I Stopped Filling Ice Trays Every Night

6 min read

The routine

For years, our evenings had the same soundtrack: the crack of an ice tray twisting over the sink. Two trays for him, two for the rotation, four in total, because one tray in the freezer takes about half a day to be useful again.

I had a system and I was weirdly proud of it. Trays stacked in order of freezing time. A specific tea towel for wrapping, a second one for drips. The kids knew not to touch the top-left shelf. That shelf was for trays, and trays were for Dad's knees after footy training, his elbow after a big weekend in the garden, my wife's ankle when she over-did it at netball. The ice went where the day had hurt most. Most nights, that was everywhere.

What I never did was the maths. Eleven minutes an evening, cracking and refilling and mopping the bench, then doing it all again at half nine because the first lot had melted. Over a year that is most of a working week, hunched over a sink, making ice for a household that treats me as a vending machine.

The night the freezer drawer gave up

The drawer runners snapped on a Tuesday. Nothing dramatic, I just pulled and the whole thing lurched forward and dumped its cargo on the tiles. Trays, bags of peas, a loaf of bread I had forgotten about. I stood there in bare feet looking at this glacier of groceries and thought: right. Enough.

A neighbour, Kerry, dropped by while I was mid-rant. She looked at the mess and said, very casually, that they had filled their last ice tray years ago. I assumed they had just given up on icing altogether. Instead she made me a cup of tea and showed me the thing on their back deck.

What Kerry showed me

It is a small cooler with a pump in the lid and a hose that clips into a cloth cuff. You fill the cooler with water and a couple of frozen bricks, wrap the cuff around whatever needs attention, and switch it on. A little pump, about as loud as a fish tank, pushes the cold water through the cuff. No bags, no towel origami, no wet jeans.

The beauty of it, and I say this as someone who ran a freezer like a logistics hub, is that the cold goes exactly where you strap it. No balancing a bag of peas on a knee and hoping it stays put through an episode of something. You sit on the couch. You stay on the couch. That alone sold me.

"Eleven minutes a night. Most of a working week, every year, spent cracking ice trays over a sink."

The cuff wraps and stays. The cooler sits next to the couch like an esky that went to uni. When he is done, he unclips, hangs the cuff over the laundry tap, and that is the entire cleanup.

What we actually got

Kerry had bought hers from a small Australian outfit. I looked them up that night and found the same kit: the Cryo Therapy Machine. It comes as the whole thing, cooler, pump, hose and one cuff, so there is no part-hunting. $499.95, which stung for about a second until I thought about the drawer, the trays, and my eleven minutes.

Nights now

The routine changed and I did not expect what happened next: I got my evening back. He settles in with the cuff on. I sit down with him instead of ferrying trays. We watch an entire episode without a freezer trip. The silicone trays that come with it freeze during the day, and the worst job in the house has quietly retired itself.

I kept one ice tray. I use it for drinks now, which is a novel experience, ice that goes in a glass instead of a tea towel.

If your freezer has a shelf you are not allowed to touch, you will know exactly who this is for.

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