Anker SOLIX EverFrost 2 (23L) Review

Design and features

• Big and weighty
• Great attention to detail
• Extremely versatile

We were impressed by some neat design touches on the original EverFrost, and I’m pleased to say they’ve survived onto the Anker SOLIX EverFrost 2. All three sizes come with wheels and a handle, so they’re easy to trundle out into the garden or onto your camping pitch. The handle doubles as a fold-up table which, according to Anker, can stand a hefty 30kg load.

There’s also a neatly integrated bottle opener, along with a pair of rulers moulded into the top surface – I’m not fully clear why, but perhaps they could come in handy for making sure you share a baguette fairly.

Adding a battery and cooling circuit to a portable coolbox inevitably makes it bigger and, despite packaging improvements, the EverFrost 2 is substantial. This smallest version would only just fit through the narrow aperture of my saloon car’s boot, although it would be far easier to load it into an SUV or a large hatchback.

My 23L version was big enough to swallow up a generous picnic’s worth of cheese, snacks, beers and soft drinks, but it did have some limitations.

Its cooling compartment wasn’t quite tall enough to stand up sparkling wine…

…although I could lie several bottles diagonally.

Despite this, the Anker SOLIX EverFrost 2 had enough room to keep food and drink fresh for a weekend camping trip in hot summer temperatures. With no suitable 100W solar panel available, I paired the cooler with the Anker SOLIX C800 Plus power station and some 200W panels. Even though I was running the cooler, lights, and occasionally a travel kettle, the power station itself never got below 50% charge, and the cooler didn’t even have to use its battery.

Here I should also mention this cooler’s only real downgrade when compared to the original model: gone is the lift out basket, which helped you remove the contents quickly if you needed to reduce the cooler’s weight before lifting it. On larger EverFrost 2 models you could use the spare battery slot to store items like cutlery, but I’d want to wrap individual items to prevent damage.

Anker has improved the display for this series, making it easier to see in direct sunlight. Even so, for best performance you’d want to keep the cooler shaded if at all possible. That said, the EverFrost 2 has an IPX3 rating, meaning it can withstand a bit of light rain – handy for changeable summer weather.

The Anker SOLIX EverFrost 2 has a lid that closes softly under its own weight, latching down to keep things nicely sealed. It also stays up by itself when fully open.

You can buy a range of accessories for the EverFrost 2 such as a Road Trip kit that includes a cup, knife and fishing rod holder, all of which slot into the bar that runs down one side of the case. There are also beach wheels; a fatter upgrade for the standard ones designed to cope better with sand. While that’s great for practicality, this cooler isn’t dust-rated, so use it on the beach with caution.

For the most part you can control this cooler from its onboard buttons, which let you set a target temperature and apply a child lock to stop it getting changed. Alternatively you can connect a smartphone via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, which lets you tweak a few additional settings. There aren’t many advanced features here, though – you can’t schedule on/off or temperature changes for example.

Battery and charging

• Charge from the mains, solar or car
• More than two days’ battery life in fridge mode
• Slow recharging when cooler is working hard

One of our few complaints about the original EverFrost related to its battery. Not only was this a £300 option, but it used older NMC chemistry and was rated for only 800 cycles before dropping to 80% of its stated capacity. Anker has fixed that, bundling a more durable LFP unit rated for 80% after 3,000 cycles. Even better, it’s tweaked the enclosure so the EverFrost 2 retains its IPX3 splash rating even with the battery fitted.

I’m impressed with this cooler’s versatility. It’s supplied with a mains adaptor – not protected against dust or rain – and a cable suitable for hooking up to a car socket. You can also power it over USB-C, or plug in an optional 100W solar panel – you must have the battery fitted for the solar power input to work. The other alternative is to charge the battery via USB-C when it’s removed from the cooler – particularly handy if you buy a spare and want to keep it topped up. Cleverly, the battery also works as a power pack, able to recharge other devices via USB-A or USB-C whether it’s in or out of the cooler.

When connected to a power source, the EverFrost 2 prioritises keeping the storage compartment cool, with any remaining power going to charge the battery. You can only use one of its solar, mains or car inputs at a time, and each has a 100W maximum. The fridge compressor uses around 60W of this, which limits battery charging to 40W when the compressor is running – it’ll charge at about 60W when it’s not. The USB-C input goes directly into the battery and tops out at 60W, so you might not recharge at all while the compressor is running.

