Anker SOLIX EverFrost 2 electric cooler review – cooler than cool, on the go

REVIEW – The price of food being what it is these days has had our family of four re-thinking how we plan for road trips.  Planning meals in advance and packing healthy food can be a challenge without proper cold storage, so I was excited for this opportunity to review Anker’s latest portable, iceless cooler system in the EverFrost 2.  Let’s see if it will be our secret weapon to keeping our family vacations on budget.

⬇︎ Jump to summary (pros/cons)
Price: $900 / $1100 MSRP for the 40L and 58L respectively.  Early bird pricing through March 6th 2025 is $600 / $800.
Where to buy: Anker SOLIX

What is it?

Anker has been around for a while and made a name for itself in the consumer electronics space, notably with its portable batteries. Their SOLIX line takes things to the next level and is centered around energy storage and utilization at home, camp, or off the grid. Their mission statement is to enable everyone everywhere with energy independence to power a sustainable future together.  

The SOLIX EverFrost 2 is an iceless cooler, which runs on a SOLIX battery pack (or two!).  It’s intended to keep your food cold whether plugged in, or off the grid.  The EverFrost 2 is offered in a dual-zone 54L model, and a single zone 40L option – which is what we have for this review.

What’s included?

• AC charging cable
• Car charging cable
• Wheel chocks

Tech specs

Design and features

The EverFrost 2 has a typical design for a cooler, and the shell is largely made of plastic to keep the weight down.  Overall, the fit and finish is outstanding, and at the level of quality you would expect from an established brand on their second design iteration of a product.  This is a solid, and heavy cooler at 55 pounds.

One of the standout features of the SOLIX EverFrost 2 is the collapsible side table.  This will give you some extra surface space for food prep, but also serves as a handle extension for comfortable transport.

Additional quality of life features are found throughout the cooler.  An LED panel in the cooler compartment will help ensure you grab the right midnight snack, and the built-in bottle opener at the front will keep your multi-tool in your pocket.  On the lid is an inlaid imperial and metric ruler, and an accessory rail is found on the front.  Anker offers a couple add-on accessories that attach to the rail such as:

• Hook on tray
• Road trip kit (cup holder, knife holder, rod holder)

The EverFrost 2 carries an IPX3 rating, meaning it should be OK in light rain.  It can’t be submerged in water, and hasn’t been tested against dust or dirt infiltration.

Assembly, Installation, Setup

The Anker SOLIX EverFrost 2 arrives very well packaged, and is fully assembled out of the box.  The manual recommends letting the cooler lie flat for three hours after any long transport (presumably in the event it was vertical or upside down in transit).  There isn’t really anything else to do aside from charge the included battery, so I turned my attention to the app.

Note: Anker provided a pre-release version of the app for the purpose of this review.  The app is subject to change and may look different at product launch. 

The Anker app is available from your mobile store of choice, in my case Google Play.  Initial setup is a breeze, and props to Anker for not requiring an account to connect to their products.  There is a caveat though if you forgo an account, in that you will lose cloud control of your devices.  I can’t imagine a situation that I would need to control a cooler from afar so I stuck with Bluetooth, but it’s nice to know you can do this if it suits your needs.

The SOLIX EverFrost 2 will automatically turn on its wireless radio when it’s powered on, so as long as the cooler is on, you can easily discover it and connect to it. Connection is straightforward, and the app prompts you through the process clearly. The app will remember your connected devices, so setup is one-and-done. Once connected, you can get a quick status of the cooler, change its operating settings, and update firmware.

If you prefer to keep things simple, Anker has built in a color display with a four-button interface to handle cooler settings.  The display will tell you everything you need to know from battery to child lock status.  By forgoing the app all you really miss out on is the convenience of remote control, and the ability to update firmware for the EverFrost 2.

Performance

So what’s it like to use the Anker SOLIX EverFrost 2?  It’s certainly the nicest and most high tech cooler I’ve ever gotten my hands on.  The build quality is excellent, and I am confident it will withstand whatever my kids can (literally and figuratively) throw at it.

Looking over the product photos before receiving it, I was curious about how the footprint would translate to usability.  It’s about the same size as a regular cooler, but about a third of the EverFrost2 is dedicated to the compressor motor and electronics.  The trade off is that you don’t have to pack and maintain ice (which would also consume usable space), and the less I have to deal with literally anything on a vacation, the better.

One of the first things I did was pack the cooler out to get a real sense of size, and was pleasantly surprised at how much I could pack.  My worries that this wouldn’t be big enough to be practical had evaporated, and the excitement began setting in.

The EverFrost 2 does take up a fair bit of room in the cargo space of our Honda Pilot.  We usually keep the third row down for trips, and even with the EverFrost 2 tagging along this still leaves us with enough room for luggage.  Having the ability to run the cooler from the car charger while on the move is a great design, as it means we’ll have the battery for when we need it.

From a noise perspective, the EverFrost 2 isn’t what I’d describe as loud, but you can hear it if you’re in the same room.  While in ‘Max’ mode I registered the compressor sound at just shy of 50 decibels.

Anker SOLIX doesn’t make a lot of lofty performance claims about the EverFrost 2, but there were a couple that caught my attention that I could for sure put to the test.  So I did, and the results were interesting.

