Anyone had experience with the ultra chiller? Seems a tighter package, but their website leaves a lot of explanation to be desired. I'm coming back from a 15 minute session soaked through, so it's finally time to drop $$ on this as an upgrade.

 

Wine Country Motorsports is having a 20% off sale on Paragon stuff, ends today. Of course this sale happened a couple weeks after I bought a new cooler/pump and fittings from Pegasus…

I have installed my Paragon cooler, but I haven’t gotten to use it yet. I will say that it’s well-built and the hose connections feel a lot better than the bits I hacked together from an old orthopedic therapy system. Not cheap though.

 

It is pretty easy to make your own for a fraction of the cost. I have three. It sucks that the shirts use different fittings. I have been cutting them off and using McMaster fittings. Let me know if you need details.

At our race last weekend we were lucky to use this:



No ice needed.

 

That ChillOut system looks so awesome, but $$$

I built a diy setup with an Amazon 12v pump and mcmaster carr dry break soda machine fittings. I bought the CoolShirt though, it's a nice product and has held up.

The cool suit is an actual lifesaver in a Miata with no AC in the summer, I use it at the track and on the drive home back when I'd drive the car 2.5 hours to the track. It was more of a lifesaver on the way home than at the track even. I even use it on road trips. By the time I need to gas up and pee it's about time for a fresh bag of ice. When that ice water hits your nips on a hot day it's a religious experience.

 

Yea, I'm going to be honest, my entire car is DIY and I deal with enough headaches because of that. I've finally entered the 2nd or 3rd wave of things to fix because I was too cheap/dumb to do it right the first time. With this one in paritcular, I would really rather not have it spray water or leak somewhere I dont want it. I have seen some awesome DIY builds though including one that somehow got all the water out of it with a dump pump of some kind.

 

I would buy the Paragon system then.

If you don’t want to DIY, get the shirt and box as a combo. There are several different fittings and they don’t work well together.

DIY is pretty simple though:
https://ultrachiller.com/pages/d-i-y

 

I'd just buy one... I had a DIY one and it worked fine, but sprung a leak or two the first few times I used it. YMMV as I clearly didn't put it together well, but it wasn't all that much cheaper than just buying one.

That being said I've had a chillout system for probably 3 years now. 0 maintenance, 0 problems, just connect shirt and turn it on. Certainly a luxury but it is nice not to worry about ice.

 

I put a scewtop Igloo and 12v boat bilge pump in the trunk (2 seats) and had no leaks and loved it. Bulkhead fittings like a boat uses are your friend. McMaster dry breaks at the shirt.

Those chillouts are nice but for $4k, there's a few other places I'd like to spend the money.

 

The ultra chiller web site looks like it's aimed at drag racers. Much less heat and time load in that sport than road racing, which might explain why they use such tiny bottles (64oz is about 10% of the typical CoolShirt/Paragon/whatever cooler).

IMHO, Chillouts only really make sense if you're going endurance racing in a series like WRL where there's no minimum pit stop time. Eliminating the 20-ish seconds it takes to change the cooler during a driver change is important to being competitive in that kind of series, so there's a direct correlation between cost and performance. I tried one last year, but took it out and sold it because it didn't deliver the cooling performance I was looking for (ice-based systems go colder).

I have an older CoolShirt cooler in my car, it works great. I like the "Evolution XL" shirt -- it's long-sleeved, SFI-rated, has twice as many tubes as the normal one, and they're on the inside of the shirt so they're right up against your skin instead of having to cool you through the shirt fabric.

Most of the older CoolShirt products are now sold under the "Paragon" brand. Apparently FAST bought the CoolShirt company but they didn't get the rights to the products, so the guys who used to manufacture them for CoolShirt are now selling them directly with the "Paragon" brand.

DIY is fine, but they can become ongoing projects where you have to debug/fix them at the track. It's not hard to waste more money by missing track sessions than you saved by building it yourself.

--Ian