As a woman of average height, I haven’t been able to see inside my camping fridge for years. It was a stretch on tiptoes when I bought my Triton brand new about eight years ago but after a lift kit and larger tyres, it’s now virtually impossible. I’ve had to get creative with how I get stuff in and out of the fridge.
By ‘get creative’, I mean I ask my husband for help. Repeatedly. The kids ask him as well because they can’t reach inside the fridge either. Obviously, he gets jack of this and develops selective hearing. When this happens, I drag a stool of sorts over but by the end of the trip, I usually just end up jumping up and grabbing blindly at whatever I touch first in the fridge.
So when Clearview offered to send me one of their drop-down Easy Slides to try out from a woman’s perspective, I jumped at the chance. Here’s why you should get one too.
It lowers your fridge to a usable height
The Clearview Easy Slide fridge lowers your fridge down to nearly the length of one of your kid’s rulers. If you only need to lower the fridge a little bit, you can do that with the Easy Slide as well. It has lock-in or ‘stopping’ points at 0mm, 50mm, 115mm, 200mm and a maximum of 290mm.
This makes it really versatile as family and friends of varying heights can just drop it down to the level required.
It’s SUPER easy to use and no muscles are required
The Clearview Easy Slide looks like it could potentially be hard to use but it’s actually not. The weight of the fridge does all the work for you so all you need to do is pull in a safety latch and push down slightly. To get it back up, you pull in the safety latch again and a set of monster 1500N gas struts push it back up for you, completely neutralising the weight of the fridge.
To prove a point, you can watch me use it one-handed below.
It’s built solid AF
Lots of things in my 4WD rattle, but not the Easy Slide. It doesn’t rattle at all! This fridge slide is built solid AF. It feels really sturdy when you use it and the best part, you can load up to 180kg on top of it. It would be hard to reach this limit even with a fully loaded fridge.
The Clearview Easy Slide is not just for fridges
Although I use it for my 40L Engel camping fridge, the Clearview Easy Slide can be used for batteries, toolboxes and anything that can be secured properly and is of suitable dimensions. Just don’t go over the 180kg weight limit.
If you’ve been eyeing off the Clearview pantry, this can also be mounted onto the Easy Slide.
It doesn’t require any tricky maintenance
Not much maintenance is required for the Easy Slide. All you need to do is keep debris out of the moving parts such as the runners and lock leavers. If they get really dirty after a particularly awesome outback trip, you can clean the bearing runners with a degreaser and reapply marine-grade grease afterwards.
More information on the Clearview Easy Slide
The Clearview Easy Slide comes in three different sizes and suits most 12-volt fridges. I’m using a 40 Litre 60th Anniversary Engel on the ES-100 Plus slide. You can easily work out which size slide you need with the handy guide about halfway down this page. All you need to do is select your fridge make and model from the drop-down box.
The latest Easy Slides have extended travel runners that slide out an extra 120mm. This means you don’t have to mount it flush against the tailgate or canopy, making it much more user-friendly for those with newer 4WDs.
The verdict
In general, the Clearview Easy Fridge Slide is a great, quality product that really does solve the problem of fridge accessibility well. The only thing to watch out for is those camping with younger kids. You’ll need to be careful with little fingers when raising and lowering the slide as it works with a scissor-point mechanism.
It’s one of those camping items that you put off buying because they’re a bit on the pricey side. However, once you get one it becomes a “Why didn’t I get one of these sooner?” type piece of gear. You’ll quickly realise that it was worth every cent and you now can’t live without it.
