Electric Cooler vs. Ice Cooler: Which is Better? I Tested Both To Find Out

Everything from cars to bikes to coolers is getting new electric components even while their legacy counterparts remain on the market. For example, you can get an electric wine opener even though regular elbow grease wine openers are still available. The same is true for the trusty old icebox cooler, which now comes with battery and charging options, letting you keep food and drinks chilled on the go for longer.  

At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work in theory. The unfortunate truth is that electrification usually adds considerable cost to most products against what was already available. This is why, in the case of cars, electric and hybrid cars tend to be more expensive than their internal combustion engine cousins. The same is true for coolers.

This is why I set out to test a “regular” icebox-style cooler against Anker’s new Solix EverFrost 2, to see how it fares in real-world use against the best coolers on the market. To begin testing, I picked up two coolers, a shameful number of cans of soda, a thermometer and several large bags of ice.

Here’s what I discovered about performance, longevity, cooling capability and portability during my testing. 

Electric vs. traditional ice cooler compared 

Electric coolers:

Electric coolers are basically small, battery-powered refrigerators. They use a cooling element to lower the temperature in their compartments, as opposed to traditional ice. They can hold ice but the main attraction is you don’t need it to keep your food and drinks cool. 

Pros 

Cons

Who should use it: People who are going on longer trips and want to keep food and drinks cold and fresh will prefer an electric cooler. Electric coolers can be temperature-controlled. They don’t rely solely on ice so if you want food kept at a certain temperature, that’s possible as long as you have a battery or input source. 

Regular coolers:

A traditional cooler, or ice chest, is an insulated container whose sole function is to hold food, drinks and ice to keep everything cold. Most of the space inside a cooler can be used for food/drink/ice storage. Unlike an electric cooler, no electricity is required. 

Pros 

Cons

• Relies on ice for cooling

• Water from melted ice can be messy

• Open food containers can contaminate cooler ice/water

Who should use it: People who will be off-grid will prefer an ice chest because ice is generally available in most places. You should be able to pick it up in just about any supermarket or gas station and as long as the cooler is well-insulated, it should last for hours, if not days. Electricity can be a bigger ask when camping and may require a hefty portable power station or multiple backup batteries.

Anker Solix EverFrost 2 electric cooler vs. RTIC Ultra Tough QT-45 

Design and features

The 40-liter EverFrost 2 cooler Anker sent me to test is pretty chunky, although it’s quite a bit smaller than the 58L model that comes with two compartments. With the size in mind, I wanted to test it against a cooler with a similar capacity. I landed on the RTIC Ultra-Tough QT-45 cooler because its capacity so closely resembles the Anker. In terms of 12-ounce cans of soda, the RTIC cooler can hold around 50 cans with ice, while the Anker can hold up to 60 cans. The RTIC cooler has more length but slightly less width and depth than the Anker, likely because of its 2.8 inches of closed-cell foam insulation. 

In addition to … you know … being a cooler, the Anker Solix EverFrost 2 has a few extra features you won’t find in ice coolers. Notably, the battery on the cooler can be used to charge other devices if you need to, such as phones, tablets and handheld gaming consoles. Also, the Everfrost has a pop-up handle/table you can use for extra table space when you’re at your picnic or campout. The Anker cooler also has an interior light for finding what you’re looking for in the dark.

If I’m being completely honest, the pop-up handle seems super flimsy. I was nervous about using it to roll the cooler around fully loaded but the picture on the website shows it being used that way, so I figured it would be fine. I figured correctly, much to my surprise.

I used the single-battery version of the cooler. You can buy extra batteries for $199.99 and you can insert a second one to make the cooler last longer. According to Anker, it can run for 52 hours with one battery and up to 4.3 days with two batteries. That said, I wanted to evaluate the cooler in its most common configuration, so I stuck with the default battery. 

Testing the weight

To test the weight, I used 12 oz cans of soda and put 50 cans in each cooler. Then I added all the ice the RTIC cooler would handle. The EverFrost 2 has a dry weight of about 50 pounds, while the RTIC cooler checks in at about half of that. Add in the ice, and the coolers checked in at 96.6 pounds for RTIC versus 78.8 pounds for the EverFrost 2. In retrospect, I could have guessed that. Because I added the same number of cans to both coolers, the only variable was the ice itself.

To fit 50 cans into the RTC, I had to stuff them in a bit, and they just barely made it. On its site, RTIC claims the cooler can handle 60 cans, so it was a little disappointing to see it not live up to this. Because of that, I was only able to manage around 10-12 pounds of ice into the cooler. Take a 25-pound weight differential and subtract the ice weight and there you go. 

