Cooler Test: Ice Retention Log
Cooler Test: Ice Retention Log
For Camping, Canoe & Cottage
Download on the App StoreLoad it with ice, leave it a few hours, then weigh the water that has collected. Cooler Ice converts that into a single heat-leak figure in watts per degree, which belongs to the cooler itself rather than to the day you tested it.
While ice is melting, the inside of a cooler sits at 0°C, and melting a kilogram takes a fixed 333.55 kJ. Every gram of meltwater represents a known amount of heat that got in, which is what makes this a measurement.
Nothing to buy, nothing to pair, nothing left inside the cooler. A measuring cup works just as well if that is what is in the drawer.
How long 5 kg of ice lasts at 30°C, how much ice a weekend at the cottage needs, whether the expensive cooler really doubles the cheap one. Account for lid opening, sun and how full the cooler is packed.
If the ice melted out, if ice packs were used in place of ice, or if it was barely warmer outside than in, the run is not a valid measurement and no figure appears — just an explanation of what to change.
Keep as many coolers as you like, each with its own measurement history, sorted best first. The ranking comes from your conditions, not from a spec sheet.
A cooler at room temperature spends its first ice cooling its own walls. On an 8 kg cooler that is roughly 720 g of extra melt, against maybe 97 g of genuine melt in an hour — enough to skew the result several times over. The hour of pre-chilling, with that water poured off, keeps the walls out of the calculation.
