We also gave up on coolboxes and went for a table top fridge, it is 16kg which is the same weight as some of the the 3 way fridges we were looking at and at only 79.99 we can use it at home and away.
Don't know if you know or not, stuff has to be cold when you put it in these electric coolboxes, they don'y actually chill they just circulate the air temperature that is in the box. I didn't do my homework properly a few years ago and wasn't aware of this when I brought mine. I've a camping gaz one, the only way i've found to really keep the stuff cold is to use an ice block to circulate cold air which is ok if there is somewhere on site to freeze the ice packs. Putting a cold pint of milk in everyday also helps.
This year i've gone for a tabletop fridge, slightly more space consuming but is a fridge!
Mark, they do cool, but it's using a very small Peltier device, which isn't very efficient when there's a large volume of air to cool. They're helped a lot by, as you say, putting stuff in already cold or with an ice block.
What I found with our Halfords one though, was that is warms up far too quickly when there's no longer power going to it. The insulating effectiveness seems to be give up in favour of a cooling or heating method. A good passive coolbox, with frozen milk and stuff in it, will stay colder much better than one of these with the power off. For longer site stay, then using the on-site freezer for ice-blocks is probably the way to go.
Also, with any box, just like the freezer at home, the less air in there the cooler it stays, so it's worth padding spare space out with newspaper or something (or more frozen milk and ice packs!)
Proper compressor fridge is good though. Just these jobs with Peltier devices could be better.
I agree with petermills, the mobile compressor fridges are the business, we got lucky and found a brand new Waeco CF35 for £150 although that was two years ago, it's been to Southern France for our fortnights summer hols now for the second year running, in the past we have never owned a cooler/fridge, and just hired a fridge on site, but the cost of that can now be 5euro per day, so thats about £70 per holiday, so I guess my little Waeco has now paid for itself, not to mention the luxury of chilled drinks and food for on the journey, the CF35 is a little larger than we need, but still takes little room up in the boot of the car, they do a CF18 that would have been fine for just the two of us, but sometimes you just have to grab what comes along, the shop price for either model is quite high.
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Topic: which electric coolbox?
