No, you don’t. Pre-cooling is a concept that came about to combat heavy, thermally-sluggish plastic hard coolers that required a lot of thermal energy just to cool them down, long before the job of keeping your food and drinks cold even starts. The reason the Oyster Tempo does not need pre-cooling is due to two things: the specific materials chosen for the shell walls and core insulation, and the total weight of those materials. Our internal shell is made of aluminum. By weight, aluminum requires roughly 2.5x less thermal energy than Polyethylene (the most typical hard cooler shell material) to affect a change in its temperature. Aluminum also transfers thermal energy very efficiently. That combination means that very little energy is used from the Thermal Battery (or ice) to cool down the Tempo’s internal storage, and that that energy transfer happens very quickly; within just a few short minutes. We call this thermal agility.