SetPower Portable Refrigerator: The Perfect Camping Cooler!
If you’re looking for an upgrade to your camping cooler, consider the SetPower portable refrigerator!
Available in a variety of sizes, these lightweight, convenient refrigerators can completely take the place your current cooler.
And that means no more fishing food out of a watery, icy mess, and no more worrying about when you need to buy more ice.
With multiple ways to plug it in, an included ice pack, and a nearly soundless compressor, the SetPower refrigerator is an upgrade to a regular cooler in every way.
In the review below, I’m detailing exactly what you can expect when you purchase one of these units, detailed information on the included features, our experience using the SetPower refrigerator, and a discount code!
The SetPower unit in my trunk
This post contains affiliates. If you purchase through the links below, I will receive a commission at no charge to you. A SetPower unit was sent to me for the purposes of this review, but my views are my own.
What is the SetPower refrigerator?
And, just as important, what makes this different than a regular cooler?
The SetPower refrigerator is a lightweight, portable refrigeration unit that keeps drinks, food, and even frozen items cold.
It’s different than a regular cooler since you do not need to add ice to the unit to keep your food and drinks cool, thereby eliminating the need to refill and drain your cooler.
You also don’t have to worry about how to keep your food out of the melting ice since the inside of the SetPower refrigerator is always clean and dry.
The SetPower portable refrigerator has one large compartment that’s deep enough for 16 oz. water bottles, soda cans, or fruit juice bottles.
There’s an additional shallow section that’s great for sandwiches, bags of cut-up fruit, or snacks.
The SetPower does need electricity to keep your food cool, which limits it somewhat, but the 2 different plug options—a 12V and an AC adapter—means that you can draw power from your car or any standard wall outlet.
If you’re using this while camping, most tent sites (and all RV sites) have a regular 12V outlet, so you can use it no matter how you’re spending time outside.
That being said, if you do have a time when you’re not near either type of outlet, you can use the included, removable ice block to keep the cold items very cold until you can get to an electrical outlet.
You can set the SetPower to a variety of temperatures, depending on what you’re keeping cool. The lowest temperature it can attain is -4 degrees F, which is cold enough to keep frozen items fully frozen as long as the cooler is plugged in.
Which SetPower refrigerator should I get?
There are multiple colors and sizes available within the SetPower brand, and you’ll want to pick the unit that best fits with your family’s needs and camping expectations.
The smallest unit they have is meant to go between car seats, and the AB series provides a 16 quart capacity. These are great for families with lots of afterschool commitments who need to keep sports drinks and snacks cold for a long time.
The smaller units range from 21 quarts to 32 quarts, and these are all excellent for smaller cars, shorter road trips, or weekend camping outings. These smaller portable refrigerators have single control, but work well for drinks, snacks, and meals on the go.
The RF series has a shallow side compartment for sandwiches or snacks.
The FC series does not have that small side compartment, but instead has a larger area for the controls.
The MC series has one large compartment without the ice pack divider.
The larger units range from 32 to 68 quarts, and include dual control.
These allow you to operate each of the main compartment areas independently, so you could have 1 half at a refrigeration temperatures, and the other at a freezer temperature.
The larger SetPower units work well for big families on a road trip or camping trip, or longer camping trips. I could also see these working very well for sports tailgates, where you’ll have a big group of people stopping by for food and drinks.
The AJ series includes dual control, cup holders on top, and a larger capacity.
The DT series has app control for the dual spaces and 2 large compartments.
The RV series has wheeled options for even more portability.
Buy a SetPower unit and save! Use code “campingkiddos” for 19% off anything on their website!
Our experience with the SetPower Portable Refrigerator
The very quiet and portable RF20G unit
Since we are always on the go, either on a road trip or at a campground, we use a cooler more than most families.
While a traditional cooler, especially high end ones, can keep our food and drinks cold for hours or even days if the weather is nice, there’s still the process of keeping ice on it constantly.
On some of our long distance road trips, we spend more time that we should finding ice, paying too much for it at the campgrounds or gas stations we’re near, and draining the water out of the back of the truck.
So, when I found out that there was an option for keeping our road trip snacks and food cold that did not involve bags of ice, I had to try it.
Now that I’ve had plenty of time to try it out, the SetPower portable refrigerator has truly changed the game for us.
I have the RF20G in grey, which is one of the 21 quart units with single control. I wasn’t sure how much I’d like the single control, as the idea of having both a cool and a frozen section was intriguing. However, now that I’ve tried it out, the single control is versatile enough for our needs.
In the time that I’ve had the SetPower refrigerator, we’ve used it so much from road tripping to Asheville, North Carolina, to packing drinks for a day at the beach, keeping our groceries cool on the way home, and even to providing cold drink options on our porch for our delivery drivers.
My husband loves it so much that he’s already reserved it for a 10-day road trip he’s taking with his buddies and dad to Nebraska, and he’s pre-planned everything he wants to pack in it.
We didn’t realize how much messing with ice in our old cooler annoyed us until we didn’t have to do it anymore. Plus, I love being able to place my pre-made meals and snacks into the SetPower unit, knowing that they will stay dry (unlike packing food in a traditional cooler).
The unit is very quiet, and we haven’t noticed it at all on our times using it in the car, even if we have it on the backseat floor.
It is small enough to fit in my Subaru’s backseat and truck even with suitcases, pillows, and our usual road trip necessities. However, the unit is large enough to carry multiple drinks and food options.
Since we have a smaller unit at 21 quarts, it is lightweight enough for me to pick it up without assistance even when it is packed full. You can easily put a half dozen water bottles or soda cans in this cooler and have plenty of room left over for dips, sandwiches, pasta salads, and more.
The cooler partially filled
When I put it out on our porch for our Amazon drivers, everything inside the unit stayed cool all day long despite the temperatures getting up to 100 here in South Carolina!
And if I’ve ever worried about food temperature, there’s an app that I use to check in on the refrigerator.
The unit quickly cools down from room temperature to be cold enough to chill soft drinks and water bottles. In our house, it takes about 15 minutes to bring the cooler to around freezing. Outside in the very hot South Carolina summer, it will take a bit longer to come down, but it’s also battling heat and humidity in the process.
Once the unit reaches the desired temperature, we’ve had no problems with it sustaining that temperature for as long as we need.
It’s really well insulated, too. I tested the unit out by freezing the included ice block, loading it up with drinks, and then unplugging the refrigerator from its power source. The drinks inside stayed cool for hours, and I imagine if it wasn’t sitting outside in the summer heat, the lower temperature in the unit would’ve lasted overnight (if not longer).
The company also sells a power bank that you can use if you know you’ll be away from an electrical plug and need ongoing power. My husband is already planning to buy one for the unit for that road trip I mentioned earlier since they’re going to be trekking around in some remote areas of the Midwest.
This unit truly is one of the things that we will not leave the house without from now on!
Thanks to its versatility in power sources, the potential to add on a battery pack, and the included ice block, you can have cold or freezing food and drinks just about anywhere you need to go.
