Ice (Homemade or bought) or Ice Paks?

[garym053]

I've been toying with the idea of buying a bunch of reusable Ice paks (perma gel kind) and cutting down or eliminating the ice cubes and blocks that I use.

Wondering if anyone else has gone this route and what your advice is?

Seems the gel paks would not be as cold as ice and ice water, in that the ice and ice water can "hug" the item(s) to be cooled more closely. For this reason. I was thinking of using it more for the meat/food cooler and continuing to use ice cubes for the drinks (Margaritas) cooler.

The other thought was to use block ice on the bottom, sealed in zip lock containers and the ice paks on top, so there is no water to make the ground beef into soup!

Any thoughts? I use a Coleman eXtreme for the meat & food, and a regular Coleman for the Margaritas and milk for my coffee.

Thanks!

[ForestCreature]

I haven't tried the gel packs, but my thought on that is  that the packs will not last nearly as long as ice will. Then when it melts you are still stuck buying ice and have the same watery mess.
 
 A better option to keep your food dry would be to seal the meats in
 Food Saver Bags. Of course this means you'd have to buy one if you don't have one. They are great for packing foods for camping. Not only does it keep the food dry in the cooler, but also helps cut down on food smells in the fridge.

[homecrew]

We use Techni Ice  http://www.techniice.com/english/index.htm  
The only problem is that if it thaws you need a way to freeze it again. This wasn't a problem for us since we brought a dorm fridge with us that had a freezer just big enough for us to swap three ice paks in and out as they thawed. We still use them with the Hybrid and continue to swap out with the bigger freezer. The cooler holds drinks so that we aren't continually opening the fridge. We have also cut the sheets up smaller and use them to keep our daughter's lunch cold.

[deniski]

The cheap way to go is to use plastic milk jugs (I use quarts) to freeze water in at home, then pack the cooler with them when you are ready to go somewhere.  This keeps the melted ice water in the jugs and off your food.  We also use block ice in the bottom or sides of our big cooler which last a really long time for us when we dry camp.

[Johnowolf]

We picked up on a similar suggestion to the milk jugs a few weeks ago, but instead of using milk jugs we use 2 Liter sodapop containers. Fill 'em up, pop 'em in the freezer, and have 'em ready for packing. Two of them will last a long weekend in the Extreme. I think for a longer trip I'd use 4 (not to mention minimizing the amount of time the Extreme is open, since for the long weekend we only brought the Extreme, so it was being opened constantly).

The other suggestion we had with that is to use salt water instead of plain tap water. Salt water freezes at a lower temperature, so it tends to keep the cooler a bit colder. It really does work well. I ran across a thread on one of the forums where someone had run a comparison test in his Extreme cooler with water, salt water, "blue ice" packs, and Gel packs. Overall, the salt water solution (at least 10%, better with a 20% salt solution) did the best. IIRC the Gel packs didn't perform any better than just jugs of plain water.
I wish I could find that original thread again, but I think it was a forum where I was "just passing through".

[4campinfoxes]

We use either 2 liter pop bottles - washed & filled with water & frozen or smaller, maybe 1 liter?, bottles from flavored water.  The nice thing is that as they melt, they keep the water contained & you have ice water for the return trip!  Most of the really perishable items (meats, butter, dairy products) we keep in the camper fridge & the pop, kool-aid & ice tea is in the cooler.


Sharon

[Papaso]

This is a cool subject , we have an Igloo 70 and it has a water jug that slides into one side. The DW freezes this solid and on weekend trips we usually take our meats frozen solid also, along with 4 of the blue plastic ice packs, this keeps most of our perishables cold for the weekend.
I also bring along a smaller Coleman that we use for Ice cubes for drinks only. Beer, soda, juices,milk,water go in the camper fridge which btw does a great job keeping everything cold. During a weekend trip we'll use 2 to 3 10# bags of ice for drinks. One thing that you always got to have in mind is to keep the opening of these things down to a minimum. We usually camp in pretty hot weather all year round and we haven't run into any problems keeping our stuff cold this way. I also have to agree with Marcy there is nothing better than the zip lock food saver bags, my DW keeps everything in them, from meats to toothpaste to just about everything we keep in the camper.

[debbiedee1957]

Well I tried the bubble package ice thingy's...after awhile they sort of smell.  The blue ice thingys have a tendancy to leak after a bit.  Boils down to there is nothing like a good ol' solid hunk of ice made from water.

Here's a story that my camping buddy (AKA Albert) teases me about all the time-
this past Jan.  I had a fire in my home, under the fireplace which is located on second floor over the garage.  When firemen were pulling out some stuff stored on shelves in garage near where fire was burning, they pull out a large box of "empty" 1/2 gal cardboard milk cartons...Albert loves to tell me about the odd look the fireman had on his face when he was pulling this box of empty milk cartons out...I didn't see it...thank god.


1/2 Gal cardboard milk cartons work great for making some solid chunks of good ol' fashioned ice that will last around 4 days no problem.

Anyone got any???  Mine were all thrown out with the fire rubbish.

[mahelinski]

We have also used 2 two liter bottles washed and filled and frozen prior to departure.  This works very well and offers good tasting drinking water a couple of days into the journey.  

[Turn Key]

Really haven't found anything better then plain, old ice.  If you buy it, try to get it a few days prior to need.  Bring it home and put it in your deep freeze (if you have one).  Freezer at store is not much colder then 32 degrees (reduced operating costs) where your home freezer should be hovering around zero.  If you'll do this and pre-cool your chest (frozen milk jugs are good for this), you'll be surprized at the difference it makes.

Hope this helps and happy camping!

[garym053]

Thanks for all the comments. I have been using homemade block ice in the eXtreme and buying bags of cubes for the drinks and drink cooler, just wondered if there was anything better. Not sure why I'm looking, a block of ice in the eXtreme easily lasts 4 days or more!

The Ice Packs I have are fairly hard plastic, not the moldable kind. I think it would take a fair amount of abuse to cause them to leak.

anyway, thanks again!