Coolers are great, as they let you keep food and drinks chilled for long periods of time. However, even the most insulated coolers can only keep ice for so long before everything melts into a puddle, leaving you with no access to cold drinks after a week or so in the wild. The Flextail Evo Icer offers a way to change that.
A portable battery-powered ice maker, the device allows you to make ice cubes anywhere you are, so you can ice up your drinking water, replenish the cooler, and even enjoy iced coffee in the middle of a two-week camping trip. Whether you’re spending your summers car camping in the mountains, staying at a lakeside cabin, or just living it up at the local beach, this thing lets you crank ice cubes on demand, so you can cool down with a cold drink right when you need it.
The Flextail Evo Icer is a portable device that measures 11 x 12.6 x 12.6 inches (width x height x depth), so it’s compact enough to slide somewhere in the boot of the car, with a handle on top allowing you to move it around by hand. Do note, this thing’s pretty heavy at 21 pounds, so it does make for another heavy gear to carry along with your cooler, power station, and whatever else you bring to your outdoor excursions.
Of course, any inconvenience its size and heft may cause should be offset by its ability to make ice on demand. Specifically, the device can crank out a dozen ice cubes in nine minutes for its first batch (it needs the extra time to reach the low temperatures), after which each succeeding cycle produces the same 12 cubes in just five minutes. That means, you should be able to produce enough to refill the ice in an otherwise thawed out cooler with just a few runs. It powers using a 200Wh battery that, the outfit claims, will allow it to produce a little over 400 ice cubes before draining out.
The Flextail Evo Icer offers three ice making modes. Quick mode is the fastest and most efficient, but can produce imperfectly-shaped cubes, while Eco mode is the slowest and uses the least power, making it ideal for when you’re not in a hurry. Cup mode offers a middle ground, producing perfect cubes just like you made them in the freezer. Do note, you’ll have to continually fill up the 40oz water tank to ensure there’s enough water in there for the machine to turn into ice, so you’ll probably want to keep a large container of potable water nearby at all times. It does have a low-water indicator, though, so you will be alerted any time it needs to be refilled.
According to the outfit, the device’s IceBurstX Rapid Refrigeration technique allows it to produce more ice cubes using the same amount of power compared to similar ice makers, making it more efficient than anything else in the market. Other features include a relatively quiet operating sound of 50 decibels, a removable ice tray (so you can take the ice elsewhere), one-click drainage for easy cleaning, and power bank function, so you can charge your phone on it in a pinch.
A Kickstarter campaign is currently running for the Flextail Evo Icer. You can reserve a unit for pledges starting at $359.