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best way to freeze block ice for cooler
Posted:
Fri Jul 27, 2018 9:14 amby ae6black
I would like to how some of you freeze block ice for your coolers. This June, I went to the Creation Music festival and camped out for five days in the middle of a field in the blistering heat. Before I went I filled up some jugs, and some of those 1 gallon Ice cream containers that you can get from walmart (I eat a lot of ice cream). At the end of 5 days, I still had some block ice left in those ice cream containers. My problem with them was that one cracked and filled my cooler with water. Is there a simple way to freeze block ice in a container where it won't crack the plastic? I was wondering if the container lined with plastic rap might help. What do the rest of you do. If the container hadn't leaked, I wouldn't have had any mess at all. I still had fresh milk at the end of those five days but I didn't like my parmazzon cheese laying in the water.
Art
Re: best way to freeze block ice for cooler
Posted:
Fri Jul 27, 2018 9:49 amby working on it
- I used frozen water, in old ice tea/milk-type blow-molded jugs (only using the ones with screw-on tops) on my last 3-day trip, and they worked well for me. I filled them with my "sweet peach tea" mix, and froze them in the chest freezer to 10 degrees F (my wife won't let me lower it to zero, since it is below the "recommended" setting on the unit), and they were still very solid at that temperature. I recently bought "Cooler Shock" bags from Amazon, which are designed to work if frozen to only 18 degrees, so my wife's freezer should be quite low enough for them to work OK (my previous artificial ice blocks - the plastic ones you find in the sporting goods section-, required that they be frozen down to -2 degrees F, so I was only getting them frozen to 12 degrees short of their specific requirement, so maybe that's why they didn't work too good in my "cooler-in-a-cooler" experiment). http://www.tnttt.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=68543&hilit=+cooler
- Cooler Shock bag, ice replacement.JPG (132.85 KiB) Viewed 4318 times
- But, back to the frozen jugs: be sure to allow room for the water (or tea) to expand; the first one I overfilled, and the top came off and the jug expelled (but the plastic never split) some tea into our new freezer (easy to clean, thankfully). On the succeeding jugs, I allowed about 9-10% of the jugs' volume to remain unfilled, and froze two without the tops, and two with, to freeze. It didn't seem to matter, because the sealed jugs stayed sealed, without bursting, so I sealed the next two jugs, also.
- frozen water expansion.JPG (57.71 KiB) Viewed 4358 times
Re: best way to freeze block ice for cooler
Posted:
Fri Jul 27, 2018 4:01 pmby coyote
I have used those cheap water containers from the dollar store. They hold a gal.or so. (lack of image) They are shaped like a brief case basically. The rectangle shape can be handy for "stacking/stocking" the cooler. The ones I use also have a spigot. Coyote
Re: best way to freeze block ice for cooler
Posted:
Fri Jul 27, 2018 5:28 pmby razorback
whatever container you use, keep cap off and be sure to allow at lease 1 or 2 inches for expansion of ice. replace caps when you take out of the freezer
Re: best way to freeze block ice for cooler
Posted:
Fri Jul 27, 2018 8:41 pmby greygoos
Lot of guys in the mobile food biz use the large juice containers like Ocean Spray cranberry juice. They are pretty heavy duty. When I did catering in remote locations I froze almost all liquids before packing the coolers except liquids that would be consumed the first day. Food was packed into Gallon freezer bags and stored with the frozen beverages.
Re: best way to freeze block ice for cooler
Posted:
Fri Jul 27, 2018 10:28 pmby John61CT
Google "polar tubes"
Re: best way to freeze block ice for cooler
Posted:
Sat Jul 28, 2018 12:41 amby crttaz
Turkey Hill 1/2 gal tea containers, 85% fill They are square enough that they fit together nicely.
Re: best way to freeze block ice for cooler
Posted:
Sat Jul 28, 2018 9:30 amby KTM_Guy
We freeze water bottles and use them to drink after they melt. For longer trips we buy some 3 liter water jugs and freeze them, also freeze a few with iced tea. The other nice thing with frozen water bottles is we can cut the top off and put the chunk of ice in a hydration backpack and then fill with drinking water from our 6 gallon jug. Works out great. And have cold water for hikes.
Todd