"extreme" or high end coolers

How's the soft sided RTIC?

Any word on the Pelican wheeled? Looking at one of these two cause of the wheels for da beach.

 

Just spent a week down in Florida with the family on vacation, my brother in law has the soft sided RTIC and it was pretty awesome. Especially for the deal he got it for (like $110 I think he said?). My only complaint would be it's a real dark charcoal grey and soaked up a ton of heat by the pool. But no worries, we only needed the beers cold for hours, not days

 

My parent in laws got the 45qt cabelas one for my brother in law for Christmas. Seems well built, I am jealous that it has built in bottle openers on the handles, and it seems a LOT lighter than my pelican 45qt. Excited to see how it performs.

And you guys are killing me talking about the soft sided coolers. I've been fighting the urge to get one of those, sometimes that pelican is just overkill.

 

Cabelas brand got the best all around cooler for the price comparison out of all the extreme coolers.

 

What's your source? RTICs are priced way less than the Cabelas line up.

 

They are priced less. I'm saying for everything comparison. Size, duration, strength, weight, price, etc. Its by Field and Stream. I'll see if I can find. I'm not sure if RTIC was in the comparison because that was when they were taking months and months to ship out their coolers.


EDIT*
The Rtic was indeed not in it but here is the review and write up. The RTIC is the basically the same crew that worked modeling the YETI, so with very close comparison to the YETI, I'd like to see where it stacked up since YETI got #3 (mostly because of cost)

http://www.fieldandstream.com/artic...owdown-12-top-end-coolers-ranked-and-reviewed

 

I can't help but to wonder how much advertising dollars played a part in this shootout?

 

Well I know Dicks Sporting Goods owns the Field and Stream name so I don't see why they would need a Payoff for a simple 1 minute video.
I do know Grizzley's haven't gotten decent feedback for their quality cooler, so I'm going to go with its a decent little comparison.
Again its not a "scientific" study and I'm not trying to persuade you on what cooler to buy because my extreme $90 Ozark Cooler does more than I need. I also wouldn't pay $200+ for any cooler just to say I have one like most people do.
For the most part you're not going to go wrong with anyone of them for more than 90% of the peoples basic needs for them. So I'd just go for the round about cheapest to begin with.

 

I like unbiased facts. My 45qt RTIC last weekend outside air temp low/high 21*/45*

 

If I could go back and do it again I'd have gotten the RTIC 45qt. The pelican has been fantastic, I'm happy with performance, that thing is real heavy though. With that said, I do expect this cooler to last my whole life, I guess that's the price to pay for a few more lbs.

 

The one good thing about Yeti is it makes for easy Christmas shopping for family and friends. Got the seadek for my 65 and a couple hats

 

For those off-season deal hunters - RTIC coolers are 30% off on their site and Amazon.

The hard side RTIC 45 is $122 and the soft side RTIC 30 is $87. Pretty decent deal on already reasonably priced coolers.

 

Pretty pumped about this big son of a bitch

 

Love my Pelican, I have the 45. I bought it when they 1st came out on Amazon and only paid $220 for it.

 

I picked up that 70qt for $290. Great prices!!

 

I'm envious of those that had good luck with their RTIC's. I scooped up an RTIC 45 during the winter sale on Amazon that I posted about above and I was looking forward to good results like others reported. Unfortunately, I must have gotten a bad one but didn't realize it until too late. I had already kept it for a while, taken it on a road trip and started putting some stickers on it before I noticed its poor performance. Which is the point of this post, two things to look out for before using yours in case you need to return it because I wasn't able to return mine due to my own mistakes:

1. The top lip of mine was very uneven. I realize these aren't supposed to be completely water tight but if any water leaks out when tipped on its side that's a clear indication to me that air is getting in/out too which leads to poor performance. I took a level and saw that the lip was wavy leading to the leaking. I used a Dremel to grind down the high points and some JB Weld to build up the low points. It's now pretty much even with very little, if any, water escaping which means it has sealed much better.

2. I did the flashlight test after using it and saw that there were light spots in the insulation. Unlike the point above, nothing can be done to remedy this.

I did my own ice test after my improvement detailed above to my RTIC versus a Coleman Extreme I've had for 10 years and I started with both prechilled. After a given amount of time with exactly the same amount of ice in exactly the same environment I drained the water to use that as a guide to which worked better. Using the same bowl to catch water and after about three days I drained 1.75" of water out of the Coleman and 1.5" of water out of the RTIC. The RTIC performed better but not by enough to say it's a significantly better cooler. It's tougher and looks better but hard to say mine performs better than my Coleman with only a 0.25" difference in ice melt.

Point of this post is to help those that buy RTIC look for the flaws before having to keep it like me. I'm happy for those that have had good luck, I just wasn't one of those people and I should have done some QC of my own before missing the chance to return it.

 

I'm a Yeti fan, myself. They rock!

 

Buuuuuuuump. It's warm out now, anybody get any new toys?

My next purchase is going to be a backpack cooler I'm pretty sure, I like the Engel

 

Bought a 26 oz Yeti rambler bottle with a chug cap this week but haven’t usd it yet. Seems heavy for its size, but I guess that’s Yeti. We have at least 10 Yeti thermoses, low balls and colsters in my house between me and the wife. Very popular conference/trade show/Vendor swag.

 

Yeti pulling duty on a 4-day turkey hunt last month.