In this particular case, the weight at capacity — how much the cooler weighs when full — is the more important figure. EverFrost 2 with its cooling hardware outweighs (by almost double) the RTIC cooler, even with ice. When they’re full, a 15 to 20 pound difference isn’t that significant, but the EverFrost 2 is still almost 20% heavier. In this case, the ice cooler wins the fight, although the built-in wheels on the EverFrost 2 cooler make it easier to move around (but not to lift into or out of a vehicle). 

Fast cooling test

We’ve all been there. You’ve got a party starting later that day and you forgot to throw the drinks into a cooler, so now you have to hustle. Which will cool down your drinks faster? In order to test this, I set both coolers out and open to warm to room temperature, or about 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Similarly, I had several cases of soda sitting out, also warming to room temperature. Once both the cooler interiors and soda warmed up, I loaded up both coolers with those 50 soda cans and tossed 10 to 12 pounds of ice into the RTIC cooler. 

Additionally, I opened a can of soda in the middle of the top layer and bottom layer of cans. From there, I used a temperature gun to take readings. The EverFrost 2 cooler has a digital readout of the temperature on the inside of the cooler. To measure the RTIC cooler, I measured the temperature of the inside wall. I also measured the temperature of each can of soda. I did this every 15 minutes for five hours and the results are recorded in the chart below:

As you can see, although the EverFrost 2 got colder faster, the cans themselves did not follow suit. In fact, the RTIC ice cooler cooled both the cooler and the cans faster than the electric cooler. 

The one issue I had with the RTIC was after about two and a half hours, the water collected at the bottom of the cooler overflowed into the bottom can, which spoiled the readings a bit. You’ll notice a sudden downward slope when that happened at 9 a.m. We’ll address that more in a bit.

Longevity 

Another situation you might deal with is camping, and in that case, you’re not going to be worried about cooling down your food and drinks quickly, but how long they will stay that way. To test this, I loaded up both coolers with just 40 cans of soda. I wanted to pack in more ice into the RTIC cooler, and leave room for an internal thermometer to see how long the it stayed cold. I tested this for two and a half days, essentially a long weekend trip.

For this test, I put the Anker cooler into Eco mode and filled up the RTIC cooler with even more ice. This time, I did not open and check the coolers every 15 minutes. I left several hours between checks because when you’re camping, you’re not constantly going into the cooler for everything. Also, this was a multi-day test, and I like to sleep.

However, even when opening the ice cooler several times per day, the ice lasted the entire two and a half days, although it was mostly water by the end of the test. Despite that, the ice cooler stayed below 40 degrees Fahrenheit the entire time. The EverFrost 2 cooler in the meantime, also kept below 43 degrees Fahrenheit the entire time (although the cooler was set for 40 degrees). The EverFrost 2 cooler sat at 13% battery by the end of the test period. So, both coolers performed their required duties for the long term, which was good to see.

Price 

The Anker Solix EverFrost 2 cooler retails for $899.99, although as of this writing, it’s on sale for $699.99. By comparison, the 45-quart RTIC cooler I tested costs around one-third that price, at $299.99 (currently discounted to $219.99). Yes, you get a lot of bells and whistles in the EverFrost 2 cooler — the bottle opener, the extra table space, the wheels, the cleaner set up and storage. However, one has to wonder if that’s worth the price. Anker isn’t exactly reinventing the wheel here; it’s just a different type of wheel.

Electric cooler vs. normal cooler: Which should you buy? 

The key argument in favor of the electric cooler is the lack of mess — there’s no ice or ice water to deal with for example. Everything you need to keep cool fits inside the cooler and there’s no need to leave room for ice. Plus, despite a slightly smaller footprint, it actually has more capacity for soda cans — 60 as opposed to the RTIC’s 50, despite the company claiming otherwise. Everything you need to get the EverFrost 2 cooler to do its job is self-contained (you don’t have to run to the store to get ice). There’s also the mobility offered by the wheels. 

The adjustability of the EverFrost 2 cooler is also nice. I remember a few times when I would head out camping and find that some of the food was ruined because the ice was too cold, or something leaked into the water, and you had to wholesale replace the ice. That won’t happen here. If anything leaks, it’s just a matter of cleaning it out and putting everything back. Plus, you can adjust the temperature to be slightly above freezing if you don’t want everything to be literally ice cold.

On the other hand, the EverFrost 2 is expensive and none of those things really justify the extra money in my mind. Of course, your mileage may vary. But if you’re wondering which cooler I’ll recommend for your next camping trip, it’s the RTIC cooler. Electrification is pretty cool and you can’t deny the fact that the EverFrost 2 cooler is handy. But for cooling things down fast and keeping them cool, the old school RTIC cooler works just as well as new school, and for a third of the price and 20% less weight.