IVAPC45

very roomy

Works Great!

I will first say that this is probably best for keeping heated food warm for long travels. As far as using it as a cooler, it may not be the best. If you try to cool this it will get no lower than 43 degrees F without cold items. It could still be beneficial, but it took 3 hours to just get to 43 degrees F. It is true that if you add ice packs it will get cooler, but the problem is I bought this specifically for when the power goes off during a hurricane. While my freezer can stay cold enough for 2 days without opening the door, sometimes my power can be off for a week. My fridge temperature is 37 degrees F so 43 degrees F would not keep my yogurt, but could be good for water. If you add two gallon sized jugs filled with water that has been frozen, it will bring the temperature down to 30 degrees in an hour. Again, could be fine as long as you have some ice packs in there, but it all depends on what you want it for. For me, I wanted it for hurricane season when I may lose power and I needed something that would keep ice packs frozen for days. It would be useful for water and some dairy products for a day or two, but that depends on how cold my ice packs will keep it. I wanted something that didn't rely on ice packs so this ice chest is basically just a regular ice chest to me. It may still be useful to keep food warm, but I suggest getting an electric cooler with a compressor to keep items cold. Compared with what you get, the watts used are high. It's around 58 watts to get mediocre cooling when I have a compressor electric cooler that uses less than half that wattage and cools faster without the use of ice. This could be a good backup to store water to at least keep them cooler, but I think it may be best to invest and spend a little more to buy an electric compressor cooler if that is what you want it for. If you want the best of both worlds (cool/warm) then I suggest you buy it but buy at least a small electric compressor cooler so that you can truly get the cold temperature that you need.

Overall, this thing basically does what it's designed to do. You plug it in (it has wall style AND car style plugs) and it keeps the contents colder than the surroundings. There's no temperature adjust, no thermostat, it just runs all the time in either hot mode or cold mode. If you're putting this thing in the back seat of the car on a road trip, that's going to be perfect.My use case was a little different. I'm a semi truck driver, and for all sorts of reasons, a "real" mini-fridge is a huge pain to deal with in this particular truck. This cooler is a great form factor. But consider this. I've basically got groceries in the thing, I get done and go home. I live in an area that gets pretty cold, so overnight the temperature gets to freezing or below. This thing happily keeps working to make the inside colder than the outside, so I come back to find everything frozen solid. Soda cans exploded, lettuce is destroyed, etc. Okay, so next time I turn the thing off and then go home. I come back, the sun came out in the morning, everything is 75 degrees, my milk is chunky, deli meat has gone bad, etc. So now I'm back to hauling groceries in and out of the truck anytime I won't be around to babysit the cooler. It's also quite loud - much louder than a real fridge, so it's not a great thing to sleep next to.In short, this thing isn't great at dealing with changing conditions. It's meant to sit in a space that's room-temperature. If that's what you're doing with it, it should be just fine. If you need something with more flexibility to deal with change, this has serious limitations.

I was surprised how well it works. There was literelly some ice in the bottom when we used it the first time. If you don't "precool" it with ice blocks or cold foods, it takes 3 or 4 hours to really get cold. But it seems to keep the food cold enough for camping without the mess of and ice chest. We can plug it into the campsite power or the truck outlets when we are travelling. Kind of pricey, but we splurged on it to make our "glamping" easier. It has a heat function as well, which my husband found out by accident seems to work really well. That may come in handy when taking meals to friends on a meal train. The handles and wheels like a regular tailgate cooler are a nice touch. Would probably make a nice tailgating refrigerator.

Great