Making Ice with your camping freezer

Can anyone report on efforts to make block ice(1L, 2L, etc) with their camping freezer, preferably out bush?

We are part way through the process of retiring the two old big heavy Coleman cooler/eskies.

First purchase was an Evakool IceKool ice box which has been very good and held stuff cold with ice still in the bottles for a week. so this covers most of the camping we do; looonnngg weekends ad the occassional week away.

Caveat, not much of a work out this summer, but it as certainly done better than the old Colemans which held 2L frozen ice bottles for four days.(melts over 4 days),

The plan now is to buy a camping freezer and use it to;
a)hold the stuff that needs to remain frozen, and
b)freeze water in 2L containers to make ice to keep the cool stuff(veges, etc) cold.

This will be needed when we do longer trips, like a fortnight this Easter and <crossed fingers> FNQ/Cape York in July-Sept.


Which is the reason for this post. So, how good is your camping fridge/freezer at making blocks of ice?

I have a waeco 80l It holds enough frozen meat to last a fortnight and it will freeze a couple of water bottles overnight ezy also fits plenty of beer in the fridge section 2/3 cartons i think

the campin fridge freezer will keep stuff frozen, but i cannot comment on making ice, you best bet is to have a second fridge for frozen goods, which is good if you're with another car. have one car as fridge, one car as freezer. also try and deep freeze stuff before your trip, it'll work out alot better.

when we headed west mid last year, i had my 60L ARB as a fridge, for stuff like milk, drinks, breads, salads, etc, and my mates 40L in his truck was purely freezer space. you'll find the freezer will be running for alot longer and be working harder over time, especially if you're trying to freeze room temperature water.

I've had bottles freeze in my 80L waeco (not on purposet tho so it must wokr OK).

that said, I usually pack several frozen 1.25L water bottles instead of ice. Stops melted ice sogging up the bottom of the esky, plus u can drink the water if need be once defrosted

longy509 said:

I have a waeco 80l It holds enough frozen meat to last a fortnight and it will freeze a couple of water bottles overnight ezy also fits plenty of beer in the fridge section 2/3 cartons i think

Click to expand...

Thanks. That is what I wanted to know. A tick for the Waeco. 80l.

Our 60L Engel chest fridge will happily and readily freeze stuff if I turn it up too high. I try not to, because we have a freezer in the caravan and the stuff we usually carry in the Engel is stuff we don't want frozen. But I have made misteaks, and had frozen drinkies as my reward.

ljacko78 said:

I've had bottles freeze in my 80L waeco (not on purposet tho so it must wokr OK).

that said, I usually pack several frozen 1.25L water bottles instead of ice. Stops melted ice sogging up the bottom of the esky, plus u can drink the water if need be once defrosted

Click to expand...

Thanks for that. That is exactly what we have done for a few decades. The bottom of our 310L chest freezer is full of 2 & 3 litre juice bottles frozen for the next trip.

The ice will last for a week and then is available for a cool drink. In the past, we would put anything up to 8 of them into the very cold esky and up to four in the cool/vege esky.

The freezer will replace the very cold esky and we want to rotate the four(?) in the cool/vege esky through the "freezer" to keep the contents fresh. Then we can completely remove the need to go to town to buy that awful "party ice".

I put a frozen 2L bottle in my evacool 35L when we went to Janowen on Saturday morning and Sunday night when emptying it I had an extra 2L of frozen Milk

Okay, we purchased an Evakool fridgemate 70 from BCF(only local seller) for $1049. Lugged it inside and connected it up to "mains", which is a 24V adaptor, moved the divider to the end, then loaded a few bottle of water into it, about 4l and 15hours later they were frozen solid.

I actually have no idea how long they actually took as not long after I took to bed with a bucket for the entire time.

That was on the maximum setting, normal mode, which is says draws 48Watts. The add-on thermometer from ABR-Sidewinder says it was at -14degC.

So, it looks like our system of freezer/ice chest is a goer.

That sounds about right, remember 0 degrees will not freeze water, you have to take it lower to remove the latent heat. 8 to 10 degrees I think? Any fridgies here may be able to confirm that number though.

Heat will transfer from one medium to the other readily if there's a difference. The greater the difference, the faster the transfer.

Up at Macquarie Woods, we had the water in our little doggie's bowl freeze at -4C.



When a face like that asks you to thaw out the bowl, how can you refuse?