Today I unbox my brand new Pelican Progear Elite cooler and go through all the features and my first impressions of the cooler.
Hey guys, Ryan here from huntingwaterfalls.com and in this video, I'm going to be unboxing this brand new Pelican Progear Elite 35 quart cooler or 33 liters. This just arrived in the mail today. If you think my accent is a bit funny, I am from Australia. I got this from gtcases.com.au for $250 Australian with postage. That's an absolute steal. You can't even get it that cheap in the States – that's about US$190 and they sell for around $210 to $240 on Amazon. You're looking at about $100 or so cheaper than a Yeti of a similar size.
We're going to be unboxing this today. I'm very excited. The first thing that I noticed when I got it is that this is a big cooler. All the coolers that I had in the past have been little carry ones that I have that fits my lunch or something like that. This is my first real man cooler. And if you look at it, it is quite large. Look, it's heavy, but it's doable.
The best way to open this is with a knife, so let's go ahead and do that. I'll be careful not to scratch the cooler itself. So we've got the cooler open. The first thing that you notice about the cooler straightaway is these beefy, thick, really strong handles that we have on the side. We also have these fold-up handles that feel quite firm, quite secure. We've got 2 of those to carry it like that. Something that makes the Pelican unique from any other cooler on the market is these push-and-pull latches. We can see, we just push in the red button and pull it up.
It is really simple. And pushing it down is so easy, you can just do it with your pinky. I know some people complain about other coolers that it's hard to get those latches down. But these are just so smooth and so easy to use. I absolutely love them. I could just stand here doing this all day.
But let's go ahead and have a look inside. Let me tip it forward for you guys so we can see inside there. Significantly smaller inside than outside just because the insulation is so think on this bad boy. The reason that it's so much smaller inside is this thick insulation, which we can see it ranges from about 2 inches or if we flip it over if we want to go metric, about 5 cm to about 2.5 inches in some areas. So this is really thick insulation. Should really keep the ice in for, apparently, 7 days, which we will check when I do a full review and a full write up on this one.
Looking at the inside, we can see the spots here where you can fit in cans and things like that. I kind of think this is overkill, but I do like that it has these drainage points that all lead down to the drainage spout. If we look at other coolers, like the Yeti, then it just has this little 1-inch drainage spout here. So I like that way that Pelican had done that. Another cool feature is that on the lid, we have inches and centimeters in measuring up here.
I don't go fishing, but if you do go fishing, then you can obviously measure your fish up here. Or if you're out with your buddies and you drink a little bit too much, then you can all compare yourselves to each other with the measuring thing on here, which could be useful in some strange, strange and really weird circumstances. But anyway, that's a cool feature off the top. We also have our lock here.
You need to padlock it if you want it to be bear-proof. There are no bears in Australia, so I will not be needing to padlock it, unless I'm trying to keep thieves out. Or you know, we do have the occasional drop bear in Australia so we do need to be careful for those.
If we open this up again and look on the side, then we can see on the back here that it's just a single pin hinge all along here. It will just kind of lock and stay open. So we can see all along here, it's just a single pin so that thing's not going to break. If I pull back on that with my hand, I can put a decent amount of force on that and I don't feel like that's going to break at all. Something that's making this really hard to move around is these non-stick feet on the bottom.
These are just made of non-slip rubber. They're white, so I don't think they're doing scuff any surfaces or make any marks like a black rubber might. And so, that's cool because if you got it on your boat or wherever you have it, it's not going to slide around. It's going to stick to the surface. I do like some other models, not the Pelican, have ones that are reversible. So it can be non-slip or you can have slip ones if you just want to slide it in the back of your truck or the back of your car or something like that.
You can also see on the corners here that we have tie downs. So there's 4 corners each have points where you can tie it down if you need to secure this in place. Something that a lot of people talk about with these coolers or complain about – some people love them, some people hate them – is the drainage plug here. This is a fixed drainage plug. We can see that if we unscrew this that it is fixed in place. People complain because the plastic, as you can see, it's already got marks on it.
It's quite a stiff plastic. Feels a bit brittle. Something that I feel like, with use, that would definitely break. It does have a rubber seal in there and this has a garden hose attachment so you can attach a hose to it if you want for drainage or if you want to pump some water in there to clean it or something like that – I guess you could use it for. But really, I think not many people are actually going to do that.
The complaint is that it's using some cheaper plastic here, whereas the rest of the cooler is really strong, really thick sort of stuff. Also, that they cause a lot of condensation, which I’ll have to check when I do the full review. But for now, I'm not too worried about it. It's got a good seal on it. We'll just have to see what happens with the condensation.
If we look at the inside of the lid, we do have this rubber gasket – commercial grade gasket all the way around. Some people have complained about the split in the middle. Mine is almost completely flushed, so we don't have a big gap there so I'm not worried about air getting out at all. And this lid is super thick. This lid is thicker than the walls. I think it's about 3 inches thick.
I've dropped my measuring tape somewhere, but this lid is super thick. These latches, oh my gosh, these latches are so good.
So we've got our sticker on here that says, “Up to 10 days world class coldness”. So we'll put this to the test and see how long will this cooler actually keep ice. We can see that it is made in the USA and that this is guaranteed for life. That is something that makes this brand above the Yeti. Yeti has a 5-year warranty. This one is guaranteed for life. So I absolutely love that. Another cool thing about this cooler is that it's super strong. So I can easily go ahead and stand on this cooler. I can even jump on to it.
There you have my unboxing of the Pelican Progear Elite, the 35 quart cooler. I forgot to mention, I did get it in white. Even though, apparently, the white does scuff more than other colors. I decided I'm going to try and get white in every single brand so that when I compare them to each other, that we're comparing apples to apples as much as possible. So I'm really impressed with this cooler.
My first impression of it is that I think this is going to be an absolutely awesome cooler. It is heavy, but hey, it's super thick insulation. It's going to keep ice for a long period of time. And seriously, these clasps, look at that. Oh, it's like magic. It is going to be very hard for other coolers to compare to this when you have these push-and-pull latches. They're just so awesome! They're so good!
If you like this video, give us a thumbs up down below. And also, if you want to pick up one of these for yourself, then I have found that they're generally the best price on Amazon.com. My affiliate link is below. If you buy your cooler, please go through my affiliate link. I absolutely appreciate that. Until next time, guys, stay cool.
