Camping Cooler Ice Test
Camping Cooler Ice Test
Measure how long ice lasts
Download on the App StorePut ice in, wait a few hours, weigh the water that collected. ChillTest turns that into a single heat-leak figure in watts per degree — a property of the box itself, not of the day you tested it.
Melting ice holds the inside of a cooler at freezing, and it takes a fixed 333.55 kJ to melt a kilogram of it. Every gram of meltwater is a known amount of heat that got in, so the result is measured rather than estimated.
No thermometer, no sensor to pair, nothing left inside the box. A measuring cup works too if that is what you have on hand.
How long 10 lb of ice lasts at 90°F, how much ice a two-night trip needs, whether the expensive rotomolded chest really doubles the cheap one. Adjust for lid opening, sun and how full the box is.
If the ice melted out, if a gel pack was used instead of ice, or if it was barely warmer outside than in, the run is not a valid measurement — so no figure appears. You get an explanation of what to change instead.
Keep as many boxes as you like, each with its own measurement history, sorted best-first. The ranking is yours, measured in your conditions, not copied from a spec sheet.
A room-temperature cooler spends its first ice on cooling its own walls. For an 8 kg box that is roughly 720 g of extra melt — on top of maybe 97 g of genuine hourly melt, which would throw the result off by several times. The hour of pre-chilling, with that water poured away, gets the walls out of the measurement.
