ARB Zero Electric Cooler - Single Zone - 47 Qts

Video Transcript for ARB Zero Electric Cooler Review

Hi everyone, it's Evangeline, and today we'll be taking a look at the ARB Zero Fridge Freezers. These are going to be coolers or freezers that are powered in order to keep your food at Sub-Zero temperatures. We're gonna take a look at it right here at etrailer. A fridge freezer like this is not for everyone. If I was just going for a weekend trip or a casual getaway and I just wanted something to keep my sandwiches and my drinks cold, I would just get a normal freezer or a normal cooler and fill it with ice. But if you're planning on going on some really cool and extreme adventures, maybe you're spending a week in the woods and you wanna make sure that your ingredients, your food, your meat, your eggs, are at safe temperatures during your entire trip, that's when you invest in something like this.

You'll commonly see this in overlanding and adventure rigs. So whether it's a truck bed camper, like what we have here, a small teardrop camper, your hatch, your SUV, your big adventure vehicle. If you need to keep your things cold, you'll use this. The way I use it is I like to use it with the custom fit fridge slide. We set that up, we plug it into our power source, load up our fridge freezer, put this away, and hit the road.

While some coolers have internal batteries, this is not one of them. It does require to be plugged in, although it does have two different options for powering it. Right off of the bat, what impressed me a lot is how fast it's been cooling down. So I started this about 19 minutes ago. The power consumption has been 30 to 31 watts.

We don't even have it set to boost right now, and in those 19 minutes it went down from 65 degrees to 14 degrees. Depending on how you have this plugged in, how you have this set up, this is an efficient and fast way to keep things cool. We currently have our 110 AC plug plugged into our power system. This also has a plug for your 12 volt DC current. This can plug into the back of your cooler and also work as a power source.

You can even have both of them plugged in at the same time and the cooler will automatically pick the AC over the DC and switch over to the DC whenever the AC goes out. If you're trying to decide between ARB's different fridge freezers in the Zero series and you're worried about the differences in energy consumption, the difference is minimal. So I currently have the 38 quart here and the optimum draw is going to be 0.8 amps. Now if you go all the way up to the Dual Zone, which is the largest fridge freezer at 101 quarts, then the energy consumption for that is going to be a draw of 3.1 amps. Not that much of a difference in the grand scheme of things. So when trying to decide which size you wanna get, focus on the size capacity for what you wanna carry and what will actually fit in your adventure rig. When speaking of quarts, we currently have the smallest cooler out here, which is the 38 quart size. So you can see how this is a single zone cooler, which means one whole zone, one temperature setting. You do have different levels though to this zone when you utilize the included storage rack. So for 38 quarts, what that means is that you can carry up to 47 12 ounce cans. The largest freezer can carry up to 144 cans. To give you an idea of the difference in size. Even though the different coolers are different sizes, they're all gonna look pretty much the same on the inside. So we have these walls, they're already really cold and starting to develop a little bit of frost on them. You're going to have different baskets for organization and you're gonna have a little drain plug at the bottom just for ease of cleaning out your fridge freezer. Your different coolers will also have lights. That way they can light up whatever the contents of the freezer are going to be. And then for the larger sizes, you'll also have a removable lid just to make it easier to access your fridge freezer in different areas. On the top of the lid, we have this fun rubberized mat. So this is gonna be great to be used as a cup holder or a bowl holder, and with this being rubberized, if you want to put your cutting board on top of it to do your food prep, this would be a great way to do that. Similar to other things designed by ARB, this is designed to be heavy duty. Now there is a steel casing throughout the cooler, which is providing most of our structure, but on top of that, we have what feels like hardened plastic. I do appreciate the designed corners though. You can see how this makes for a more impact resistant corner structure, and if you are lugging your cooler around, you'll notice that that's gonna be the most important parts to reinforce. Something I do recommend taking a look at though is going to be the protective cover for your cooler. That way it can help insulate the cooler if you are using it outside in the bright sun. Plus, that will add even more layers of cushion to protect your investment. To operate your fridge freezer, you have a display up front. You have your power button for when this is plugged in. You have your boost button if you want to quickly cool down your freezer. You also have a mode button over here, so to cycle through the different modes, pressing once allows you to change the temperature that you want to achieve for your freezer. Pressing again allows you to change between Fahrenheit and Celsius. You also have your battery protection settings. If you are connected to your vehicle battery, go ahead, press high. If you're connected to a power station, like what we have here, go ahead and press low. A lot of people like to leave it on battery protection high if they're not sure. You can also adjust your Bluetooth, turn your Bluetooth on or turn that off, and then that's it for our different modes, you just use the plus and minus buttons to cycle through those different settings. Upfront we have other ports. If you wanted to charge your own items, you can plug in your phone to the USB A port here. This is gonna be a three amp port. Now you also have an emergency override switch. This can only or should only be used if there's electrical failure. If you switch over to emergency override, it will automatically go into the maximum capacity full freeze mode. So ideally, you'll want it over normal. Overall, I like the heavy duty style of the ARB Zero fridge freezers. Being able to go down to below zero degrees means that whatever I need to carry is safe and fresh for whenever I'm ready to cook it. With that in mind, for my own adventures, I would definitely be pairing this with the slide because as you have this loaded up, it then gets very hefty. But if you don't have this slide, or if you do want to use this at the campground, take it down. Then you do have handles on each side that allow you to maneuver this out and about. Just something to be mindful of is once you do get the larger dual zone coolers, maybe having a friend help you out with lugging it around is ideal. For your heavy duty fridge freezer, this was a look at the ARB Zero cooler. We have this available in different sizes, from 38 quarts all the way up to 101 quarts. Check out our product descriptions and pictures if you wanna compare those. We also have all the different accessories you saw here, whether it's a fridge slide, the power station, or any other accessories that will match your freezer. Check them out here etrailer.com. My name's Angelina, and I hope you enjoyed the journey.