In any case, recharging takes quite a while. I timed a 0-100% recharge at more than five hours when the cooler was busy freezing a couple of kilos of ice. Still, for three seasons of the year, a 100W solar panel could probably keep this cooler charged and running 24/7, provided the weather was fair and you weren’t trying to freeze large quantities of ice.

One oversight I discovered when testing the Anker SOLIX EverFrost 2 was that there’s no warning either when it’s disconnected from mains power, or when the battery is approaching exhausted, either on the cooler or via the app. That’s a shame – configurable warnings here would help alert you to an issue that might otherwise spoil a good day out. On the plus side, this cooler does start beeping at you if you leave the lid open for more than a minute or two.

Performance

• Moderate noise
• Fast cooling
• Poor temperature stability when chilling

Set the Anker SOLIX EverFrost 2 to your desired temperature, plug it in and it’ll get to work with little fuss – but it’s not silent. There’s a moderate buzz from its fan and, if you listen closely, you’ll hear the compressor itself. I thought I’d find this disturbing overnight on a quiet campsite, but out in the open it didn’t bother me. It’s also not constant; depending on the set temperature and the environment it might go a couple of hours between bursts of work.

My entry-level 23L model doesn’t have the air-circulating fans you get on the bigger devices, so it didn’t cool down quite as quickly as Anker’s headline specs for the range. It was still fairly swift though: loaded with 2.3kg of ice packs, it took about two hours to stabilise at -18°C.

Fully charged and pre-chilled to 4°C, the Anker SOLIX EverFrost 2 consumed 270Wh of mains power over the course of about 50 hours’ use, equating to an exceptionally low 5.3 watt hours (Wh) per hour. In this configuration the cooler would consume just 46kWh of energy in a year, costing only around £11 – very low for a portable fridge. I unplugged it, and the battery lasted for two days and 15 hours. Even when it had run out, the cooler remained nicely chilled for several hours – the soft drinks within it were still very cold nine hours later.

I repeated this test with the cooling compartment loaded with 2.3kg of ice and set to -18°C. This always consumes more power as a freezer needs to maintain a steeper temperature gradient than a fridge – you can see it cycling on and off more frequently in the temperature graph below. I measured 1.1kWh of power used over two days and 14 hours, equating to a much higher 149kWh per year, which would cost roughly £36. When I unplugged the cooler, the battery lasted only 19 hours.

I should point out that the battery portion of this freezer test took place during extremely warm weather, during which the room temperature rose to around 28°C. Despite this, the air temperature within the EverFrost 2 remained below freezing for three hours after the battery ran out, and it stayed below 10°C for 33 hours, suggesting the contents were still likely to be frozen – or at least very cold. Even after two days, the compartment’s temperature had only risen to 17°C; by this point that was 12°C below room temperature, which had edged up to 29°C.

The original EverFrost 43L we tested was exceptionally good at maintaining stable temperatures, typically remaining within one degree Celsius of the set target. This entry-level model is less accurate, probably at least in part because it has no fan to circulate air internally. This was most noticeable in my chilled test, during which the compartment temperature averaged 5.7°C – that’s 1.7°C above the selected temperature. During this test the standard deviation of temperatures was 2.1°C, which isn’t great, especially given that the internal temperature reached 9°C a few times during the test – that’s 5°C above what I had set, and could be too high for particularly sensitive items like medicines.

The Anker SOLIX EverFrost 2 was much more impressive when working as a freezer. It averaged -18.4°C on my frozen test, just 0.4°C below the set temperature, with a reasonably small standard deviation of 1.3°C.

Overall these figures suggest a cooler that’s well suited for occasional and mobile use, but perhaps not ideal for long-term chilled storage in the home. You wouldn’t especially want it for that role: while its running costs of £11 and £36 per year are low, this cooler’s small capacity means its running costs per litre of volume are far higher than you’d get from a regular fridge freezer – it’s not a suitable choice for daily use, unless you can partner it with solar power.

Should you buy it?