HOUSTON – Nuggets, cubes or crescents, how you like your ice in Texas isn't as important as having lots of it. We gotta keep the sweet tea cold.
The Ice Genie promises to save you space in your freezer. The commercial claims the little canister can make and hold enough ice to replace 10 ice trays in your freezer. It costs $19.88 at Walmart. Meteorologist Britta Merwin agreed to try it out.
Merwin followed the directions in the package and filled the Ice Genie with water. She put it in her freezer overnight. The Genie is small, so it doesn't take up much space.
The commercial says once the water is frozen, you can just lift out an inner plastic cylinder from the Genie, squeeze the sides to empty ice cubes into the bucket and then refill and freeze it again.
But Merwin had a hard time just getting the lid off of the frozen ice genie. After a minute and a half of tugging and pulling, Britta brought a butter knife to the battle to pry the lid off. Then she still had more work to get the plastic insert out of the Genie.
Once it worked, she was able to squeeze small ice cubes out of the soft plastic.
She would have to do that three times to get 120 cubes.
"They say you can dump it in into a bowl to save them, but who wants to put a bowl in their freezer?" Merwin asked.
"So the second option is put the plastic back in and get all the ice cubes in the middle." she explained.
When she filled it up and froze the water a second time, it all came out as one giant chunk of ice.
The commercial claims the Ice Genie can hold up to 3 batches of ice cubes or 120 ice cubes at a time.
Merwin asked her 6-year-old to count them. It was all good until he came to the monster block of ice.
"I thought the Ice Genie was really bad," said Merwin. "It did not pass. It was hard to use. It did make me laugh. So that's a positive. I would not recommend it to a friend. And I give it a big fail, sadly."