They can be incredibly useful when it comes to storing items and keeping them fresh. The Xtreme also offers ample room for your beer, claiming a capacity of 50 quarts. Even better, that capacity came in at a bigger-than-advertised 58.1 quarts when I filled it with water to double-check. A cooler that rolls along behind you is a sensible upgrade for anyone who hates carrying things, and at $45, the Coleman Xtreme Wheeled Cooler will get the job done. It isn’t the sturdiest piece of plastic I’ve ever lugged around, but it kept things colder for longer than its closest rival, the Igloo Latitude Rolling Cooler. A. Yes, a model like the 5-quart Coleman FlipLid is great for making a large ice block.
The Roadie 24 and OtterBox Venture both have plastic and rubber latches similar to the Xspec, but they’re both exceptionally easy to use, requiring less finagling and feeling much stronger overall. The RTIC has visually similar rubber latches that are much more flexible. As such, they are easy to use, lacking the stiff stubbornness of many other latches. Still, more flexible rubber might have a shorter lifespan than denser rubber, though we haven’t had an issue after using this product for years. The Igloo IMX 70qt is similar, with exceptionally flexible, soft, easy-to-use latches, also giving us pause about how well they’ll hold up through years of UV and user exposure.
The Coleman Xtreme features replaceable hardware, whereas some of the company’s cheaper models don’t. This is an important detail because the first thing that will wear out on a cooler is either a hinge or a handle, and having affordable replacements means a cheap repair rather than a brand-new purchase. At the moment, you can buy Coleman’s replacement hinges and replacement handles for less than $10 each.
Having a soft cooler is a versatile way to keep your cold things cold without sacrificing as much portability as most hard coolers. Without a buddy to help you lug the fully-loaded Engel HD30 to the beach, it can feel quite heavy while using its shoulder strap. We also discovered after a rainstorm that the external pocket isn’t waterproof, though this is a small gripe. All in all, this big cooler bag is our favorite thanks to excellent insulation and great features like rounded handles and a removable bottle opener. Food and drinks stay chilled longer with the Coleman 70-Quart Hard Ice Chest Cooler, which Keeps the Ice up to 5 days.
In open-coleman instant tent foam, most bubbles (more than 50%) share walls with one another. These foams, which weigh around 0.5 pound per cubic foot, are light and easy to compress. With better insulation, a cooler can maintain lower temperatures for longer, thus consuming less ice.
Still, we think the coleman instant tent 65 is a super useful choice for almost any activity where you drive your car. I’ve been told that Yetis are most effective if they are chilled before putting ice in them. If I’m using the Yeti at home, I’ll take whatever ice is in my icebox and put it in my Yeti before packing it up with food and store-bought bags of ice. So I think I could’ve increased the cooler chill by a day if I could keep the internal storage colder before putting my food and ice inside.
Simply put, coolers are unlike most other categories of outdoor gear that may last for just for a couple seasons before needing to be replaced. This means that when you’re making the calculation of whether spending $300 or $400 on a cooler is worth it, you are getting a product that literally should last for decades. That said, if you don’t need multi-day ice retention, even a cheaper hard-sided cooler should be around for many years as well. If we had to nitpick, the Venture 45’s handles are rigid and don’t fold down like much of the competition.
Anything smaller, and you end up carrying a lot of bag and not carrying much of anything else. There just isn’t enough room in those smaller sizes for them to be functional for anything except an individual lunch or a few drinks. By measuring meltwater, we can produce data that illustrates the relative performance of insulation between coolers over time. For example, after five days, the Coleman Xtreme retained 11 more pounds of ice than the Igloo MaxCold did. That translates to the Coleman Xtreme being 20% more efficient than the Igloo MaxCold overall in ice retention during the same time period. We also started tracking the internal temperature of the coolers with the ThermoWorks Signals thermometer to see exactly when temperatures began to rise.