The major draw is that it easily fills the gaps between your food and beverages, cooling them quickly and efficiently. However, crushed ice is also the fastest to melt and you’ll likely need to replace it fairly frequently. Blocks of ice, on the other hand, take much longer coleman camping chair to melt than crushed ice. However, blocks are bulky and take up a lot of space in the cooler since they don’t conform around your food and cans. If we have enough space, our preferred method is to use both block and crushed ice together, and Yeti has more great tips here.
Even better, that capacity came in at a bigger-than-advertised 58.1 quarts when I filled it with water to double-check. In addition to wheels, many Coleman coolers come with other special features, including cup holders and easy-to-use two-way handles. On top of some coolers being built for sitting, many of them are built for stacking, making them more easily accessible. Others are explicitly built for keeping your haul on-ice during a fishing trip. We’ve tested Polar Bear coolers for seven years now, buying them or receiving test units from Polar Bear.
In practice, most of the claimed ice retention times feel quite inflated to us, perhaps due to extremely favorable testing conditions (storing the cooler inside with the lid closed in cool temperatures, for example). If we had to generalize it, we would say that you should expect to get approximately half of the claimed ice coleman camping chair retention time in real-world use, give or take depending on your specific circumstances. Previously, we tested hard coolers in the summer in Baltimore through a week that saw highs of 80 to 90 degrees Fahrenheit and lows of 64 to 72 degrees. And more recently we tested most of our picks again throughout the year in Hawaii.
We also started tracking the internal temperature of the coolers with the ThermoWorks Signals thermometer to see exactly when temperatures began to rise. Simply put, coolers are unlike most other categories of outdoor gear that may last for just for a couple seasons before needing to be replaced. This means that when you’re making the calculation of whether spending $300 or $400 on a cooler is worth it, you are getting a product that literally should last for decades. That said, if you don’t need multi-day ice retention, even a cheaper hard-sided cooler should be around for many years as well.
Simply freeze the cooler overnight before filling it with filtered water and placed in the freezer. coleman canopys are designed more for people on a budget who are looking for a simple cooler that can meet their needs for a weekend trip to the lake or a tailgate. They have found a happy medium between performance, toughness, and asking price. We may have wished for such niceties as a dry bin or the ability to handle dry ice, like many of the other coolers in this review, but such is not in the cards for the Coleman.
It’s also important to point out that some companies provide different warranties for their hard-sided versus soft-sided offerings. For example, Yeti covers its Tundra and Roadie collections with a five-year warranty, while their soft-sided Hopper is only covered for three. The Steel Belted cooler is light and has effective and comfortable handles.
These coolers are simply made by inserting hot plastic into a defined mold, given time to cool, and then removed. The process is simpler and cheaper than rotomolding and allows for greater precision because of the molded shapes. But they’re made with multiple pieces—unlike the single, uninterrupted form with rotomolding—which can lead to a drop in durability and added susceptibility to cracking. That being said, a high-end build like RTIC’s 52 QT Ultra-Light stacks up favorably to top rotomolded coolers in overall toughness. Many injection-molded designs also allow for various mounting locations for accessories like tables, cup holders, and cutting boards—something you don’t typically get with rotomolding. Orca (Outdoor Recreation Company of America) isn’t a household name like Yeti, but the Tennessee brand has gained a dedicated following of committed outdoorspeople.