From an
older blog post:
See, the problem isn’t really about the water freezing. The problem is about how you thaw the water. The solution, of course, is pretty freakin’ obvious – the smaller the quantity of ice, the faster it will thaw.
Imagine a gallon of ice as a frozen block. Now imagine 128 1-ounce ice cubes lined up in a row. Which one will thaw completely faster? The ice cubes, of course.
There’s two ways I keep water in the vehicle – I use either the small 4 oz. ‘lifeboat ration’ water pouches or the small hand grenade sized plastic water bottles. Both are small enough you can shove them in a pocket or under your butt and thaw them out. The pouches are the easiest to thaw..they are about the size and thickness of a Pop Tart and you can thaw them in just a few minutes by sitting on them. Yes, it takes a lot of them to add up to a couple gallons of water (which you should always have in your vehicle). So what? Whether its 2 1-gallon jugs or 64 4-oz. pouches its still the same amount of water…the only difference is that it wont take two days for the pouches to thaw.
The pouches freeze quite well and I’ve never had one fail from being frozen, but, of course, whenthey are frozen try no to bang them around. The plastic water bottles have also never given me any problems and I’ve had them go through several freeze/thaw cycles. Fact is, most bottled water is packaged in bottles that are so darn tough you can pretty much ignore them. Roll a couple under the seats of your car and forget about ’em.