Chuck Gould wrote:
On Jun 27, 4:19?am, Short Wave Sportfishing wrote:
I watched a Mthbusters that I had missed yesterday which tested the
fastest way to cool beer.

So I tried the experiment myself yesterday with a couple of Playmate
coolers.

First cooler had a six pack of Diet Pepsi, ice and salt water. I used
about a 1/4 box of salt on the ice and in the second cooler a six pack
of Diet Pepsi with just ice. I put both coolers on the rear deck, in
the sun, of my Ranger at 6 PM.

As expected, the ice/salt combination cooled the soda to 36 degrees F
in roughly fifteen minutes which matches the Mythbusters experiment.
As of 10 PM last evening, the ice only soda only reached 45 degrees.

However, the interesting piece of this was this morning. The ice/salt
water combination over night kept the soda cooled and as of ten
minutes ago, the water was at 50 degrees F. The straight ice cooler
water was at 62 degrees.

Cool huh?

Get it - cool?

Ever make ice cream in an old fashioned, hand cranked freezer?
It works much better if you add rock salt to the ice packed around
the
canister. A pile of ice cubes will contain a lot of air pockets and
that air will never be as cold as the ice itself. By accelerating the
melt with salt, the pile of ice cubes more quickly becomes brine. As
your experiment illustrates, brine is denser than a pile of ice cubes
and that allows it to maintain temperature more effectively. The
melting of the cubes also releases the cold temperatures stored
throughout the shape, rather than merely the cold temperature stored
on the faces of the cube.

I wonder why somebody doesn't make sal****er ice cubes? Freshwater
freezes at zero degrees centigrade, but depending on the amount of
salt
in the water sal****er can resist freezing down to about -20
centigrade.
While a salt water ice cube would really screw up a drink, ice used in
coolers and other applications where it is not imbibed or consumed
would be much colder if made from salt water than when made from
fresh. I guess that once made it would be more expensive to transport
and store sal****er ice cubes....the trucks and freezers would need to
be considerably colder to keep them frozen....so that's probably one
of many reasons.



What, you don't have a brine icemaker on Xanadu?