QUICK DRAWER
HAVE WE BEEN DOING CAMP FRIDGES ALL WRONG? 4X4 AUSTRALIA CONTRIBUTOR DAN EVERETT THINKS SO.
LET’S face it, camping in its very essence isn’t overly complicated; hell, you could go light a campfire and fall asleep next to a tree and you’d be camping. Tins of spam to eat, water from the creek drained through your sock, and the softest rock you can find to use as a pillow would all suffice. But that sounds like a miserable time, doesn’t it? It stands to reason then that the gear we have, in its purest form, is there to make life easy for us, give us more options, and let us get on with enjoying nature rather than fighting our gear just to survive.
It was that mindset of ease of use that led to us to installing not just one but two of Evakool’s 40L drawer fridges in our Ranger canopy set-up. Now, after a couple of thousand kays of corrugations and roughly one million opens and closes, and a few times forgetting to clean them out, we figured it’s time to spill the beans on how we’ve found them.
First up is ease of use; it’s the main reason you’d buy a fridge like this. Put simply, they’re the easiest and quickest access fridge you can buy. If you’re timing yourself grabbing a beer as soon as you get to camp, this is the fridge you want. Rather than fiddling with a drop slide, then unclasping a traditional chest freezer’s lid; you simply open the drawer. A small child could do it. The drawer style is quicker than a chest freezer to open and close, and doesn’t run the risk of your milk falling out when you open the door like in an upright; they’re also somewhere in between the two in terms of retaining cold air.
Each drawer holds 48 cans of drink and can run either as a fridge or freezer with a temperature range of 10 º C down to -16 º C; we’ve typically ran the bottom fridge at the -3 º C mark and the top fridge down to -10 º C, giving us dual zones. Even on stinking hot days neither fridge has ever struggled to maintain a temperature. The main box stays in place and houses the cooling elements, while the drawer itself
is essentially a plastic insert on runners so the fridge quickly drops temperature again as soon as it’s closed.
Those plastic trays are removable, too, so you can pop them out and load them up inside, even pre-cooling them in your house fridge before heading off on a trip. It also means you can pressure wash them if you forget to unpack your fridge after getting back from a trip – ask us how we know.
We’ve found no noticeable wear and tear on the fridges after use – they click shut tightly, don’t rattle and have no visible wear on the controls.
Of course, it’s not all sunshine and roses and there are a few setbacks. Two 40L drawer fridges compared to a single 80L chest freezer will draw roughly double the power at around 4amp/h measured on our set-up – that versatility does come at a cost. In our configuration where the drawers are stacked, the top drawer can be difficult to see in to for short people, if fitted to a lifted 4WD. The drawers themselves are also shallow, just a little higher than a can of drink, so standing bottles up simply isn’t an option and will require a little more thinking than a deep chest freezer; although, we’ve never struggled even with a week or two worth of food onboard.
All in all, running two drawer fridges compared to a single chest freezer is really a case of what suits your needs more. You’ll sacrifice a little versatility, need a little bigger battery, and the fridges will be stuck in your 4WD for good. But they’ll take up far less space, weigh considerably less than other options and make camping a far simpler proposal, making them well-worth the money in our eyes.