Friday, June 3, 2011

Product Review 14: Polar Bottle Insulated water Bottles

Polar Bottle company

Today I’m going to be reviewing 3 water bottles from Polar Bottles. Ironically, my last reviewed company was RecoFit, and identical to RecoFit, Polar Bottle was founded in Boulder, CO by an avid cyclist.

Polar Bottle has been making their insulated water bottles since 1994 and has largely stayed true to their original design. There’s a lot to be said for a company who chooses to focus on one thing and be the best they can at it. Polar doesn’t sell t-shirts, supplements, wristbands, or anything else – just high-quality water bottles.

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Polar Bottle Insulated Water Bottles:


Insulated Polar Bottles

These are my favorite. Remember when I said Polar had stuck true to their original concept and design? This is it. It’s very simple, very inexpensive, and does everything you need it to do. Well.

They come in 20 oz and 24 oz sizes, weighing in at 4.6 oz and 5 oz respectively. These things are double walled, insulated/vacuum, plus a foil layer on the outside to reflect the sun – in short, they’ve gone to great lengths to keep what’s inside cold – for which it does an excellent job.

The top has a large, wide mouth which makes it easy to fill with ice, even from my fridge’s ice dispenser.

Once again, a huge benefit of these bottles is that they are completely dishwasher safe with no problems and, again, the valve can be completely disassembled for added cleanliness.

A feature that I really like about these is that they are also freezer safe: allowing you to
a. keep the empty bottle in the freezer and then fill it with cold water to keep the water even colder for short runs,

b. fill the bottle about half way, freeze it, then fill the rest of the bottle with water and allow the ice to super cool your water + melt slowly and refill your bottle, or

c. I even tried filling the bottle full and freezing the entire thing over night with no problems – no cracking, breaking, busted valves, nothing. This allowed me to take the bottle with me on a long outing (heat index of 99 degrees here right now) and allow it to very slowly melt and have cool water the entire day

For anecdotal findings, I found that if I did not freeze the bottle and instead just pulled it out of the dishwasher, filled it a 1/3 of the way with ice, then filled it with tap water, the water remain cold for me for about 2 ½ hours in 90+ degree heat. So 2 ½ hours is your worst case scenario base line and you can build up (more ice, freeze the bottle, freeze the bottles contents, etc.) from there.

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