#Xpad cooler review full#

After loading one side of the Glacier with beer and one with ice, I parked the cooler outside, connected a south-facing 200-watt solar array, and started the timer.ĭay one brought only intermittent sun and temps in the mid 50’s, but by the end it was sitting pretty at 99%. While the finicky spring weather here in Portland was an obvious handicap for the solar panels, I figured the cooler weather might offset it.

#Xpad cooler review full#

Since late-season snow is putting a damper on early-season camping in the Pacific Northwest where I live, I didn’t get to wheel the Glacier into the woods as intended, but I did run a simulation in my backyard, for science: How long could I keep a cooler full of beer cold using only the sun and a 200-watt panel? The wheels can quickly detach with four thumb screws, which could save the day in tight packing situations. The Glacier includes both wheels and a telescoping handle to make it rollable rather than strictly luggable. Since a fully loaded cooler can push 40 pounds, that’s no small convenience. Two, you can pull it out and charge it without moving the cooler. One, you can pull it out and use the single USB-C port to power other gadgets like your phone or laptop. Power comes from a 300Wh brick that slides into the back of the Glacier, which is convenient for two reasons. It’s also a power-intensive parlor trick that costs about 10% of battery life, so while you might make enough ice to toss in a glass of Glenlivet, you won’t be playing ice machine for the campground. Eighteen minutes later, you lift a basket full of tiny ice cubes from the water bath. When you make ice, the nubs chill rapidly, forming thimbles of ice around them. It’s a tiny water bath stippled with little metal nubs that protrude through the bottom of a basket. The icemaker is so simple, it’s ingenious. And ice cream, and popsicles, and whatever other frozen delights you might desire beside a fire. That means you can not only make ice, you can store it. Inside, two different compartments can be set to temperatures as low as -4 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s an amount you could realistically pull down with solar panels while you’re camping, which elevates the Glacier from an “iceless cooler” to a true off-grid fridge, a genuine mobile appliance prepared to keep your food and drink cold indefinitely with enough sweet, sweet sunlight. But the Glacier is rated to use just 300 watt-hours of electricity for 24 hours of cooling. OK fine, the blending, boiling, and microwaving I did may have also had something to do with that. Having lugged an actual minifridge on a camping trip last year, I’m acutely aware of how inefficient they can be – the fridge in question barely lasted a weekend attached to an absolutely massive battery. When EcoFlow offered to let me try the Glacier, I envisioned sipping a perspiring glass of whiskey in the tropics and accepted the occupational hazards of my job.

My home fridge can’t even do that, and I didn’t even know I wanted it to until just now. Less a cooler than a mobile battery-powered fridge on wheels, the sleek electric Glacier not only obviated the need for ice, it would make ice for me in 18 minutes.

Perhaps that’s why I was so enamored when I saw the EcoFlow Glacier at CES 2023.