Coolers! Soggy Food! Solved?

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Re: Coolers! Soggy Food! Solved?

Postby Rick Tyler » Thu Jul 14, 2016 3:26 pm

GuitarPhotog wrote:
Cosmo wrote:My experience has been items above the water line don’t get cold. The primary heat transfer is conduction (contact) not convection )air flow).

Convection is not very effective in a cooler – even if a fan is added. The air passing over the water and/or ice does not exchange a much heat.


That's why my food, in the basins, sit directly on the blocks of ice. Conduction is good.:beer:


So, we have convection and conduction covered -- any way to get radiation involved here?
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Re: Coolers! Soggy Food! Solved?

Postby Trebor English » Thu Jul 14, 2016 4:52 pm

I made my own cooler. It is a Rubber Maid tub lined with six layers of .75" foam insulation all around. The hole in the center is lined with a smaller tub and holds 10 pounds of ice. There is a 9 x 13 x 2 inch aluminum baking pan resting on the ice. A few hours after new ice is added the high spots melt and there is a good conductive contact between the ice and the aluminum pan. Daily I use a Harbor Freight orange hand pump and hose to remove melt water. The food in the aluminum pan stays dry and cold. The ice lasts a week. The ice space is much larger than the food space.

To get radiation involved I would try irradiated food. That does help delay spoilage. Some might argue that if bacteria won't eat it maybe we shouldn't either. Is there another way to get radiation involved?

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Re: Coolers! Soggy Food! Solved?

Postby greygoos » Thu Jul 14, 2016 8:20 pm

jstrubberg wrote:
S. Heisley wrote:I freeze water in plastic containers that are built like a cereal box and put one of those at each end. When the ice melts, I refill the containers with ice from store-bought bags...no mess.

Watch out for carcinogens!
Incidentally, they have recently found that plastic that is frozen will release even more carcinogens into the thawing water than when hot water is put in plastic; so, don't drink that water!

Add salt?
I recently saw that adding salt to your ice chest water before freezing it will keep food colder longer. (The article didn't say how much to add.) Has anybody tried it? What's the ratio of salt that should be added?


I doubt the salt thing is true. Adding salt to water and THEN freezing it can get you longer lasting ice, because salt water freezes at a lower temperature than fresh water. Adding salt to existing ice isn't likely to do anything but make the melt water salty.


Sprinkling a handful of Kosher salt to a cooler of ice will keep the ice for a longer period and it will melt slower. Think of an old fashioned ice cream churn. You add salt to the ice to keep it from melting rapidly.
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Re: Coolers! Soggy Food! Solved?

Postby drhill » Thu Jul 14, 2016 9:10 pm

Actually adding salt does not change the heat of fusion of the ice. ie= the same amount of energy is required to turn the ice from a solid to a liquid. But is does lower the freezing point. That is why salt is added to the ice when making ice cream so that the freezing point is lowered below 32F so that ice crystals can be formed in the ice cream.
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Re: Coolers! Soggy Food! Solved?

Postby JuneBug » Sat Jul 16, 2016 9:04 am

Trebor English wrote:I made my own cooler. It is a Rubber Maid tub lined with six layers of .75" foam insulation all around. The hole in the center is lined with a smaller tub and holds 10 pounds of ice. There is a 9 x 13 x 2 inch aluminum baking pan resting on the ice. A few hours after new ice is added the high spots melt and there is a good conductive contact between the ice and the aluminum pan. Daily I use a Harbor Freight orange hand pump and hose to remove melt water. The food in the aluminum pan stays dry and cold. The ice lasts a week. The ice space is much larger than the food space.
Trebor


Could you post a photo of your set up?

Also, we discovered by accident that some WalMarts sell dry ice. More expensive than regular ice, but works especially well in small coolers. Alas, I don't know if they all do it, so hard to develop a strategy on long road trips. The down side to small coolers, even if just right for one's needs, is that a bag of cube ice is too much and a block of ice is too big.
"The large print giveth; the small print taketh away" Tom Waits
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Re: Coolers! Soggy Food! Solved?

Postby Rainier70 » Sat Jul 16, 2016 2:42 pm

If you use dry ice, be careful of where you have your cooler. As the dry ice turns to carbon dioxide it can displace the oxygen in an area. An example would be: If you have your cooler in the back of your teardrop, and you are sleeping on the floor of your teardrop.
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Re: Coolers! Soggy Food! Solved?

Postby JuneBug » Sat Jul 16, 2016 3:22 pm

Rainier70 wrote:If you use dry ice, be careful of where you have your cooler. As the dry ice turns to carbon dioxide it can displace the oxygen in an area. An example would be: If you have your cooler in the back of your teardrop, and you are sleeping on the floor of your teardrop.

EEEEEK! I'll remember this! Based on other warnings in other threads relative to oxygen depletion, carbon monoxide, etc, if I ever do build a tear drop, it will have permanent open vents.

