Ice - dry ice - cooler - freezer question

[EGAZ]

Been reading through the food/drink, what worked-didn't work thread. And a few of the ice threads.

Came across GreyCoyote's post on using a chest freezer.. Bing! the lite went on.

As I have posted before I have my Rolling Man Cave I'll be camping in with a 3000eu quite genny. So I have the power. The RMC also has a 25gal fuel station, so I have the gas issue covered.

The original plan:
I have three 48qt cheapy coolers. These have served me well on the sand & generally only carry one for beer/soda/water. One block of ice in the middle and a bag of crushed on top lasts most of the weekend with only needing one bag of ice depending on how much beer I have left. (cooler sits just inside the RMC door.) All my perishable food for my longer dune trips of 4-5 days fits in the RV fridge/freezer. But I am finding out through some over thinking that even if I use all three coolers, freezing jugs of drinking water and using dry ice, I still have limited room for frozen foods like meats, premade meals & breakfast burros, etc. & Bacon!! Gven these are not super insulated coolers, I will still need to make ice runs to Arctica. (My goal being no ice runs or at most one late in the week. Though this may not be a realistic goal.

I also plan to bring my old school 5gal water cooler for water My plan was to freeze rectangular 1gal jugs as they fit into my chest coolers and the water cooler like block ice. This would allow double duty for keeping the coolers cold and having the required amount of drinking water. But using the chest freezer would almost eliminate all this messing around.

The New Plan:
This freezer will most likely be only used at BM. Though if I have it I might bring it to the dunes on the longer holiday trips, two max. Either way it will be stored in the garage most of the time. I'm looking on CL for a used one and found this..

It's 41" wide, 34 1/2" height, 21 1/2" deep (<<<inside above the compressor I'm guessing) for a solo Birgin I'm thinking this might work for me. I have also thought of building a Super Insulated 150-200qt Cooler I can thrown the bed of the truck. But even with having everything in the garage to build and skin it but the 2" insulation, (about $100 depending on design), this freezer is cheaper. And being all beat up it's playa ready!

For those who have done the chest freezer thing, what size freezer did you use and for how many people?
Where was the freezer located. I will need to have in the bed of my truck, (Long Box) drivers side rear. The genny sits up front passenger side of the bed, so kitty-corner. (which really knocks down the sound of the Honda even more.) I decided to blow off a monkey hut shade cover for the bed of the truck but will I need to bring it back or will some reflective bubble wrap taped on top sides of the freezer suffice?

[Just_Joe]

We brought a small chest freezer last year. It wasn't worth the hassle.

You're gennie will need to run 6-10 hrs a day to keep everything solid. There's a lot to do out there and scheduling all of your fun around babysitting it will be distracting.

There's really not a lot that you can put in a freezer. Ice, ice cream and frozen meat are the few that come to mind. The first time you forget to run it, you're going to have a bunch of melted ice cream and the clock will start running on the meat eat-ability. If you're plan is to "manufacture" ice for your coolers (beer and other refrigerated stuff), remember you're going to have to haul water to make it, and freezing 80 degree water into blocks is going to take quite a bit of time.

Stick with the coolers, $10 a day at Arctica and maybe some dry ice if you want to bring an ice cream treat. Plan your meals to use the frozen stuff early in the week and then switch to more canned/prepared food later on.

[GreyCoyote]

This year we are bringing something like 5000 tamales, plus some seriously epicurean camp food. So we bring freezers. At the moment the count is four, but I've been informed we may need two more. Truth be told, I bought a school bus in April to haul all this stuff in.

Keep in mind that we are a food camp, so for us, freezers are LIFE. So my input is necessarily a little different than Joe, who tends to favor a more spartan tone to his burn. Its all about what you want to do.

Wanna doma freezer? Then a few things to think about, in no real order:

- Forget wrapping the freezer with anything. You WANT the sides exposed because those are the main heat rejection surfaces for the condensor. Feel the sides of a running chest freezer: warm!! You want to get rid of this heat. Wrap the sides and you'll cook it in fairly short order. In a running freezer, a gentle breeze along the sides is your FRIEND, and reduces the back pressure on the compressor, saving you watts and run-time, hence fuel. You do however want to drop a 1 inch layer of insulation board on the inside-bottom of the freezer (major heat gain there), and another piece on top of the outside of the top lid. Blue foam core insulation panels work great for this job and are not moopy at all if you tape the edges. Bungie cords, metal tape and velcro are your friends. And naturally, having dark shade makes a substantial difference too.

