Best Portable Ice Maker For Camping

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Camping these days doesn’t mean saying goodbye to creature comforts we’ve got accustomed to and these portable ice maker for camping machines are easy to transport and make ice cubes fast. All you need is an electrical hook up or some form of power, and you can be sipping iced drinks in the scorching sunshine in the great outdoors.

Okay, you might not be in the scorching sunshine, but you will be sipping iced drinks 🙂

Top picks

In a hurry? These are our top 3 favourite portable ice makers for camping:

Also see:

• The best electrical hot plates for camping
• 3 Way camping fridges
• The best electric cool boxes for your camping trip

Portable Ice Makers

Being highly unlikely to have an ice machine plumbed in when you’re camping means your ice machine need to be able to be filled from a bottle, and with an often limited (or expensive!) source of power, they need to be able to get those ice cubes made fast. These machine fit the bill on all counts. It’s amazing how fast these become an essential bit of camping kit.

Here’s the ones we like:

Andrew James Ice Maker Machine

This best selling ice machine can make ice cubes in 10 minutes. Yep you read that right, ten minutes! It’s a pretty small machine, yet can hold 2.2L of water, needs no plumbing or drainage of any sort, make ice cubes of different sizes and cleaning is as simple as wiping it down with a soft cloth.

There’s LEDs that tell you when the machine is getting low on water and when your ice is ready, and the machine is controlled by a soft-touch control panel.

The ice is dispensed into a removable ice basket when it’s ready and can hold up to 700g of ice, which is roughly about a third of the size of the ice bags we’re used to seeing in supermarket freezers in the UK, so it’s quite a bit of ice.

This machine doesn’t store the ice once it’s made, which on the one hand means you make your ice and then use it straight away, but also means you’re not using power keeping ice frozen when you don’t need it. And since it’s really fast to make the ice cubes, we never found not being able to store ice a problem, and we just made it as we wanted it.

The ice cubes you get are hollow, which while I originally found a little strange, does explain how it can make the ice so fast. And it’s ice, right, to chill your drink…and it does this well. In fact it can be quite cool to watch it do it’s work. So you get ice and at least a few quiet minutes as the kids sit watching it!

And one unexpected but very welcome feature of this machine…because the ice is small(ish) and sort of bullet shaped, the ice cubes can be easily put inside most water bottles when you’re packing drinks to take out with you for the day. That alone was enough to make me fall in love with this machine!

There’s a drain cap to easily get rid of any unused water when you want to pack it away, and weighing only 2.2kg, it’s very easy to move around and get out when you’re about to use it. Overall, a great little addition to your camping gear kit.

Stainless Steel Kealive Ice Maker

This portable ice maker is a little bigger than the pervious model, and can produce slightly more ice and hold more in the ice basket, so good for bigger camping parties. The time given for making ice is 6-10 minutes, which we think is nearer 10, but still amazingly fast.

As with the last model, you get an LED touch screen to control ice size, on/off and cleaning functions, and to tell you when the ice is ready. The self clean functionality is a nice addition, especially if you’re in a hard water area where minerals can form on the inside of the machine. This makes it easy to clean often and gives you purer ice.

The shape of the ice is able to be put inside drinking bottles when you’re packing refreshments for the day as did the last one, which really is very handy. The cold water bottles also act as a cooler for any food you’re taking with you so they have a double use: always good when you’re camping!

This machine is also quiet. The noise a portable ice machine makes when it’s working can be significant, although as they’re not on for long, it’s not really an issue. This one is quiet though, so a good option if you’d rather not have the noise. Also be aware this machine does not store the ice.

Wolketon 120W Ice Maker

With it’s self cleaning function, ice cube size selector and fast production time, this portable ice machine is a good buy. It has the usual LED information screen, and can take 2.2L of water, which will give you approx. 700g of ice.

After 6-10 minutes (ish), the first cubes drop down into the bowl. It is replenished every 5 minutes, each batch contains 9 cubes. The ice is hollow bullet shape as most of these seem to be, which is great, and 2L of water in the machine seems to make about 3 baskets of ice, which would be enough for all but the biggest camping parties.

This machine is a little smaller than some of the others, so better for a smaller tent or if you’ve really not got much room at all, and this is a great camping addition overall.

VonShef Ice Cube Maker Stainless Steel

• Fast – 2.1L capacity water reservoir allows you to make ice cubes in approx. 10 minutes, ideal for cold, chilled drinks and beverages
• Stainless steel design – black compact design
• Cube sizes – choose small or large ice cube settings to suit your preference
• Really easy to use – the quick and efficient ice-making process is visible through large transparent viewing window, if you’ve not had a portable ice maker before, this is a fascinating thing to watch!
• This ice machine has everything you’d expect it to, is a good price and does the job well.

FOOING Ice Cube Maker

This FOOING ice cube makers adopt premium finned cooler, it has large heat dissipation area, and high cooling efficiency. Just 6 minutes to get 9pcs of bullet-shaped ice-cubes per cycle. With a simple control panel, just add water, select the ice size, and it’s ready to work.

When there is not enough water Or when the ice bucket is full, the indicator will light up, reminding you to add more water or to remove the extra ice cubes.Thickened foaming layer ensure a good insulation effect, ice will not melt within 5-8hours at normal temperature.

This machine holds up to 2L of water, includes an ice scoop and removable ice bucket which has a capacity to hold up to 70-100 pieces of ice cubes. With the popular bullet-shaped ice and long freeze time, this is a great buy.

How to choose a portable ice maker

In all honesty, there’s not a huge amount of difference between most of the better ice makers on the market. They’re able to work quickly by producing hollow, thinner ice cubes than we’d make in our freezers at home, but this is a good thing. The cubes fit in bottles, something we’d not expected by were very thankful for.

The noise level on portable ice machines does vary, but since they’re not on for very long, you hardly notice and you’ve often got your machine on as you’re making food, so the kids are playing and people are chatting, so you really don’t notice the noise. And beside, after a long busy day spent exploring, there’s something strangely soothing about listening to the ice being made then dropping into the tray!

Is there a portable ice maker that keeps ice frozen?

For a camping trip, we don’t recommend using a portable ice machine that keeps the ice frozen and stored until you need it. By nature if it being a camping trip, you’d be using (wasting?!) huge amounts of power, and these machines we’ve looked at are designed to make ice super fast, in likely in less time it’d take you at home to jump in the car, pop to the shops and grab a bag of ice.

There are portable ice machines that have the ability to store ice and keep it frozen, but we don’t review them here.

Do portable ice makers use a lot of electricity?

Like all electrical appliances, a portable ice makers energy efficiency depends on a few factors. Different manufacturers produce machines of different energy efficiencies due to the way they’re built, but keeping your machine clean means it doesn’t have to work as hard to make ice, so that’ll help use less power.

As these machines are not on for long periods of time, you wouldn’t notice much of an impact on an electric bill, although if you’re using a campsites electric hook up, make sure you agree the fees upfront, as these vary hugely between campsites, and better you know what it’s going to cost you before you start using it.

The lower its kWh (kilowatt hours) consumption, the more efficient the appliance is.

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