I've had a fascination with "dry ice" for a long time. When living in SW Colorado, I often hiked in an area called Sand Canyon where there was a riser for a CO2 wellhead. It was covered in thick ice all year long, even in the most blistering days of summer. Here's a bit of information about this CO2 deposit:
The McElmo Dome is one of the largest known pure CO2 source fields in the world, with over 20 trillion cubic feet of CO2 in place. Kinder Morgan CO2 is capable of producing and transporting approximately 1.5 billion cubic feet per day of CO2, making us the largest transporter of CO2 in North America.

On the extremely off chance any of you are familiar with this area, it's west of Cortez, Colorado, on the McElmo Canyon Road, near Canyons of the Ancients National Monument.
Cortez is better known as the place you stay if you are getting ready to drive up to Mesa Verde National Park.
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Re: Coolers! Soggy Food! Solved?

Postby Rainier70 » Sat Jul 16, 2016 3:37 pm

Just remember that Carbon Dioxide is heavier than air. It will displace from the bottom up. So a window open up above will not help.

It is the same reason that caves in an area, like the one you mentioned in Colorado, where CO2 is natural can be deadly. They look safe and are open at the top to lots of air, but can still be full of CO2.
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Re: Coolers! Soggy Food! Solved?

Postby Kelly'sTear » Sun Jul 17, 2016 11:59 pm

I buy bottled water in the gallon or half gallon if I can find it and freeze it. That way it keeps the food cold and when ice melts it just provides more drinking water and it's cold!

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Re: Coolers! Soggy Food! Solved?

Postby KennethW » Mon Jul 18, 2016 7:31 am

Kelly'sTear wrote:I buy bottled water in the gallon or half gallon if I can find it and freeze it. That way it keeps the food cold and when ice melts it just provides more drinking water and it's cold!


I have started to do the same thing with a layer of 20 oz water bottles on the bottom of the cooler.
threel uses cooler ice, drinking water and spacer for melted ice water later on the road trip.
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Re: Coolers! Soggy Food! Solved?

Postby S. Heisley » Mon Jul 18, 2016 7:12 pm

Kelly'sTear wrote:I buy bottled water in the gallon or half gallon if I can find it and freeze it. That way it keeps the food cold and when ice melts it just provides more drinking water and it's cold!

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Unless you like to tempt fate, DO NOT DRINK THE WATER! It has been found that water frozen in plastic has even more carcinogens than hot water above 109 degrees F in plastic. But, it's your choice....


...Enough said.
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Re: Coolers! Soggy Food! Solved?

Postby Treeview » Mon Jul 18, 2016 10:04 pm

I sure don't mean to start a fight...I have a curious mind. When I read about dioxins from frozen plastic containers i got curious.

FWIW...Snopes has a few articles:

http://www.snopes.com/medical/toxins/plasticbottles.asp

Johns Hopkins seems like a credible source too:

http://www.jhsph.edu/dioxins

But..do as you please. Find credible sources for information.
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Re: Coolers! Soggy Food! Solved?

Postby S. Heisley » Mon Jul 18, 2016 11:46 pm

Treeview wrote:I sure don't mean to start a fight...I have a curious mind. When I read about dioxins from frozen plastic containers i got curious.

FWIW...Snopes has a few articles:

http://www.snopes.com/medical/toxins/plasticbottles.asp

Johns Hopkins seems like a credible source too:

http://www.jhsph.edu/dioxins

But..do as you please. Find credible sources for information.



Thank you for that. My source was from a local nutritionist/dietician who was presiding at a nutrition seminar, this past May, 2016 and she relayed that it had just recently been proven. Snopes is a pretty reliable source and their most recent (2014) update, found at the very end of their publication, discusses cautions of the threat of cancer from plastic bottles but doesn't go into great detail. Probably, more testing would have been done in the past two years, allowing more evidence to be factored in. Most the sources in both the Snopes and Johns Hopkins publications were older (2004, 2007, 2008, 2009). However, there is a possibility that the nutritionist/dietician could be wrong; and,after all, I didn't get it in writing like you did. Myself, I'm going to try to err on the side of caution and I would think that anyone who has had cancer or is susceptible to it would also want to do thus. There is an old adage, "It is better to be safe that sorry" which may fit here. In light of all this, I'll leave my post as it stands.
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Re: Coolers! Soggy Food! Solved?

Postby Treeview » Mon Jul 18, 2016 11:55 pm

I think its wayyyyyy to late to be too concerned about plastic and food. If there is an issue i think all of us are infected.
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Re: Coolers! Soggy Food! Solved?

Postby S. Heisley » Tue Jul 19, 2016 12:02 am

Treeview wrote:I think its wayyyyyy to late to be too concerned about plastic and food. If there is an issue i think all of us are infected.

:lol: It's only 10 PM, here. But, yes, I think I'll probably tuck in soon. Have a good rest of the night and sleep well. :goodnight:
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