chest freezer in pick up bed questions

Couple of times per year an itinerate meat salesman pulls up into the drive. Has a chest freezer and a Honda running in the back of his truck. Every year I take his picture and run him off, but he pops up again several months later.
Must work for him, he has been doing this for years.

Seems like a practical plan to me. It would help to maintain the temperature to more or less fill the excess room in the freezer with bags or blocks of ice or something to add more thermal mass. That does unfortunately mean more weight in the truck.

I would suggest waiting several hours after loading the freezer into the truck before running it if you have to tilt it significantly to get it in. You'd also need to have some sort of positive latch or other closure to keep the lid shut while en route—most chest freezers I've seen rely mainly on gravitation to keep the lid closed. A hasp or strap or even a double hung window lock should do the trick nicely.

We fish on the Snake River......a lot of people bring the small ones over to keep the fish in until they go home. :) Seems to work fine. If your truck can hold a heavy freezer and 1/2 beef, then go for it!!!!! Just get a thermometer that can be read without opening the doors.......to keep an eye on the temps.

It will work. We used to do something like that when going to Chitna to dip for salmon. If we were going to be there for a week (sometimes the salmon run was spotty) we'd take a chest freezer and generator. We'd clean the fish each night, wrap and freeze them. That way we didn't have to rush home and there was nothing left to do but divide up the salmon when we got there.

If we were only going to be there for a couple of days, we'd fill the back of one of the trucks up with ice. After you turned off of the Richardson Hwy onto the road to Chitna, there was a campground with a large (10' diameter) culvert under the road. It would still be half full of ice from the winter. We'd load up a truck, put the salmon in the ice and cover them with a couple layers of tarps. Worked fine for three to four days.

Bill

use some dry ice JMO

Seems like a good plan, maybe cover with something while traveling to keep the sun off of it.