I have soda pop cans within a cooler. How do I chill them quickly and keep them cool for the longest period of time. (The ice supply is limited.)
Should I stack the ice above the resulting water and keep stacking it for as long as possible or level it within the cooler at first even though water conducts heat better than air?
Should I add water initially? Salt?
Do I pour off water as it rises above the cans?
As someone who uses coolers a lot I’d say these two goals are at odds. To chill them quickly add some water. This exposes the entire surface of the can to the 32 degree water. This decreases your total chillability time, however, since you had to chill the water.
For maximum endurance of chill I put the ice in dry. Water will form fast enough, thank you, and the metal of the cans conduct heat very nicely. I don’t drain my meltwater, either. I figure I’ve invested some of my ice in lowering its temperature and it’s now acting as a heat sink to extend my chilling time. I’m guessing that the insulation of the cooler makes the difference in heat transfer fairly small. FWIW
I too am an expert on keeping beverages cool in a cooler.
Do not put water in your cooler. As previously mentioned, the water will form soon enough.
Do not drain the water as it melts. I have opened coolers days later to find very chilly water and no ice. If you pour it out as it forms, you will end up with a cooler full of dry warm drinks.
Do not add salt. Salt will melt your ice (think icy sidewalks)
As for arranging them, I don’t think this matters much. What matters is getting the most ice you can without sacrificing beverage count.
If you would like to see Daddy’s Cooler Clinic I will be at Lowes Motorspeedway this weekend.
A college trick-
If you have a warm “soda” can that you need cold quickly:
place the can in a u shaped depresion in the ice cubes, then quickly roll the can using a hand over hand method. This causes the can to cool off very quickly. In about 30 seconds the can will be cold enough to drink.
Not really sure the reason this works but it does.
Notwithstanding Daddy’s great advice on three of four points, I must disagree with #3.
Exactly–it does melt the ice. That does not mean it makes it warmer! It just lowers the freezing point of the ice. (Chemists will probably take some technical exception but let’s please just worry about the practical effects.) Adding salt to ice is the old-fashioned way to freeze ice cream. The liquid water is colder than the freezing point, and makes more surface contact with the ice cream container. So adding salt to the ice will cool the drinks faster, and should have no impact either way on how long they will stay cold.
Good point, I forgot about the ice cream. But IIRC from high school chemistry, doesn’t it take more energy to warm the ice to melting temp AND THEN convert the water from solid to liquid AND THEN raise the water to ambient temp as opposed to simply warming the salty water to ambient temp?
I will have to do extensive research on this. . .
As any salt water fisherman can tell you, you can keep your fish and your beer icy cold if you add some salt water to the cooler. You get a nice slushy effect, and beer is much colder.
No exception taken – that’s exactly what happens, though we call it “freezing poiont depression.”
It takes energy to dissolve the salt in water; it takes energy to melt the ice; it takes energy to heat the water. Remember, when the freezing point is lowered, there is a much larger difference between the melting temp. and ambient temp. I’m not going to do the math, but I’ll go out on a limb and guess that at least as much heat is needed to raise the entire system to ambient temperature, and that the heat transfer is much faster with the salt.
I feel silly going on about this but oh well,
Obviously the addition of salt lowers both the temperature and the freezing point of the water. So would it be true that if your main objective was to cool it quickly you should add salt but if your main objective was to have the cooler stay cold as long as possible you should leave the salt out?
Besides, who wants a salty beer can?!
Yes, it takes energy. That’s the whole point: The ice melting uses up energy, and that energy comes from your pop. Pop loses energy = Pop gets colder. In fact, most of the cooling from ice comes from the melting, rather than the mere fact that the ice is cold.
Or you could get really hardcore about it. Do you live near an Air Force base?