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Hey guys just wanted to put out a general warning on these Kooltron coolers that plug into the car cigarette lighter. I thought it was going to be a handy dandy solution to move my medication that needed to be refrigerated cross country and I mentioned it in another post.
I'm honestly still not sure what happened. But somewhere along the way in Arkansas 3 days into the trip we heard a loud kaboom in the car. But we thought a rock had hit the car. We discovered however that for whatever reason the Kooltron became a "hot-tron". Several hours later I brought the cooler inside, opened it and a can of Dr Pepper had exploded and literally blew off the top quarter of the can. Yes it severed the metal completely as if someone had sawed off the top part of the can! The bottles of Sprite and water were so hot I could barely handle them...it was like an oven inside the cooler. Oh...and the worst part my medication was melted ...and one bottle totally unusable.
I'm assuming it overheated from being plugged into the car 8 hrs a day though we had nothing touching or next too the outside fan on the unit and of course we had the a/c running in the car anytime the cooler was plugged in. Apparently its not suppose to be plugged in for a long time or else it just malfunctioned. I still don't understand what happened with it...just be careful with it.
Most of these things do have a "heat" and a "cool" setting.
Cockpit error?
(Rickover) Keep in mind machines do what you *tell* them to do, via control inputs, they don't know or care what you *want* them to do. Your job as the opearator is to tell it to do what you want it to do. (/Rickover)
I'm aware some of them have a heating mode. But I see nothing on the inside nor outside in the way of a switch/control/knob to switch from heater to cooler. It appears to be only a cooling unit. BTW- any time we got out of the car we unplugged the unit because it does work even when the car is not running and will drain the battery according to reviews I read on Amazon. We spent very little time outside of the car each day only say 15 mins twice in a day for restroom breaks then we only stopped to eat in the evenings after getting a hotel room and taking the cooler inside to an air conditioned room. Something just went wrong with it, maybe the fan unit stalled and overheated. There was no instructions with it.
I'm aware some of them have a heating mode. But I see nothing on the inside nor outside in the way of a switch/control/knob to switch from heater to cooler. It appears to be only a cooling unit. BTW- any time we got out of the car we unplugged the unit ,,,,.
These units do heat or chill. The way to heat is to pull the cord out of the cooler and flip the cord over when plugging it back in. If you look there is likely a red or blue mark on one side of the plug.
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