It has been 35 years since I have used dry ice. I will be camping and hunting the high desert this September. I expect heat and will need to cool my game meat ASAP.
How do you pack your cooler using dry ice? Any tricks I need to know? Will it hold temps lie longer than blocks? Any issues to be aware of?
Always handle it with care, never with bare skin. Even thin gloves may not be adequate. Take precautions to insulate your hands and fingers
You don't want dry ice in direct contact with the cooler or the meat. You can use cardboard or newspaper layers to help insulate.
Yep, so long as you keep things closed up, if will be even better than block ice, since it holds at a much lower temp than 32 F.
You can't make the cooler air-tight -- or in this case, CO2-tight. As the solid CO2 sublimates into gaseous CO2, it expands greatly. Cooler will eventually go boom. Leave the lid loose and it will "burp" as needed.
Do NOT get yourself and the dry ice in a confined space without ventilation. Carrying cooler while vehicle is moving OK, as are brief stop where the doors and windows will be opened. Most vehicles aren't air tight, but I never risked sleeping with it in the vehicle.
I use duct tape to seal about 95% of the ice chest joint. This minimizes the cold loss, but allows the CO2 to escape. Ice chests are not air tight, so the tape helps the dry ice last. We have had it last for a week on house boat trips in 100+ heat. We use the dry ice for food storage only, a try to minimize how often the ice chest is opened.
I don't know how to deal with game meat. But I do have some experience using dry ice to improve the cooling of a standard cooler. I put the dry ice in a double wrapped (plastic + paper) bag. I organize it so it's flat-ish. Then put water ice on top. Then the food goes on top of the water ice. Depending on the amount of dry ice, this can give me 3-5 days awesome cooling in a standard Coleman cooler. More dry ice = more days. The only thing to watch for is that you'll easily freeze stuff. That might be just what you need...but for my camping puruposes...it can be a problem. I use cardboard as an insulator. And then I plan out the meals and put meat (etc) I plan to use later in the trip closer to the water ice/dry ice.
it'd be a great idea if someone came out with a dry ice specific cooler/container with compartments to store the dry ice! (and maybe regular ice on top). complete with vent. this would be a great alternative to a very expensive engel or arb fridge i think, for the not so long trips into the bush.
Yeah, getting the right cooler sure helps. Something custom designed for dry ice would be great. I know that the blood bank uses dry ice locally, because that's where I got mine from in the past. Maybe there's something they already use? Might be expensive, though.
In the meantime, having the right kind of lid helps. The old Coleman steel banded ones have a lid heavy enough to stay down, but also light enough to burp on its own. Many of the new all plastic coolers have a very tight fitting lid. You actually have to leave it ajar to let pressure out, because the lid would otherwise resist burping when fully shut.
On venting, we tired to use the bottom drain one time...Failure! All the cold sinks and the gas rose, the resulting pressure was forcing the cold air out the drain. We killed our dry ice in a few days. Vent the gas out the top.
We use IcyTech coolers and have good luck with. I started using cheap corrugated plastic sign material to separate the dry ice from the cooler and items in the chest. Better than card board as it never gets soft and crappy, or collect odor.
No personal experience, but I heard of using 2 cooler method. Kept water ice frozen using DI in one cooler. And the other cooler was conventional water ice with the food. As the food cooler melted the fresh ice was relocated from the DI cooler to the food cooler. The method's main advantage is that you're never in danger of freezing the food.
The last and only time I used dry ice, I was told to put a layer of "regular" ice over the dry ice and then a towel over that. It worked pretty good in a cheap cooler for a 3 day camping trip. Actually had some eggs freeze that weren't in the egg container.
