YETI COOLER PERFORMANCE ENHANCEMENT, PART 1: SOLIDIFICATION

Those of you who follow this blog know that my husband and I moved heaven and earth to create a custom hitch carrier for our Yeti cooler (blog posts Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) so that we could carry frozen food on our extended family vacations.  In 2014, I fell in love with this idea, because it allowed me to make most of the food at home, freeze it, transport it 3,000 miles, and be thusly freed from the task of being chief cook and bottle-washer for a house full of people.  By this strategy, I could have more of a vacation myself, instead of spending a lot of my time slaving over a hot cottage stove, making meals from scratch.

However, we noticed significant performance differences between our inaugural 2014 trip with the Yeti, and the repeat performance in 2016, for two reasons.

Number one, in 2014, we took the Yeti 6,000 miles in our floggin' minivan, before we purchased our Airstream Interstate.  The Yeti was kept within the air conditioned space of the vehicle, and thus was at least 20 degrees below the worst heat of the day for the entire trip.  

Number two, our 2014 trip was characterized by much cooler weather overall compared to 2016, so there was an antagonistic impact on performance.

Not only did we shift the Yeti to the outside of the vehicle where temperatures were significantly hotter, the weather itself was hotter overall - up to 100 degrees.  Even with a closed-cell foam augmentation on the lid and this reflective tarp cover, the cooler still heated up significantly more than it had in 2014.  

It still kept the food from spoiling, but it was a pain in the ass to have to keep attending to the diminishing ice load throughout that trip.  Furthermore, once we crossed the Canadian border, ice was extremely expensive, if it could be located at all.  A replenishment that might cost us $3 in the U.S. could be $15 in New Brunswick.  

For these reasons, I decided to concoct a different scheme for our 2017 trip.  The best inventions relate back to some sort of real life precedent, and this was no exception.  We are in high summer in Houston right now, and there is no shortage of howling out of my husband because I like to keep the internal house temperature at 77 F, which is too hot for him.  And why is that temperature comfortable for me, but a burden for him?  Because my surface area to volume ratio is much larger than his.  

And so it was with the ice.  I was having excessive melt problems because cube ice has too much surface area for optimal performance during heat wave conditions.  

So how to reduce that surface area?  Rather than simply adding super-cooled ice cubes to a super-cooled load of food, for this upcoming trip, I decided to try freezing the food in solid blocks of ice.  This required that I develop both strategy and apparatus, so here's the story of how that went.

Here is our culprit, the inside of the Yeti cooler, looking down from above with toes for scale. 

Based on the configuration of our Yeti 50, I decided that the most practical, and not to mention easiest, approach would be to create two solid blocks of food-encapsulating ice, side by side.  The cooler is bilaterally symmetrical, so I could create one mold, freeze a batch of food in it, take it out, and simply freeze the second batch, flipping it 180 degrees to fit the other side.  Two pieces would be easier to handle than one massive, unwieldy block.  Plus, I'd be able to thaw one at a time, reserving half the food for later consumption.  

I started with a paper tracing of the internal shape, because the cooler sides are flared rather than being at right angles to the base, as you can see.  From that, I proceeded to craft the shape out of cardboard.

I used remnants of the cardboard shipping crate that our new Vitrifrigo refrigerator came in, so it was double-thickness cardboard - much stronger than average. 

I taped the crap out of it, for a reason that will become obvious in a second.

Around and around and around we go. 

We kinda figured that the final mold would need to be made out of thin plywood or perhaps even sheet metal, but I wanted to run tests on this cardboard prototype, so...

There it is lined with a kitchen trash bag and filled with water in our garage utility sink, which is embarrassingly filthy, obviously. 

And there's the kitchen bag tied off with the water in it, so that I can carry the thing without sloshing (which would wet the cardboard, which would then disintegrate rather catastrophically, LOL!).  After I tied the bag, I put clear tape straps across the top to keep it from bowing. 

The damned thing was heavy.

About 30 pounds.  The main risk with the cardboard prototype is that the bottom would fall out if it were not well-supported. 

I left it in the utility sink overnight to confirm that it would not bow excessively, because if it did, then the frozen block would not pack into the cooler.  

Once it passed that test, it went into our upright freezer for the next stage of this proof-of-concept.  

And of course, in this freezer, you can see a lot of the home-made meals that I intend to take with us.  We have over 150 different Pyrex storage containers because much of our diet is freezer-based (a natural off-shoot from home gardening, where the entire harvest has to be cooked and put up at once).  I would be liberating the frozen contents from the Pyrex and transferring each one to freezer-grade plastic wrap, which saves a lot of space and weight.  But you can see that, with two of these frozen blocks, I could transport a lot of that food. 

OK, now here's where it starts to get funny.

Sooo... it appears to be at least partially frozen the next morning...

...but all was not well in paradise.

Oh, sh!t - it's leaking on the floor!  LOL

Aaaaand the foreseeable demise:

Note to self:  Don't try to freeze 30-lb monolithic blocks of ice all at one time.  