Claim: The Anker SOLIX EverFrost 2 can cool from 77°F to 32°F in 15 minutes
The fine print from Anker SOLIX: 15-minute cooling is based on testing in Max mode with an ambient temperature of 77°F. The cooling temperature was set to 32°F with no contents inside.
Test: Aiming to replicate the conditions described by Anker SOLIX, I let the cooler get to room temperature while empty, which was approx. 74°F.  This was measured by a digital Taylor thermometer suspended near the center point of the cooler.  I closed the lid, turned the EverFrost 2 on, set to Max mode, and dialed in a temp of 32°F.  I then set a timer for fifteen minutes.
Result: The EverFrost 2 cooled from 74 to 43.5°F (reported by the Taylor thermometer) in 15 minutes. It took another 10 minutes or so to reach the target temperature on its own thermostat; however, at that point, the cooler’s internal temperature was in the upper 20s, based on the Taylor.

I re-ran the test, this time adding a Weber temperature probe.  From a starting ambient temp of 70°F, the Weber probe just managed to hit the freezing mark in time with a 7°F head start… however.  When I opened the EverFrost2 I noticed that the probe was pressing against the wall of the cooler which is where I suspect the ‘cooling’ is radiating from.  The Taylor thermostat was suspended, and reading 43°F – which also lined up with what the cooler itself was reporting for internal temp.

A few observations here:

• I should note my setup is far from scientific and likely prone to some uncontrolled variables, though I feel is an accurate representation of the real world.
• The walls of the cooler may reach 32°F in 15-20 minutes, but the ambient temp within the cooler will lag.
• It’s hard to gauge how the cooler itself reports its temperature. At no point in my testing with the cooler did it ever report its temperature being higher than 62°F despite being at room temperature (~74°F). The EverFrost2 would often report its temperature as much as 5°F warmer than the cooler’s ambient internal temperature. In my freeze tests, the cooler would read 0°F but be as cold as -4.9°F.

A couple other data points for Max mode, all metrics gathered indoors with an empty cooler.

• 73°F (internal ambient) to 0°F/ 40 minutes / battery from 98% to 84% / internal temp reported by Taylor thermometer: -3.6°F
• 12 hours later in Max mode, battery drained to 17%, lowest temp recorded by Taylor thermometer: -4.9°F

For additional context, the different cooling modes as described by Anker SOLIX in the EverFrost 2 manual:

Eco Mode: Eco mode is the quietest mode and saves the most energy for the longest battery life. It stops the air-cooling fan to conserve power, but cooling speed may not be as fast as other modes.

Smart Mode: Smart mode, also the default mode of the cooler, utilizes integrated Negative Temperature Coefficient (NTC) sensors to detect both internal and external temperatures. This enables the system to decide how the compressor and fan should function, achieving an optimal balance between cooling performance and energy efficiency.

Max Mode: When Max mode is activated, the cooling fan circulates cool air, and the system uses maximum power for cooling. Activating Max mode will reduce battery life, so only use this mode as needed.

Claim: The EverFrost 2 can get up to 4.3 days of run time when running on battery power.
The fine print from Anker SOLIX: 4.3 days of cooling is determined with an internal cooler temperature of 39°F. The cooler was empty and in Eco mode with 2 fully charged batteries in an ambient temperature of 77°F.
Test: Anker SOLIX only includes one battery with the EverFrost 2, so I can’t fully test this… but I can see how long I get from a single battery which should be easy enough to extrapolate.  To replicate the conditions, I fully charged the Anker SOLIX battery, and kept the empty cooler inside the house at an ambient temperature of around 74°F.  With the cooler set in Eco mode, I dialed in a temperature of 39°F and periodically checked in via the app to avoid opening it.
Results: This was far less dramatic… I got just shy of 51 hours from a single battery, or 2.125 days. All other things being equal, that gives us 4.25 days with a second battery, and rounded up for the marketing folks is the claimed 4.3 days.

Final thoughts

The Anker SOLIX EverFrost 2 is a great cooler system that is well built and backed by a company that’s successfully done this before. For our needs as an occasional, short-term cold storage option, it well exceeds my expectations in terms of features and capability. For those looking for a dual-zone system to cover both refrigeration and frozen food storage, the 58L would be worth checking out.

I riffed on the performance claims by Anker earlier in the review, and while the delta I uncovered in a real world test of the fast-freeze claim was disappointing, it also isn’t significant in practical terms.  These aren’t commercial deep freezers, and I don’t expect or need the EverFrost 2 to be that.  What I do think needs some attention, and possibly can be resolved in a firmware update, is the discrepancy in how the cooler reports its own temperature.  If your needs require tight tolerances for temperature control within five degrees, it may be worth waiting for more EverFrost 2 reviews to come out to determine if this will meet your needs.

For us, I’m really looking forward to bringing the Anker SOLIX EverFrost 2 along for our family adventures.

What I like about the Anker SOLIX EverFrost 2

• Battery system with solar, car, and AC make is super versatile for on the go.
• Excellent run times on battery.
• Easily handles food storage needs as either a cooler or freezer.

What needs to be improved?

• Fifteen minute claim to hit 32°F is a bit out of touch in practical terms.
• Temperature read outs are inconsistent and result in temperature overrun.

Price: $900 / $1100 MSRP for the 40L and 58L respectively.  Early bird pricing through March 6th 2025 is $600 / $800.
Where to buy: Anker SOLIX
Source: The sample of this product was provided for free by Anker SOLIX. Anker SOLIX did not have a final say on the review and did not preview the review before it was published.

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