5 ms·
A test with the freezer as full as possible with just water would be interesting as a best-case set of data points to compare against. I always keep containers
by pengaru 6y ago
A test with the freezer as full as possible with just water would be interesting as a best-case set of data points to compare against.
I always keep containers full of water in the bowels of my refrigerators/freezers only removing them when the space is required for food. There's not much sense in keeping empty volumes of air in a refrigerated space.
- Mathnerd314 6y agoWhen there's no airflow in the refrigerator, then it takes a long time to chill food, the reverse of how a blast chiller can chill food really quickly by moving lots of air. But maybe the water chills the air to make up for this, IDK. It would be interesting to experiment.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoChilling food super swiftly / immediately is rarely a concern for regular home residents. It is a public health concern at scale. Two overlapping but divergent scenarios.
- OJFord 6y agoChilling drinks quickly is though. (Or gazpacho, thought that might be shot down as a bit niche though. But it is lovely this time of year (in the Northern hemisphere)!)
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoWhy?
- OJFord 6y agoWhy might I want to chill drinks quickly? Because I (or someone) want(s) a chilled drink, and forgot to put it in earlier, or it was only just bought/arrived. I've known people keep celebratory champagne permanently chilled in case of an unexpected call for it; I semi-frequently put beer or white wine in the freezer for 15-30mins ish because I didn't think to put it in the fridge earlier (or had to take them out to make room something more critically needing to be kept cool).
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoOh, right, yeah that's obvious now. Nothing to do with food safety though.
- WouterSpaak 6y agoI tend to chuck in a handful of ice cubes into my gazpacho, it doesn't dilute the mass all that much and really helps with the blender warming up the soup.
- pengaru 6y agoIt's like pre-loading your refrigerator/freezer with a sack of ice. If your power goes out long enough for your food to spoil, what will you do? Well, maybe you'll go buy some sacks of ice to throw in there until the power turns back on. Ok, if you have the space to spare, why wait for the failure to go fetch the emergency ice? Just fill the empty space with ballast water and you're ahead of the problem. Once the thermal mass is at the desired temperature, it will help bring newly introduced items to the desired temperature faster, not slower. The only time it slows down the cooling is when first introduced @ a warmer temp, or when there's been a failure for long enough to let everything warm up. But note that in the failure scenarios, the thermal mass helps keep the space cool for longer than had it not been there. Just remove the warmed ballast when the failure is over to let the perishables re-cool first, then reintroduce the ballast when appropriate ... perhaps even pre-cooling it elsewhere first.
- Xylakant 6y agoPractically all of your food has a thaw point that’s below the thaw point of ice. The energy absorbed in the phase transition of ice to water massively eclipses the energy to heat up the same amount of water by one degree. In effect, all your food will protect your newly acquired ice from melting. You want something that has a thaw point way below your foods thaw point - add salt t your ice.
- ghaff 6y agoI had never thought about this but you're right. Big frozen water/soda bottles of ice still increase the overall thermal mass and will almost certainly slow full thawing. Otherwise, ice blocks in a cooler wouldn't work. But you're really better off adding salt to those bottles so they absorb energy when melting below the freezing point of pure water (and frozen food).
- jayrot 6y agoWhile that's true, since the current topic of this conversation is about emergency preparedness, I think having potable water (in ice form) would be much preferable to salted water.
- dawnerd 6y agoI can say that if I load up my fridge, especially the top it will freeze up the fan and stop working altogether. Airflow is essential if you have a poorly designed Samsung where it’s a common problem to ice over.
- miked85 6y agoDealing with this now, it seems like Samsung refrigerators need a monthly defrost to actually work properly.
- k2xl 6y agoThat is a very interesting and clever idea. Thanks for the tip
- foota 6y agoInteresting, the idea being that the air gets cycled every time you open the door?
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y agoAnd that water has a higher specific heat than air.
- foota 6y agoI don't think this should matter though? In theory the longer amount of time it would take to cool down would be countered by the length of time the compressor needs to run to cool it down. Unless you factor in some minimum amount of time the compressor runs for, which probably isn't too unreasonable.
- oehtXRwMkIs 6y agoI don't understand why that doesn't make sense. What you do with containers of water is what doesn't make sense to me.
- ghaff 6y agoI keep soda/water bottles in a secondary downstairs freezer. They're my ice packs for throwing in coolers. (This, of course, makes more sense if you have more than a primary refrigerator/freezer).
- axaxs 6y agoGoogle 'icebox', which is coincidentally what my Dad still calls refrigerators. Different times.
- mnw21cam 6y agoSmall fridges sometimes have an icebox inside them, which is a different thing to a fridge/freezer which actually has a separate door, or a dedicated freezer. The icebox is just a part of the fridge compartment, weakly insulated from the rest of the compartment, and the cooling plate is located inside the icebox. The rest of the fridge is kept cool mainly from cold leaking out the icebox.
- bacon_waffle 6y agoWater has a much higher heat capacity than water, and obviously much higher density too. By filling freezer space with water, the thermal mass of the freezer goes up, and it will stay cold for longer in a power outage.
- OJFord 6y agoI think your second 'water' was meant to be 'air'?
- bacon_waffle 6y agoOops, yes...
- aaron695 6y agoYou'd be better off having lidded containers with no water. Since it stops the air loss every time it's opened. But you don't lose the energy when you take them out. Water is ~ 1000 times heaver than air so for a fridge, removing the water is the same as letting out air 1000 times. Freezer is worse because there is also the phase change in the water. But having ice is useful.
- dantillberg 6y agoIt depends what you're optimizing for. If you're primarily interested in resilience to power outages, then maybe you are OK with the wasted energy used to freeze/re-freeze the extra water.
- aaron695 6y agoYes I'm wrong. You would have a larger thermal mass but the same surface area so it should keep for longer.
- Xylakant 6y agoWater is not a good choice to optimize for this. Most energy from the ambient air gets consumed at the thawing point of the medium - 0 degrees for water. So water/ice will keep freezer at 0 degrees for longer, but that’s not an attractive goal for a freezer - you want some cooling medium that does the phase change at a colder temperature (adding copious amounts of salt to the water would go a long way) Professional cooler packs can have that point down as far as -35 Celsius.
- pengaru 6y agoYeah well, water is practically free, readily available, relatively benign if it leaks, and can be a hydrating life-saver in a pinch. So it's a pretty good option as something other than air.
- Xylakant 6y agoKeep in mind that everything with some amount of sugar or salt has a thaw point below 0 degrees. Practically all of your food will have thawed by the point the ice melts - so you’re dumping a lot of energy into freezing water that will be mostly useless at the point disaster strikes. Adding salt to your water will substantially lower the thawing point and it’s still cheap and widely available. If you want to prep for cases when you need water you’d be better off keeping your freezer cold with a suitable medium and have a few 30liter buckets of water with some sort of additive that prevents spoilage (silver ions for example) or have some packs of bottled water around.
- sleavey 6y agoI do this with my fridge too, always making sure the back is full of beer.
- Gibbon1 6y agoYou're going to be the only victim of a hurricane whose cause of death is listed as liver failure.