ZAKVOP 2L Insulated Water Bottle with Straws&3 Lids

 

My other 64 oz stainless steel water bottle is a BJPKPK (I’m aware that these are Chinese companies, but you’d think someone could come up with more sensical names if trying to sell these in the American market); for reference, that water bottle outperformed a Hydroflask for cold retention when I reviewed it last October.

For this experiment I compared that 64 oz BJPKPK to this 64 oz ZAKVOP.
Each vessel was dry at the start, and at room temperature.
Each was prepared with exactly 4 cups of cold tap water (allowed to run for a minute beforehand, so that each bottle’s water be of uniform temperature).
Each received 1 tray (14 cubes) of uniformly sized ice cubes.
Each was closed with a solid (non-straw) lid, gently shaken for 5 seconds, and placed away from windows & in the same location inside my 65 degree home.
I started the timer at 1030.
I checked the bottles every 2-3 hours to make sure each had ice and to give them another gentle 5 second shake.

They each contained a fair amount of ice in them when I went to bed, at a little after midnight.
At 0900 (22.5 hours elapsed) they both still had a little ice left inside (lucky for me, otherwise quantifying this test would have been impossible). I stopped the timer, strained-out the remaining ice for each, placed that ice into separate cups, allowed those to fully melt, and then measured for volume.

The official winner was the ZAKVOP, with more ice having remained unmelted inside the vessel (a tiny bit shy of 20 milliliters, which poured back into the ice tray represented ONE ice cube), compared to the BJPKPK’s just over 15 milliliters. With such a small difference I’d consider the performance of these bottles to be about the same overall. Your cold icy drinks shouldn’t start warming-up (ie once all ice has melted) for about 18 to 24 hours, perhaps LONGER if you started with more ice (there WAS room in theses bottles for more), but of course SHORTER (1) if less ice is being used, (2) if you’re starting with a room temperature liquid as opposed to COLD wintertime tap, (3) if the bottles are in summertime ambient temperatures, such as inside your car, (4) if exposed to sunshine, like in a campsite or on a trail, (5) if carried in a backpack next to your body’s heat, (6) if being opened to drink from….. LOTS of variables are possible, so results will obviously vary. But since the BJPKPK had previously beaten the Hydroflask in a controlled experiment such as this one, then by association so does this ZAKVOP water bottle outperform Hydroflask!

Two of the 3 included lids screwed-on perfectly, and I detected zero leaking when full of water and turned upside-down for an hour in my dish drying rack (no matter which lid I used). My star deduction is based on the basic solid-handled lid not screwing on smoothly. I determined the problem to be with the lid itself (unfortunately, since that’s the one I prefer to use), NOT with the stainless steel threads at the mouth of the bottle; both the two other lids AND a wide mouth flip-lid (off a 20 oz Hydroflask) screwed-on normally/smoothly. I like that they made this bottle so that other brands’ wide mouth lids are compatible (NOT so for the BJPKPK, which has a wider mouth & thus requires a larger diameter lid… AND that lid is MALE-threaded, making it non-compatible regardless of size).

The little carabiner (aluminum? maybe plastic? definitely not magnetic) was useless to me. The braided handle is color-coordinated (nice touch) and could be useful for carrying purposes, but I don’t expect to ever depend on the cheap tiny compass embedded within.

While I’m sad that the most functional lid (for me) was problematic, I still recommend this ZAKVOP bottle for its cold storage performance. It slightly outperformed the bottle that had significantly outperformed Hydroflask, despite the Hydroflask 64 oz growler’s price point being about double (unless found on-sale). This is a good buy.