The Cold Truth: How We Went From a $60 Cooler to a Fridge That Runs on Sunshine

Let me tell you what a bad cooler looks like by day three. There's a hot dog floating past a leaking bottle of sriracha. There's a bell pepper that has accepted its fate. You reach in to pull something out for dinner and your entire forearm goes into water that is somehow both freezing and slightly orange. This is not the vibe.

We've been through a few coolers, is what I'm saying. And I have opinions.

But first — a note for anyone who's just starting out.

You don't need to spend a lot to start

If you're not sure yet whether camping is going to be your thing (like really your thing, the kind where you're plotting the next trip while you're still on the current one), please do not go out and buy expensive gear. Check Facebook Marketplace for a secondhand cooler. Borrow one from a well-equipped gear junkie (like me). Give yourself a trip or two first.

I say this as someone who deeply understands the camping consumerism trap. It is a perfect storm: the stuff lasts forever (so every purchase feels justified), but also new and better things keep coming out (so there's always an upgrade to consider). It can get expensive fast. Start slow. See if you like it. Then spend the money.

Anyway. The opinions.

Phase One: The Coleman Marine Xtreme 70-Quart (2017)

After our New Zealand campervan trip sealed the deal that camping was going to be our thing, we came home and bought a Coleman Marine Xtreme 70-quart cooler.

I picked the "marine" version mostly because it was fairly cheap, well-rated on Wirecutter, and it seemed like a step up from a regular cooler (it actually is, though I didn't fully understand why at the time and honestly didn't look into it that hard). Marine coolers are built for people on boats in direct sun all day, dragging fish in and out of a wet box, which means thicker insulation, denser foam, UV-resistant walls, and better ice retention than a standard grocery-run cooler. A solid marine cooler holds ice for one to three days versus a basic one that gives up much sooner. Camping - especially in California summers - has a lot of similar needs: you're sitting in the sun all day and you want your food to last.

One underrated cooler feature worth mentioning: a good hard-sided cooler doubles as a table, and the Coleman had little built-in can holders on the lid which was a nice touch. The catch is that a fully loaded 70-quart cooler weighs approximately as much as a small bear, so you'd better be happy with where you set it down, because moving it is a whole event.

So we had this 70-quart sea-worthy cooler, and it served us well. For a while. The problem with regular coolers (marine or otherwise) is that the ice ALWAYS melts. It's just a matter of when. And melting ice means water, and water means everything inside is slightly damp, and if anything leaks or isn't perfectly sealed you get The Soup. The Soup is never good. I have lost a bell pepper to The Soup. I have lost my dignity reaching in for a hot dog to The Soup. We move on.

Phase Two: YETI Tundra Haul (2020)

By 2020, after about ten trips and a lot of ice soup, I used my REI member coupon and pulled the trigger on the YETI Tundra Haul Wheeled Cooler in River Green.

Now, yes, there are other roto-molded coolers. RTIC is well-known and significantly cheaper. Pelican, Engel, others — they all have solid reviews. But I'm also a sucker for marketing and I really love the Yeti color drops (very much a capitalism play, and I respect the hustle). River Green was calling to me.

The upgrade was immediately noticeable. Roto-molded coolers blow regular marine coolers out of the water on insulation (often two inches thick or more), plus freezer-grade rubber gaskets that add another day or two of ice life. The Haul has wheels, which sounds minor until you've tried to drag a fully loaded 70-pound cooler across a campsite to a bear locker and back. Wheels matter. Adding bear-proof locks are also a perk if you camp in established campgrounds in the Sierra Nevada, where bears have cracked the code on most human food storage (though almost all of them have bear lockers anyway). And the Tundra height is PERFECT as a footrest, which sounds ridiculous but if you spend as much time sitting in a camp chair as I do, you will come to appreciate this deeply.

We did another eight or so trips through 2020 and most of 2021. Still doing the pre-chilling ritual (you have to chill the cooler itself the night before with a bag of sacrificial ice, otherwise you're just burning through your expensive ice retention immediately). Still occasionally losing something to The Soup. But better.

