ChillTest: Esky Ice Test
ChillTest: Esky Ice Test
How long your esky holds ice
Download on the App StoreChuck the ice in, leave it a few hours, then weigh the water sitting in the bottom. ChillTest turns that into a single heat-leak figure in watts per degree — a property of the esky itself, not of the day you tested it.
While ice is melting, the inside of an esky sits at 0°C, and melting a kilo of ice takes a fixed 333.55 kJ. Every gram of meltwater is a known amount of heat that leaked in, so this is a measurement rather than a guess.
No thermometer to buy, no sensor to pair, nothing left rattling around inside. A measuring jug works just as well.
How long 5 kg of ice lasts at 35°C, how much ice a two-night camp needs, whether the pricey rotomoulded esky really doubles the cheap one. Allow for lid opening, sun on the lid and how tightly it is packed.
If the ice melted out completely, if ice bricks were used instead of ice, or if it was barely warmer outside than in, the run is not a valid measurement and nothing is shown. You get told what to change instead.
Keep as many as you like, each with its own measurement history, sorted best first. It is your ranking, from your conditions, not a claim off the box.
An esky at room temperature spends its first ice cooling its own walls. On an 8 kg esky that is around 720 g of extra melt, against maybe 97 g of real melt in an hour — enough to throw the result out by several times. The hour of pre-chilling, with that water tipped out, keeps the walls out of the numbers.