CLEVELAND – Holiday weekends and hot temperatures have sent flocks of people outdoors for parties, cookouts and picnics at the lake.
Most of them bring along a cooler or two stocked with refreshments, but is the cooler doing its job?
Coolers come in all shapes, sizes and price tags. Are you getting what you pay for? Is that $300 fancy, brand name cooler really better than a $10 one?
On Tuesday, we put coolers to the test to see if the most expensive ones are really icing the competition.
We filled a $300 Yeti Hopper 40, a Rubbermaid plastic cooler, a foil-lined Thirty One soft cooler and a run of the mill Styrofoam cooler, each with 22 pounds of ice, two Diet Cokes and a thermometer.
All four were left unopened in the sun from 1:15 p.m. to 6:15 p.m. When we opened them, they all had mostly ice, measured at 32 degrees and had two cold cans of Diet Coke.
The four coolers may have turned up different results had they been left out for days or weeks. However, our test shows that if you're looking for a cooler to just take to the beach for four or five hours, there's no need to shell out for an expensive cooler. They all did the trick.