At home I have a Rewyld ice bath hooked up to a 6kW Urban Ice Tribe (Remora F6) heat pump with a sand filter and pump assembly. When on holiday in the UK, I always take a portable ice bath with me, but the ice requirement is costly and inconvenient. I'd buy anywhere from 20-40 kg of ice a day. You get some funny looks in Tesco or Morrisons when you roll up to the checkout with a trolley full of bags of ice cubes every morning.

I recently upgraded to the Lumi recovery pro as my travel ice bath. The inflatable, insulated walls and lid help with keeping the water cool.

The chiller itself is a nice, compact unit, though the polished finish is a fingerprint magnet.

Mine arrived with the wrong type of cable fitted to it and I'm still waiting on a replacement from Lunmi more than a month later. In the interim, I've rewired the existing connector (I have a lifetime of electrical and electronics experience) to a length of the correct cable and fitted a German-made 10 mA inline non-latching RCD for additional safety.

Setting the unit up was easy, though having followed the setup instructions to the letter, the chiller wouldn't prime and I got the dreaded "E2" error. In the end, I loosened the filter cartridge with the spanner to help bleed the air which then got things moving.

I really like to put stuff to the test, so I filled up the Recovery Pro to about the level where it's almost brimmed when I'm in it and set the temperature to 3°C.
Cooling takes an age - about 1°C per hour drop is the most you can expect. It's summer here in the South East and peak ambient temps have been 25 to 27°C the last couple of days.

WiFi connection to the Smart Life App (same as I use for the Remora unit) was straight forward. Besides temperature setting and on/off control, it also provides temperature graphs.

The unit is much noisier than I expected (compressor and fan noise), the pump is almost silent. It's on a par with my Remora setup, but this only runs for short periods. By contrast, the LUMI miniULTRA needs to run all the time.

By 08:00 this morning (powered up at 16:00 yesterday @19.1°C starting temperature), it was down to an indicated 5.7°C. A quick check with a calibrated thermometer and it was actually reading 4.7°C, so I entered a -1.0°C offset in the P3 calibration setup.

At 10:00, the temperature bottomed out at 4.5°C and then started to climb as the ambient temperature rose above 22°C. It was up to 11°C when I turned it off at 13:00.

With only a 770W cooling capacity, forget 3°C ice baths in the summer. It just isn't beefy enough to shift that much heat.

For my purposes - being able to ice bath when holidaying at various Airbnbs around the UK, it'll do the job, but as a fixed, every day, use-it-at-home solution, you need to spend more and get a bigger unit, unless you live somewhere like Shetland, where it doesn't get that warm!

The worst bit about the chiller is its energy consumption. I have a pretty sophisticated energy monitoring setup at home. We have heavily invested in SolarPV and battery storage, so we like to know how much energy we're using and where it's going.

In 22 hours, the chiller chewed it's way through 11.2 kWh (units) of electricity trying to get to 3°C, and it didn't get anywhere near there. In summer, expect it to run flat out 24/7 consuming ~500 Watts unless you like to cold plunge at more tepid temperatures. That's 12 units a day at whatever you're paying per unit.

During the summer, my energy is essentially free from SolarPV and anything I import between 02:00 and 05:00 on my tariff is currently 17 pence per unit.

By contrast, my 6 kW Remora uses about 20 kWh per week. It runs from 05:00 to 08:00 every day, sometimes a little longer at weekends if I'm being lazy and it's always at 2°C when I get in. Typically, having been off for 21 hours, it takes about an hour to hit 2°C and cycles off and on between 2 and 3°C.

My fixed chiller setup was twice the price of the miniULTRA, but it has 8 x the heat pump capacity and a proper ~20 litre filter canister (which I've filled glass media) and comes with a substantial pump. With a few hundred pounds a year saved in electricity, it would only take a few years to recoup the outlay.

Top ice bath

This chiller struggles to get Lumi Pod Pro water down to temperature. In 16-18 degree ambient temperature the chiller won't get the water below 8-9 degrees. Limits the time you can have an ice bath below 5-6 degrees to first thing in the morning with the chiller on all overnight. Don't expect this to get your water down to 3-5 unless ambient is down well under 10 degrees.

Lumi customer service is poor at best on top of this, they offered to return and issue replacement but logistics nightmare over a 2 week period just meant it was turning into more hassle than it was worth. I'll purchase another chiller elsewhere in the coming months

What an upgrade! We were ice bathing in what we thought was ice water (with 7 large ice blocks), we thought it was cold until we started using the pro pod with the chiller unit. Left it running through the night and woke up to the coldest ice bath yet. So far really impressed with the upgrade quality and not having to mess about with ice blocks after every use is a massive win when you’re busy.

A lovely little compact unit that looks great and is pretty quiet too. It does however take a while to get the ice tub cool and its obviously using up a lot of electric to get it down to a cold temperature.