Packing food for an in-ride personal picnic.
#26
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Join Date: Oct 2012
Location: Berkeley CA
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Bikes: 1981 Ron Cooper, 1974 Cinelli Speciale Corsa, 2000 Gary Fisher Sugar 1, 1986 Miyata 710, 1982 Raleigh "International"
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Putting reflective materials inside a bike trunk will not keep anything cool. It's thermodynamically impossible. Reflective materials only affect heat flow by reflecting infrared energy away. They cannot do this if they are in contact with any object and they have no innate cooling ability. So, the only way they can keep heat out of the bike trunk is if you put the wrap on the outside of the trunk to reflect away the radiant heat of the sun. The bubble wrap itself might constitute a tiny bit of insulation due to the trapped air in it, so that will slow down conductive heating, but not much. Far better to use thick foam insulation if you want to keep things cool. Insulating value is directly proportional to thickness. There's a reason that actual iceboxes do not have reflective material inside them.
#27
Senior Member
My wife and I went to the beach last weekend and we pulled out a soft sided cooler that we'd used before and it occurred to me that it looked a lot like a pannier too. I rigged it up with some flat bungie cords that I had bought for another purpose and hung it off the rack and it was perfect! We packed it up with sandwiches and drinks and used an alcohol based coolant in plastic bags (vodka!) to keep it cold and to mix with our cranberry in our water bottles. The beach doesn't allow alcohol anymore but they used to sell it there so I don't feel bad about sneaking it in. But the freezer vodka did work as a coolant, along with ice packs. Everything was plenty cold except what was in the water bottles in the cages,
(It wouldn't let me use the Cyrillic vodka, I thought I'd done it before but maybe not here. I started taking Russian lessons online but haven't gotten very far. I live in Brooklyn and there are a lot of Russians here and I just wanted to be able to read signs, understand a few things. It is surprising how many words are the same or with the same roots. Vodka is of course Russian to begin with.)
(It wouldn't let me use the Cyrillic vodka, I thought I'd done it before but maybe not here. I started taking Russian lessons online but haven't gotten very far. I live in Brooklyn and there are a lot of Russians here and I just wanted to be able to read signs, understand a few things. It is surprising how many words are the same or with the same roots. Vodka is of course Russian to begin with.)
Last edited by zacster; 07-31-20 at 08:56 AM.