Aaaand it just keeps getting better.  It started to leak before I got it out of the cardboard, thus blowing out the cardboard. 

This little experiment taught us what should have been obvious from the outset:

1. We need to pre-chill the surrounding water before placing the works in the freezer.
2. We need to freeze in lifts, rather than all at once.
3. We need a mold that won't dissolve.
4. We need some means of wrangling the solid blocks of ice once they are formed.  
5. It also occurred to us that we had to minimize floating of the individual food packages that are submerged in the water before it turns into a block of ice. 

On that third point, my husband constructed this out of thin plywood:

Well that looks much better.

Regarding that fourth point, I decided to embed some webbing sections that I had inherited via a free grab bag of strapping scraps from the vendor Strapworks of Eugene Oregon.

Intending no disrespect, I decided to name my two blocks of ice the gay block and the straight block.  Well, don't blame me - Strapworks had sent me this nice scrap of rainbow webbing, plus some blue and some pink.  What's a person to do??  I also cataloged which foods were going in the gay and straight blocks respectively so that I'd have that record two weeks down the road when it was time to take the food back out again.  

I put the rainbow strap at the very bottom as a lifting aid (it would be frozen into the ice once the block formed), and I also began working with this device for the first time:

A low-ended Foodsaver FM-2000 system plus two 50-foot rolls of bags (large and small) for less than a hundred bucks all in.  Sometimes it's really wonderful that Amazon Prime delivers on Sundays.  

As you can deduce from the photo above and the previous shot of the freezer, we freeze in Pyrex because of the convenience, but there's no room for all that glass in the Interstate, whether it be the Yeti cooler or the internal refrigerator.  So I have to remove the food from the Pyrex and transfer it to plastic, either freezer bags (as in the past), or now this.  All it takes to pop those frozen masses out is to melt a micron-thick layer by immersing the Pyrex in some warm water.  It then frees from the glass, and this can happen next:

Vacuum power, baby!

I hastily put my first lift (layer) of food in the form's gay block, dumped in a slurry of icewater, and slammed shut the freezer door.  I did this so quickly with the intention of minimizing melt that I never got a "before" pic.  But here are the "after" pics, the money shots, after the second layer was added and frozen a day later.

Looks solid enough.  Now let's take it out.

Next note to self:  Don't remove each block from its trash bag unless absolutely necessary for fit purposes.  It's just too messy.  

Now for the fit test.

And you can see that the next block, the straight block, will fit nicely beside this gay block.  A layer of cube ice on top, and we'll be ready for the road.  

Now that I've gone to all this monolithic trouble, will this strategy actually work?  Will those 30-lb blocks extend my boondocking range?  For the answer to that, you'll need to check back.

HITCH CARRIER EXPANSION FOR THE AIRSTREAM INTERSTATE

Last year, I published a post trilogy (Parts One, Two, and Three) describing our EPIC struggle to obtain a hitch carrier that met our specific travel and family needs.  We ended up custom DIYing the best carrier that either of us have ever seen, bar none.

And our dog agreed. 

Fast forward a year and a nagging voice in my head kept saying, "Lady, yer gonna need a chain saw where yer goin' next!"  And the chain saw we picked requires a gas can.  And a gas can presents a serious challenge for carriage in a Class B camper van.

It was just a small gas can, a Wavian 2.5 gallon military spec steel jerry can, but still, it presented a big challenge.

I wanted to do something as simple as possible - maybe bolt it temporarily to the back of our existing hitch carrier, because it will only need to live there briefly during local trips when we were actually hauling a couple of gallons of gasoline to our property.  But my husband had other ideas, and due to the cuteness factor of this project, I could not find it within myself to object to his plan.

Basically, he built a custom bracket that bolts onto our existing carrier.

The secret to retrofitting this device, the need for which we had not foreseen when we designed the original hitch carrier, was to "hang" the bracket off that main structural member, and extend it out to the driver's side.

Close-up of those two main bolts.

The Wavian frame could therefore be bolted, in turn, directly to that bracket.

View from above, without the gas can in place. 

The result was just too precious for words.

The Yeti cooler had a baby!  And it looks like it was a mixed marriage because coolers don't typically give birth to jerry cans!

Of course I made a matching sun shield / modesty cover out of silver tarp for the gas can.

I used the same approach as for the Yeti cooler, described in Part 3 of that trilogy linked above.
#vansizedsewing

You'd almost think that we designed the hitch carrier this way, given the fit in the remaining space and the fact that the gas can does not extend one millimeter beyond the body of the Sprinter.

Couldn'ta planned it better if we'd tried.  

Anyway, mother and baby are doing fine, and I'm dying from the cuteness factor here.

Awwwww!!!  It's not often that I get to use the word 'cute' in a Class B context!

No, ours is way cuter than that.