- There is really no need to babysit a Honda genny. Get it a foot off the ground so its not ingesting massive dust, and outfit with an hour meter. Start it with a full tank of fuel in the AM, make a note of the hours on the clock, and GO PLAY. It'll quit 8-12 hours down the road from fuel starvation. No biggie. If you crank the freezer thermostats down to max-cold, they'll pump down to about 15 degrees below zero by the time the gas runs out. At some point you'll likely come back to camp (dinner?) and then you just do the same thing. Or just do what we do: put the genny on an extended run fuel tank. My tank is 12 gallons, and we burn about 3 gals/day running 24/7. We only stop running to change the oil every 50 hours and the plugs every 100 hours. Cheap insurance, and its damn handy to have power all the time.

- The freezers we use (Haier and Arctic Point) average about a 60% - 80% duty cycle on-playa because we are in and out of them constantly. If you are just using it as an ice chest, plan on about 50%. Our units draw 90-120 watts each. Once they have a couple hundred hours of run-time, the starting surge drops WAY down and you can run 4 freezers without worrying about starting surge current from one knocking the others off-line. Especially with an EU3000, you'll have plenty of juice.

- Pack all your frozen foods a week early and set the freezer to max cold. After a couple of days, re-arrange the stuff inside and repeat the cooling process. Now you have a freezer that can easily go 24 hours if it needs to because everything started the trip frozen solid. For extra bonus points, mount your Honda on the trailer tongue or in the truck bed and run while in transit. Works GREAT as long as you cut the genny off before you go over about 7000 feet (it will foul the plugs, so take spares). FWIW, we run our genny from the moment we leave Texas to the time we get back 3 weeks later. Works a treat if common sense is used.

- In our camp, as soon as we get extra freezer space, we send someone to Arctica for a bunch of bags of ice. This goes in the freezer and generally means we have enough ice for the rest of the burn. One trip and done.

I'll grant you that we tend to be an extreme case for recommending freezers, but you asked. And lets face it, dishing-out ice cream during strike makes for some seriously happy campers, as does eating real food (steak, salmon, pork chops, jambalaya, etc) all the way through the burn.

YMMV.

[EGAZ]

I hear what you're sayin' Joe. I generally run the genny 24/7 on the sand so run time is not an issue. And all the drinking water will be frozen before departure. I have the room to haul it in the bed of the truck removing two coolers from the trailer. Thanks for your input though!!

GC. After I posted and the edit timer ran out I realized the fail in 'wrappin' the sides. I know this, just flat forgot. The mind was in insulation mode..... Doh! I will do the foam top/bottom then fab up a cover for sun.

Without posting it all I planned to pre freeze everything as has been suggested. My ride north is only a two day trip with an overnight in Fernley, were I would run it and top off with bags of crushed ice in the morning. And I will only be in it once a day to transfer items.

The 3000 has a 5gal tank so I should be back before it runs out. If not someone needs to start looking for me. I get almost 16 hours on the sand running the RV fridge, roof fans, two 350watt flood lights at night, etc. I've got oil, air filter, and will get a plug for insurance. (The RV fridge will run on propane at the Playa) I'll do the maths to be sure I won't need more than 25gal the fuel station has. 30 total counting the genny tank.

After reading your original post I just thought it makes sense given I have the power and room to haul it all. And takes another build item off my list. Because I would build the Super Insulated cooler before buying one. I can also gift some power to those around me if needed.

That is the thought process anyway....

[maladroit]

Resurrecting this thread to add some more data. I set up a 7 cubic foot chest freezer with only about 1 cubic foot of water in bottles, all hard frozen. Dangled a temperature probe in AIR...not touching any of the frozen objects. Turned off power and monitored temperature over time. It took about 9 hours to reach 32 degrees air temperature, and leveled off to around 34 degrees at about 23 hours without power.

There is a huge amount of energy kept in phase change, so that's likely what's holding the temperature. Everything still seems frozen hard. If we start with a mostly-full freezer, I don't predict any problems during transport without power, and we don't need to run the generator 24/7 either.

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