The Roadie: A Brief Interlude in Orange (July 2021)

Okay, I have to come clean about another cooler purchase. In July 2021, fresh off picking up Poppy (our orange Jeep), I was apparently in an orange phase, and, as I have mentioned, susceptible to color drops and bought a Yeti Roadie in orange. It's a smaller beverage-cooler-sized thing, very cute, very orange, not very necessary.

I don't use it that often. It mostly collects dust in the garage. I keep it around with the optimistic theory that its purpose will eventually reveal itself to me, but I've had it for four and a half years now and that hasn't really happened. Maybe a picnic? A day trip? One day, I’ll be glad to have it. I’m sure of it… Our newest cooler has now made it even more redundant. But it's orange and it matches the Jeep and I stand by the purchase emotionally if not practically.

Anyway. Another 7 or so trips passed with this, but now we had our Jeep and trailer... and I started reading and watching overlanding content, and my world opened up.

Phase Three: The Dometic CX45 (2022, present, forever, always)

Electric coolers (basically portable fridges that run on power instead of ice) are one of those things the overlanding internet quietly knows about and the general camping public hasn't fully caught up to yet. I'd been thinking about one for a while, reallllly trying to convince myself I was happy enough with the Yeti, which was also expensive and also fine.

Then I got a new job and celebrated accordingly.

The Dometic CX45 is one of my favorite camping purchases of all time. Possibly of all time generally.

Here's the thing about ice coolers: so much of the interior has to go to ice. The standard recommendation is at least one-third ice-to-contents, often more when it's hot. So a 70-quart cooler is functionally more like a 45-quart cooler, and you're babying it constantly. With an electric fridge, that entire volume is just... food. Tall bottles of salad dressing. A full thing of maple syrup. Eggs in a carton that doesn't disintegrate overnight. I have not had to "edit" what I bring to a campsite since we got this fridge, and that, for someone who loves to cook, is an enormous advantage.

The first trip we took it on was El Camino del Diablo (a notoriously remote stretch of southern Arizona desert, multiple nights out, no resupply). I had already picked up a Jackery 500 battery and solar panel (a separate gear love story) after some camping friends brought a tiny rice cooker to a Big Bear trip and made me realize that electricity at a campsite could be used to improve the camp cooking experience! That first trip with the Dometic, man. Pulling cold drinks out without digging through anything. Prepping dinner with ingredients that were actually, fully dry. Not stopping at a gas station two hours out to buy a bag of ice that would be half melted by arrival. I just moved things from my fridge at home straight into the CX45 and that was that. We also now always have cold drinks ready for the next morning because it's so easy to just throw a few cans in the night before.

A few practical notes:

Get the cover. Especially for desert camping and hot months, it makes a real difference in how hard the fridge has to work.

The latch takes a little getting used to. You have to press down firmly to get the click, and the click is small and soft; if you don't feel it, it's not actually closed. I mention this so you don't spend the first two trips confused about why your temperature is off. One slightly fiddly thing for an otherwise enormous upgrade.

On power: we run ours off a Jackery 1000 v2 (we managed just fine with the 500, but I upgraded in 2025 to the larger, LiFePO4 version that's lighter and also bigger so we can charge cameras, drones, etc.) with an accordion solar panel that I am constantly fussing with (honestly, you'll be just fine as long as it gets a couple hours of sun - I just like the optimization game). In the desert it runs all day and overnight without issue. While you're driving you plug it in to the DC car charging port. It does draw continuously, so you need a battery that can handle it; if you're already thinking about dispersed camping or overlanding, you're probably thinking about power anyway, and that's a whole other post.

Here's the bougie progression if you're building a camp kitchen from scratch:

Borrowed or secondhand regular cooler → a few trips to see if you like this → marine rated cooler if you're only going once or twice a year → decent roto-molded cooler if you're doing it regularly → electric fridge if you love to cook at camp and hate ice logistics.

You don't have to get all the way to phase three to have a great time. Plenty of people do perfectly well with a good Yeti and some dry bags. But if you cook at camp the way I cook at camp, the electric fridge will eventually call to you. And when it does: it's worth it. A million times out of ten.