Keeping Water Bottles from Freezing

While snowmobiling, the idea of having my water bottles freeze concerned me. In fact, the idea of driving in the car with all the water bottles frozen concerned me too. I always liked to have an unfrozen water bottle that’s handy to take a drink. We worked out a system that worked well in the car. All the water bottles in the back would freeze overnight while we were in the car, and it would even freeze when they were left in the car for not too many hours. What we discovered was if we took the frozen water bottle and put it directly on top of the heater vent, it would warm the bottle up to a point where it would melted within about 20-30minutes. In fact at one point, the water got so warm I thought that we can make some tea that way, but we never actually tried it. In real life, if I were you, I’d be careful though, and make sure not to block the vents and not to start a fire. This is what I did, but please, don’t take it as advice as what you should do yourself.

Then, came snowmobiling. When we went snowmobiling, I was really concerned about what would happen to the water bottles if they would freeze, and how I would be able to take a drink of water. I was so concerned of this fact that I devised what turned out to be a huge experiment on how to make this work. I’m guessing that the temperature, when we went snowmobiling, was ranging between about 0 and 20 degrees during the day. What was funny is that we put water bottles in a variety of different places.

One thing I did was I bought a small ice chest, which was very well-padded and the flexible kind of padded ice-chest. Inside of it, I put heated water bottles that I’ve warmed up in the microwaves. I put in this product called Lava Buns, which is a big gooey hot pack that you heat up in the microwave. Then, in addition to it, I put in about 10-12 hand warmers to keep the water warm. I would have thought that will all of that around the water bottles, they would’ve stayed toasty all day, because the Lava Buns stays warm for many hours, and the ice chest, itself, normally keeps them hot or cold for many hours. The truth was by the end of a day of snowmobiling, that water was still defrosted, but it had gotten quite cold. I think if it had stayed much longer it would’ve frozen. That was an ice chest that was on the back of a snow mobile.

I also had on my camel back and on it I’d already had the bladder that holds the water. What I had done was, I put a water bottle into the camel back that was up against my back and thrown a couple of hot packs of hand warmers in there. I found that that stayed very warm even though I was wearing it outside of my jacket. So, the lesson learned from it was that it was either a combination of my body blocking the wind and the warmth of my body keeping the camel back warm, even though it was outside my jacket, and the fact that the ice chest was a few feet away from me where it was getting blown by a lot of wind and had no protection or warmth source. In the end when I do this again, I’ll just simply wear my camel back with a few bottles of water in it that are held against the back of my jacket, along with a few hand warmers inside. That should keep the water from freezing at least for half a day out and about.