UNDER COUNTER HANGING STORAGE FOR THE AIRSTREAM INTERSTATE

I decided to rectify some of the excess dead space in our Airstream Interstate's galley cabinetry, and solve the annoying problem of where to put my full-sized frying pan and a few other items that were simply getting piled on top of my existing under-counter storage baskets.  I don't like stuff piled on top of other stuff.  To get at the other stuff, you have to excavate the cabinet and of course in the small space of an Interstate, where do you pile the stuff that you have just excavated?

I decided to adapt an under-counter storage basket to reclaim some of that unused space resource.  These are sold in a number of different sizes and styles.

Many of them are intended to take advantage of dead space in dish cabinetry, such as this example from The Container Store.

I settled on a product called the "Design Ideas Under Shelf Mesh Basket, Large" because it had dimensions that were nearly optimal for the T1N Interstate; specifically, it was almost exactly as wide as the available under-counter space  between the Dometic sink and the gas stove.  Plus, it is constructed of the same finely-spaced metal mesh as the silver magnetic mesh bins that I had gotten from The Container Store to place on our twin wall pocket strips.

A little stylistic consistency never hurt anyone.  I didn't get this from The Container Store, however.  As of this writing, I got the last two that were available via Amazon Prime, although they are still available from other vendors. 

Let me run through the installation sequence for ya.

We used bolt cutters to snip off the "arms" such that we were left with a three-sided basket. 

We snipped small screw holes in the mesh.  We installed the back side of this device up against a wooden support member for the counter itself, the right side flush with a protective wood strip adjacent to the stove.  The remaining left corner we carefully screwed into the underside of the countertop itself.  Thus, two of the three sides were simply screwed into existing wooden support strips, and the last point was secured via one of those zip ties that has the screw hole end.  I'll explain with a few more pics.  

This is the kind of cable tie to which I refer.  

Zip it around the upper support bar of the basket and cut it flush.

Then you are left with this little tab through which you can run a screw.  

Like this.  We also used washers for added support, but I think this piece would do nicely without them.  

And the money shot:

As I said above, it's a good size for the T1N Interstate cabinetry.  The gray blob at left is the underside of the Dometic sink.  The white strip at right is the spacer that protects and anchors the stove.  The basket is a near-optimal width and depth to provide an additional storage shelf without obstructing movement of the items stored below.

You can see how the basket is anchored by five screws with washers.  There is room to store additional items in there with the frying pan (and I probably will).  BTW, the lower dish and utensil storage basket is described in this previous post; the cutlery is inserted individually into the basket weave so that it won't rattle up against itself while the vehicle is in motion. 

You'll also notice a mini-bungee cord extending across the front of the 3-sided wire basket as a keeper.  Some of these under-shelf baskets have a lip on the front edge to prevent items from accidentally sliding out.  This one does not, but the cord serves the purpose.  I bought a plastic sack full of mini-bungee cords for five bucks at Walmart shortly after we first bought our Interstate.  They have a hundred and one uses.

KITCHEN UTENSIL RACK FOR THE AIRSTREAM INTERSTATE

All of the hanging utensil racks that I found on the internet were designed for houses that do not roll down the highway.  Any utensils placed on them would cause an unnecessary ruckus whacking against each other and the wall or cabinet behind them, and maybe even get bounced off entirely, if installed in an RV.

Oh hell no - you do not want anything like these in a motorhome!

Screengrabbed from Google image search.    

Therefore, I had to create my own silent version.

That's a four-dollar small sink mat screwed to the inside of the cabinet door.  Short pieces of common sewing elastic are fed through the grid pattern of the mat and knotted to form loops.  The the utensils are fed into the loops.  The mat is a soft polymer such that vehicle shaking will not cause the utensils to make any noise bumping up against it.  The elastic also holds them more tightly in place than an ordinary hanging rack would.  

The beauty of this system is that you can re-position the knotted elastic loops if you later decide that you wish to accommodate a different set of utensils or tools.  I left the tails of the elastic pieces long in case I later need to re-tie them during the process of affixing larger items.   

Here's the sink mat that I used.

Items like this are sold in home decor and home improvement stores.  This is the Sink Works Euro sink mat.  

The elastic was similar to this.

Screengrabbed from this Amazon listing.  It's about four bucks but this project only consumed a tiny fraction of it. 

Here are the basic installation instructions:

Here are the basic tools.  That green handled thing is a punch tool for making holes in the sink mat.  That's not really required, though, as the drill can do it.  

Select screws that are not as deep as your cabinet door is thick.  

I was doing this as a one-person project (no helper), so I first masking-taped the sink mat to the inside of the door to hold it in place while I affixed three screws along the top and two along the bottom.

LOL - you can see that my top screws are not very straight.  This was my third Interstate project of the day (the other two were the ART FOCAL WALL and the COROPLAST PRIVACY SCREEN) and I was fatigued by this point!!

Oh, BTW, I also tape my drill bit so that I won't overdrill and accidentally punch through to the front side of the cabinet door.  That Would Be Bad!!!  

As usual, this is a noncommercial post presenting personal opinions only.  No retailer provided any consideration in exchange for being cited.

If you can't find the product you need in the market, invent one of your own.
:-)