Hitting 5° and below is easy, holding it is the hard part.

Most ice bath companies love to advertise how cold their chillers get. “We can hit 3°C!”—yeah, cool. But getting cold isn’t the hard part. Staying cold is.

Because the second you hit that temperature, everything is trying to pull it back up.

Heat is sneaking in from everywhere—room temperature, body heat, even the pumps themselves.

It’s like trying to fill a bucket with leaks.

At 15°C, those leaks are tiny. Easy to manage.

Drop to 10°C, and they get bigger.

But at 5°C? You’re trying to fill a bucket that’s haemorrhaging water.

And here’s what no one talks about: chilling power isn’t a straight line.

At 15°C, a chiller is cruising.

At 10°C, it’s working, but it’s fine.

Push down to 5°C, and most will fail.

Below that?

It takes a high powered and well tuned chiller to operate.

That’s the part they don’t tell you.

Hitting 5°C for a moment isn’t impressive.

I could drop a few bags of ice in a pool and it’ll get to that.

Holding it there is the real challenge.

Because when you push chillers into ultra-cold zones, physics creates more problems.

Water starts freezing in all the wrong places—inside components, around sensors, in circulation pipes.

We know this because we torture-test every unit to 3°C on a 5000L setup before they leave our warehouse.

Not just to see if they can hit that number—but to see if they can hold it.

And we do our product testing in the middle of summer on 40+ degree days, with the chiller in an old chicken shed where it goes well above 50 degrees.

And that’s where the difference between marketing hype and real engineering comes in.

A chiller might look great in perfect conditions—early morning, no users, cool air.

But what happens when the day is sweltering, you’ve got back-to-back sessions, and it needs to run for hours without a break?

That’s where most chillers collapse.

So before you chase a number on a spec sheet, ask yourself: Do you actually need 5°C?

And if the answer is yes, the only choice you have is Bergs - quite literally.