to trust that yogurt and lunch meat had we stayed a fourth day.


chris randall wrote:

Or you could down the route we’ve more recently taken and switch to entirely freeze dried meals!


Some lunch meats would likely keep longer than four days, even unrefrigerated. Consider taking certain types of salami if you like the taste.

Thanks for the detailed review.


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PostPosted: September 21st, 2021, 8:04 pm 
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Joined: August 26th, 2008, 8:48 pm
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The barrel buckets make it so I almost like using my barrels.


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PostPosted: September 22nd, 2021, 9:46 am 
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two2the8 wrote:
Thanks for the helpful review, @Callee. I’ve been thinking about picking up some of these accessories lately too. It’s helpful to know a bit more about the coolers in particular.

A couple of quick questions if you have a minute:

- How rigid are the coolers? Strong enough to keep fruit from getting crushed? (Provided you don’t sit on the whole mess :) )

- The buckets seem to come in two versions: with lids or without. Any reason to choose one style over the other?


Thanks!

I definitely went with the lidded buckets myself. The sides of the buckets are not at all rigid - just a nylon bag, really - so I can imagine that without the lid things would easily spill about. Also, we tend to get our barrel down at the beginning of the day and leave it down, and so our buckets were frequently sitting out on the table while the coolers stayed in the barrel, so without the zip up lid i'm sure we would have had chipmunks and other critters into our trail mix and bread.

As for the rigidity of the coolers, they're rigid enough to keep their own shape, but they certainly can be crushed. The foam is about 1" thick I'd say, so it would give a decent amount of protection to fruit. Especially if you stacked your buckets in your barrel and put your cooler on top, then there's be no way for the fruit to get crushed or damaged at all - it would be safe within the padded cooler protected by the barrel.

We only had apples on this trip, and they did fine. I suppose bananas would be the real test!

Hope that helps


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PostPosted: September 22nd, 2021, 12:25 pm 
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Joined: August 28th, 2021, 7:49 pm
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Location: Vancouver, BC
Right on, thanks Callee. Very helpful intel.

chris randall wrote:
I have lined my own brand barrel organisers with Reflectix, works pretty well to keep cheese and butter from melting.


As a side note, I enjoyed checking out your products, Chris. Some pretty interesting stuff.

chris randall wrote:
Or you could down the route we’ve more recently taken and switch to entirely freeze dried meals!


I second that for longer trips. We've taken to dehydrating and vac-packing our own meals when we're heading out for a week or so... it can be a fair amount of work, but it's very satisfying. It's always fun to have fresh food for weekend trips, though, so I think a barrel cooler will also be a nice thing to have.


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PostPosted: September 22nd, 2021, 1:47 pm 
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chris randall wrote:
Or you could down the route we’ve more recently taken and switch to entirely freeze dried meals!


We don't use freeze dried but most things are dehydrated. We take some fresh fruit for the first day or 2, though. If anybody has found any dehydrated beer I would be ready to pay a premium for it! :lol:

Re barrel org---not quite as slick as the Op has, but we used color coded mesh bags with drawstring from $rama

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PostPosted: September 22nd, 2021, 2:42 pm 
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wotrock wrote:
chris randall wrote:
Or you could down the route we’ve more recently taken and switch to entirely freeze dried meals!


We don't use freeze dried but most things are dehydrated. We take some fresh fruit for the first day or 2, though. If anybody has found any dehydrated beer I would be ready to pay a premium for it! :lol:

a


https://beerstreetjournal.com/powdered- ... add-water/

Feel free to mail me my premium! :D


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PostPosted: September 25th, 2021, 3:59 pm 
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I’m not a fan…i also don’t like their barrel attachment bags that go on the outside of a barrel…I just don’t find they attach well.

I do like their barrel buckets and barrel organizers that go inside a barrel.

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