One question: does the ice survive the weekend?
I test YETI hard coolers against a single job — keeping ice for two to three days on a camp or hunt weekend, when the chest can stay near a vehicle. Everything on this site serves that question. Nothing else.
Marion Tucker
Has used every cooler in this class. Who I am 
The decision
Almost every buyer gets this wrong at the same point
People choose a cooler by size or by ice-day claims. The question that actually decides it is far simpler: does anyone have to carry the thing?
Illustration If it stays put Tundra stays The chest that lands on a tailgate and becomes the camp pantry for the weekend. Load it once. Roughly 30 lb before you add a single bag of ice.
See the comparison →
Illustration If it moves Roadie travels The one you carry in a single hand, from truck to site and back. About 17 lb lighter empty — and about half the room inside.
See the comparison →The record
What this lab has measured so far: nothing
That is an uncomfortable sentence for a review site, and it is the honest one. I have used every cooler in this class in the field. I have not yet put ice on a scale and logged what remained.
So this site does the next best thing and does it openly: every duration figure it quotes belongs to a named independent lab, credited on the page where it appears, with a link to their write-up. When my own runs exist they will appear here first — dated, per cooler, alongside the conditions that produced them.
- Coolers used in the fieldEvery model in the class
- Ice runs loggednone yet
- Start mass recorded—
- Remaining mass at hours—
- Lid opens per day—
- Own bench photographsnone
- Figures borrowed and credited2 labs
Contents
Four pages, in the order they are useful
- 01 Tundra vs Roadie The one comparison this site is built around. Which family to hire, and the published bench days side by side.
- 02 Are YETI coolers worth it? What the money buys, what it does not, and the four cases where a cheaper cooler is the correct purchase.
- 03 How long do YETI coolers hold ice? Published results from two independent labs, credited — plus the five things that change the answer on your weekend.
- 04 Roadie 48 vs Roadie 60 The wheeled pair, benched by one lab under one protocol — where the smaller box outlasts the bigger one.
- 05 How I test Ice mass against days under a fixed lid-open routine. The results table is empty, and this page shows it.
House rules
What you can hold me to
Borrowed numbers stay borrowed
Every figure names the lab that produced it, in view, with a link. Nothing here is dressed up as my measurement until it is one.
No prices, no star ratings
Both change weekly. A stale number on a review page misleads, so this site sends you to Amazon to see the live one.
Nothing is sold twice
One product per review, and no buy button on a cooler I would not point you at. Two pages here end with "buy the other one instead".
The skip-if comes first
Every recommendation names who should not buy it. If one person must carry a big chest far from a vehicle, no ice figure rescues that.
Sources
Duration and capacity figures quoted across this site come from OutdoorGearLab and GearJunkie, with manufacturer capacity tables republished by Treeline Review. Their protocols are theirs, and each page says which one it is quoting.
This lab covers YETI hard coolers only — not drinkware, not other brands as roundups, and never deals or coupons. It earns through Amazon Associates and nothing else. How that works.