Being unlimited, anywhere

[Michel]

@kmichel

I used a swamp cooler technique

@Beacher

I wet a T-shirt in the lake, wrapped my insulin, put it in a plastic bag,

We love this technique and use it a lot! But the problem with it is that it only works when the humidity is low. When you get to 75-80% humidity, it becomes useless:

How well does the Frio bag work?

Keeping insulin cool: earlier today, I was writing about an experiment on preparing for a hot weather, high humidity trip. I mentioned in passing that the Frio bag loses its effectiveness around 85% humidity, and @Sam challenged me to publish the actual numbers, so here goes! First, we should mention that a Frio bag only works if it is (a) totally wet, (b) not in direct sunlight, and (c ) able to freely evaporate to the atmosphere (i.e. not inside a bag). Here is an example of how a Frio bag mi…

@Sam always gets mad about the Frio ads because it simply won’t work when it is is humid. So, unfortunately, this technique won’t work in hot jungles.

One thing that does work, I think (we tried it) is to keep insulin in a waterproof bag in the shade at the bottom of a raft, in the water itself. The water of almost any river will be much lower than 87F. So this technique takes care of rafting down or being constantly in a flowing river. We still have to figure out how to deal with backpacking in humid heat.

I am looking into sun cooling right now (electrical cooling). But so far I have not found a good, practical way to make this work low tech, reliably and lightly.