Esky techniqes (ice maintenance)

[matthecat]

Hi all,
Was having a fire-side discussion about the best way to keep ice in eskys and thought I'd ask what tips you all use.
It was proposed that bung should be out in the food esky to help retain ice.
In the drink esky bung should be in to maintain a slurry - all new drinks to go via engel freezer to take the heat out of them.   
How does everyone else do it?
Regards

[EagleBoy]

I use block ice in the food esky, I have a couple of containers where the block is almost the same width as the esky so a couple of them sit perfectly in the bottom and have had them last 5 days summer camping. Then it's the slow esky dance to chase the shade all day.

[chisel]

I think you should keep the water in if you want to have the ice last longer ... but the hassle with ice melting and spoiling food is usually too much so I empty it occasionally.

[GBC]

There's two questions to be answered.

1. keep ice the longest but not necessarily keep you goods as cold : drain the water
2. Keep goods cold the longest (beers) - keep the water - the ice melts quicker but the thermal mass is bigger

and 3 - keep goods even colder and blow up your beers - create a salt water brine - but that's really only good for keeping seafood.

[Alan Loy]

Other issues
Insulation, wrap it in a blanket when travelling or not being used eg in the AM for the beer esky

Evaporative cooling, cover with a wet towel, evaporation cools the esky

Keep out of sun!!

[Nomad]

When I go away on a boys trip we run two big eskies, one food and one drinks.

The food esky gets bagged ice zipped into those 8 kg dog food bags with the zip lock thing on top (Those bags are obviously washed out before use). They dont leak at all when you stand them up. Ice lasts for ages and esky is kept cold. When they do start to melt you can just pour off the water into the drinks fridge

Drinks fridge just cops bags of ice in over the drinks and turns into a slurry.

Shade and wet towels do make a big difference.

[mickn]

And add as much salt as can be disolved into water filled containers such as ice cream containers and freeze in the home freezer.    They take a few days to freeze hard, but they are much much colder than ordinary ice.