Home built big game cooler for dummies!

Just try to get your deer in the late season and then hang it in your unheated garage. It can hang there to atleast march, if theres anything left package it up and putit in your freezer. This is what we did we the roadkills we got in december of last year.
 
My dad was a retired butcher. He built a coupl;e of walk in coolers from scratch, it isn't complicated. Just make it tall enough to hang a carcass in with good air circulation all around. Make the walls and floor of washable material. Insulate well. 4" - 6" of Styrofoam works real good. If you use fiberglass batts, you must put a good vapour barrier on the warm side. Call a refrigeration contractor and get advice on the proper blower and pump to use for the job at hand. We have a cooler in camp that was built with a wimpy little blower, we get by with placing a few 20L jugs of water in it as soon as we arrive in camp and turn the cooler on. By the time we kill an elk, the water has cooled down and provides adequate thermal mass that the carcass heat transferring to the cold water allows the little blowers to keep up OK. Good air movement is essential. dead air does not cool a carcass quickly enough. We can hang a bull elk in our camp cooler in 25C temperatures at mid morning and have it cooled to the touch by supper time.
 
Some friends who hunt at a different camp used the panels used for new garage doors, just stacked them and bent corners out of aluminum to hold them together. it works, it simple to build, but Im not sure how easy it is to find these panels and at what price.

We hang our deer in our garage, its unheated and the opening and closing oh the door is enough to circulate the air enough without drying it out too much.
 
Tres cool

Longwalker said:
My dad was a retired butcher. He built a coupl;e of walk in coolers from scratch, it isn't complicated. Just make it tall enough to hang a carcass in with good air circulation all around. Make the walls and floor of washable material. Insulate well. 4" - 6" of Styrofoam works real good. If you use fiberglass batts, you must put a good vapour barrier on the warm side. Call a refrigeration contractor and get advice on the proper blower and pump to use for the job at hand. We have a cooler in camp that was built with a wimpy little blower, we get by with placing a few 20L jugs of water in it as soon as we arrive in camp and turn the cooler on. By the time we kill an elk, the water has cooled down and provides adequate thermal mass that the carcass heat transferring to the cold water allows the little blowers to keep up OK. Good air movement is essential. dead air does not cool a carcass quickly enough. We can hang a bull elk in our camp cooler in 25C temperatures at mid morning and have it cooled to the touch by supper time.
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Longwalker,

Awesome post! IS your camp cooler cooled by a 120v compressor or are you folks off the grid?

We're on this same topic because while this year has been unusually cool, future years won't be.

Thanks,

FM
 
Our cooler is powered by a 120 V compressor, but I don't think that an air conditioning unit would work for two reasons - blower does not have enough air velocity/movement, and the moisture from warm air will freeze the blower fins. In a cooler with a warm carcass hanging in it, moisture is a problem until everything gets cool. you need some way to defrost the blower, air conditioners do not have that feature. We sometimes have to spray hot water on the blower fins to defrost them an hour or two after hanging a hot carcass. A timer could possibly allow the blower to defrost itself if it went through a cycle where the blower fans run but not the compressor, but I'm no technical expert, I just know what works for us.
 
you may want to look in to building it out of actual cooler panels that are used for commercial fridges and freezers. They are relatively easy to find near major cities. Hit kijiji.ca and do a search. I have found a couple of guys in the Toronto area that sell them so cheap you can't even consider another way to do it. One guy out there buys overruns and such from a factory and other guys have reclaimed/recycled panels. I hope this helps, but they may not be available near your location, wherever that is.
 
I thought there was a post a while back about a guy that turned one of those small camper trailers into a cooler with 4 or 5 window air conditioners and a wack load of styrofoam. I think he used it for moose and elk hunting so he could pull it behind the truck.
 
Hung mine in the basement keg cooler at the local pub this year:D:D
I've been thinking one of those Pepsi two slideing door drink coolers you see in the stores would work.
 
A Pepsi cooler would be better than nothing, but would not be able to cool a warm deer carcass quickly enough to ensure good quality meat all the time. And it would be hopelessly stressed beyond capacity with an elk or moose. Good blowers with enough quick cooling capacity and good air circulation is not a "nice to have" it is a "Must Have".
 
Moose aren't real common here in SWO;) Pepsi cooler would do a quartered deer I think.
The pub cooler was perfect for me this year. The heat exchangers are right inside the cooler. Constant air movement and when one goes into defrost the other kicks in as needed. Problem is not everbody gets access to one.
A small fan built into the pepsi cooler to make the unit work harder and make up the air will cool a deer I'm thinking.
Idealy I'd like to take mine to work! We freeze 100,000 to 150,000 lbs of processed food per day in our blast freezer and have 6 other rooms that are used as tempering coolers or blast chillers beside that. Two refrigeration units on the roof backed by two auxilleries keep our production floor at less than 50F per CFIA regulation. CFIA would frown deeply on us hanging game eh! M&M, Loblaws, Win Dixie, Campbells and a few more would likley frown too. Anyway that said 4th Class Engineer responsible for all that refrigeration as well as our boiler plant is the one who sugested the Pepsi cooler to me. I'm his supervisor so he better not have steered me wrong lol.
 
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Not quite a cooler for hanging, but I converted a large free freezer this past summer for cooling deer/bears till I can get to them. I've made a racking system, but that will require a rethink.
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I got my info from this site http://www.west-point.org/users/usma1986/42894/kegerator.htm
Using one of these. http://www.blueridgecompany.com/radiant/hydronic/287/johnson-controls-a419-series

I have a buddy that made one for his trailer and uses a smallish Honda geney to keep things cool in transit. I've used mine three times this fall and it's worked great.

BTW that buddy got a water proof unit at a local outlet for less than I paid shipped for the US, look around, you'll find one!!
 
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