What's the best way to pack a cooler?

[beths]

What is the best way to pack an igloo cooler to maintain temperature with smaller number of units (2) and a larger number (10)? Any advise would be much appreciated.

[adiescast]

It somewhat depends on how long you want the cooler to maintain temperature and what your ambient environment will be. For short term transport in non-extreme temperatures and no opening the cooler during transport, placing the blood in the bottom of the cooler and a bag of ice (chipped is better than cubed) of approximately the same volume on top of it is fine. If you need it to maintain temperature for a longer time in a hot environment, you will want to surround the blood with ice. Often it is good to have something between the blood and the ice (thin cardboard, fabric, or paper) to keep the part of the blood facing the ice from freezing. If you use an ice substitute, the chances of local freezing of blood in contact with the ice substitute is higher. You would definitely want some divider in that circumstance.

Our Igloo-style (I think some of them are different brands) coolers maintain 1-6C for 8 hours in normal room temperature settings with hourly opening packed with just the equal volume ice on top of the red cells and a layer of paper towels between.

[Alternatives]

Hello Beth,

I concord with Adiescast...a standard configuration does not exist, and there is no "best way". However, some methods could be easily defined, and then be qualified upon your reality. Most important factors to take into consideration is payload size, length of transportation, and external temperature.

In all cases, do not use frozen gels in direct contact with products you want to keep refridgerated. I don't think using paper paper or thin carbon would be recommended to separate frozen gels from your products...They will become wet and create humidity very fast...

Method you could test is maybe using a sandwich method...a frozen gel at the bottom, then refridgerated, your product, another refridgerated gel and a fozen one...But again, it will depend of many factors, plus size of your cooler...

For your tests, do it at min and max payload as results could be different...

Ben

Edited April 6, 2011 by Alternatives

[hornickfr]

The key to all the different methods of packing is to validate the method. We validated ours using expired units and discovered wrong ways of packing the cooler.

[ejsommers]

We validated our method with the Igloo Cooler packed as follows: 2 frozen bottles along both sides, 1 refrigerated bottle along the back panel. The rbc's - up to 6 - are contained in a plastic container in the middle of the three bottles with a refrigerated soft gel pack on top of them.

This set-up will maintain an acceptable BB temp range for 6 hrs. Of course, we use the Hemo-Temp sticker on each unit to verify they never went out of range.