The first thing to consider when buying a cooler is how you will use it. If you don’t travel a few days at a time, you may not need an expensive high-end cooler. All the coolers we recommend above keep it in the shade at a safe temperature in the day. Again, if you’re driving on solid terrain, you may need wear-resistant wheels – if you’re just going to the beach, you may not need them.
Hard side cooler: These range from the old green Coleman coolers (the staple for every camping trip) to the snowman, which is as many cars as Coleman started making coolers. You might be wondering why snowmen are so expensive. I can’t answer, but Yeti does upend the cooler industry by introducing rotary molding or “rotating debris,” where melted plastic is molded in a piece of melted plastic in the foam insulation. The rotary cooler provides seamless, uniform density in the walls and covers, greatly improving the performance of the cooler. By contrast, all of us use ancient, affordable plastic coolers for walls, leaky seams and less insulated lids. Whether you need additional insulation depends on what you are doing and how hot you are when you are doing. Want to know more? Our internal knowledge all has a more thorough thermal insulation explanation.
Hard-side coolers usually have the luxury features you want, such as leak-proof covers and drain plugs, and some are even more bear-resistant (check this list of protective products if you enter the Ursine Country). The downside is that these coolers are usually huge and heavy.
Soft cooler: The soft cooler includes from well-filled, impressively insulated suspender bags (such as the snowman hopper flip above) to a rolling, dry-style dry cooler, perfect for those mild beach days. The best soft coolers are easier to carry, easy to pack when not in use, and have the versatility that traditional hard coolers lack. (I have used a dry cooler as a dry bag.) The duration of ice won’t last long, but for short outings where you don’t need a large cooler, these are what we recommend.
Electric cooler: Of course, this is not necessary, but if you are going to take a longer adventure and get electricity, you don’t have to worry about melting the ice.
Other features to look for:
- Drain plug: This can greatly simplify life by venting water from the cooler. If you are buying a large cooler, make sure it has one of them.
- Dividing line: The most important trick for us to use more cooling for a long time is to have two coolers: one you think of it as a refrigerator with almost no opening, and the other is a drink. If not possible, you can achieve some of the same achievement by having a cooler with a partition wall in it. This way, you can wrap one side tightly with ice to keep the meat low and cool the drink with cube ice on the other side.
- wheel: The cooler gets heavy and the wheels are great. They won’t always work (good luck putting your cooler on the roots of the tree), but when they do, they’re totally worth it.
