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Making dry ice at home
- pmx 3y agoit's actually much easier than this makes out. Sodastream bottle, some kind of cloth like a tea towel, pillowcase or even a sock over the end, let 'er rip and you have a chunk of dry ice.
- function_seven 3y agoThat’s cheating! You outsourced the pressurization step. :)
- pmx 3y agoindeed! I also don't dig my own well every time i wish to boil water for tea!
- civilitty 3y agoYou're supposed to just dig the well once.
- mometsi 3y agoRelying on past me is cheating. Current me needs to finish it all in one go.
- amelius 3y ago“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe” -- Carl Sagan
- knodi123 3y agorating: 2 stars I substituted brown sugar for primordial quarks, and I used an air fryer instead of a big bang. apple pie came out mushy and bland.
- chaps 3y agoDone this with 10lb CO2 containers used for brewing and such. Really doesn't take much CO2 to make a good amount of dry ice.
- JohnFen 3y agoAt that point, why not just buy the dry ice directly? It would surely be cheaper...
- doloputer 3y agoI have never seen plain dry ice for sale anywhere, though I have not gone looking too hard. I have seen the dumping some liquid CO2 into a special sock method though.
- SkyPuncher 3y agoI see it in supermarkets, often kept by the customer service counter. I've seen several places requiring ID to purchase dry-ice to avoid youngsters making soda-bottle bombs with it.
- HWR_14 3y agoIt's dangerous enough (suffocation, freezing) that there are plenty of reasons to require an age minimum. I don't think I've seen dry-ice in supermarkets since COVID started, but I haven't been looking much either.
- gmiller123456 3y agoNever disappeared around here. A lot of people rely on it to get their frozen stuff home without thawing out. So it's more available in rural places where people will have a long drive home.
- sneak 3y agoAhhh, that makes a ton more sense now. As one of the aforementioned soda-bottle-bomb-making-youngsters, I had no idea what people's legitimate uses for it were outside of party tricks.
- 3y ago
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- at_a_remove 3y agoDry ice has become really quite scarce in the last five years. It was explained to me at the ice shop I used to visit that there were changes in some shipping regulations, not too sensible ones, that resulted in a much higher price and a bunch of people just dropping out of the business. Indeed, that place finally got out of the dry ice business as well. Airgas has some pretty tight hours and in smaller towns, they don't even have it stock. Penguin supposedly has it in different places like Walmart but it is a complete gamble. Local grocery stores have bailed out. I've had no luck at ice cream places.
- JohnFen 3y agoIn my part of the US, it's ubiquitous. I don't think there's a major grocery store around here that doesn't sell bricks of it. But it all appears to be manufactured locally, so perhaps the shipping regulations aren't so impactful here.
- londons_explore 3y agoIn the UK and most of europe, dry ice is limited to industrial/scientific uses. No retail shops sell it.
- JohnFen 3y agoThat's a real shame. It's very useful stuff!
- omginternets 3y ago"The US innovates; the EU regulates", as the saying goes. Makes me sad...
- Timon3 3y agoAnd as usual, the saying is BS - I was able to find an online shop selling the stuff to private people in Germany in a few seconds.
- 3y ago
- wrs 3y agoOur chem lab in high school (in the 80s) had a CO₂ tank attached to a metal cylinder similar to the 3D printed one shown here. You just hooked it up and turned on the valve to create a puck of dry ice. So if you need it frequently and have trouble finding it for sale, maybe look for the modern equivalent. (It being high school, about 5% of the dry ice created was used for legitimate chemistry purposes.)
- RC_ITR 3y agoOne of my craziest learnings as a non-Chemist taking my basic college chem was that liquid nitrogen is usually much cheaper than milk on a volume basis. It makes sense ofc - nitrogen is our most abundant gas after all, but it still really blew my mind for something that seemed so exotic.
- bluGill 3y agoIt probably had a vortex tube in there. I've seen them for sale, but never really had a need for enough dry ice to ask if it was worth buying. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex_tube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex_tube
- fnordpiglet 3y agoI tried to make a TEC chip dry ice maker. It was hard to manage all the heat the TECs made. I ended up with an elaborate water cooled device with a large copper block acting as a thermal mass interfacing with a TEC tower and 3d printed insulated chambers etc. I got a little bit to freeze, and I could get temperatures close to freezing nitrogen, but eventually my wife made me clean up my huge mess in the dining room.
- spdustin 3y agoMy FAVORITE thing to do with dry ice is make ice cream. It’s the smoothest ice cream you can make at home, and as a delightful bonus, it’s fizzy! You have to crush the dry ice into graupel size (even better, into snow) for it to be safe, and it can be super messy if you add the dry ice too quickly. It’s important to make the pieces as small as possible to ensure they fully sublimate, and no dry ice is remaining in the mixture where it could be ingested. Frostbitten tongues are terrible; frostbitten stomachs are a threat to life. Just start with a normal ice cream base in a large mixing bowl. If you have a stand mixer with a blade suitable for ice cream, that’s even better. Slowly (or there’ll be a big mess) add crushed/pulverized dry ice while mixing. Keep going until the ice cream is stiffer than soft-serve, but not so hard that you can’t mix it any more. It’s colder than normal ice cream, so eat small mouthfuls. But damn, it’s got an indescribable /zing/ from the little bit of CO2 that dissolves into solution with ice cream base. SO GOOD.