The Teen brought some home from the neighborhood national night out festivities at the pool where he guards. He wants to keep it in the freezer over night and have some fun with it tomorrow.
I’m not even sure if it will keep over night in a regular freezer and I am headed over to Google to find out, in the mean time.
What are some “fun” things to do with dry ice.
Nothing particularly dangerous please. It a mom thing. 
Put it in a bucket of water for that cool Halloween fog effect.
Should keep for a few days in the freezer in a LOOSLY sealed container or, better still, in an open box.
“Nothing dangerous”?!
[Screws up large page of notes in disgust]
You could use it to make heavier-than-air balloons. But the dry ice in a bottle, then stretch the balloon over the bottle. Yeah, yippy :rolleyes:
Use in an ice-cream maker instead of salted ice water.
Shame it wasn’t liquid N2. That stuff is really fun! Mmm, make ice-cream in 30 seconds…
Some guys from my dorm last year used dry ice as a senior prank.
My friend Jon and I only knew because we happened to be eating late, and it was very, very hot, so we’d hoped to find an air-conditioned place to take our food. Not finding one, and sick of walking, we settled for the area near the basement elevator and the cafeteria door. Some guys from the “comedy” (and I use the term loosely) troupe brought some dry ice in while we were eating and put it in a trash can. It made a very interesting and dramatic effect to begin with. However, no one noticed!!! It was absolutely ridiculous!!! Someone would come down in the elevator or stairs and sort of go, “Dum de dum de dum, smoke covering the floor, gee I wonder what’s in the vending machine, dum de dum de dum.” Jon and I sat there for probably 45 minutes, eating and talking, and no one cared about the dry ice. So, as a senior prank (which is what we thought it was), it failed.
So use it to impress yourselves, not others!
I have heard that dy ice + soapwater = lotsa bubbles. True?
I’m not recommending these things: just letting you know:
If combined with water in a sealed container, it could explode.
If put down someone’s shirt as a joke, it could cause cold burns.
Go to Walmart and hold a spoon against it. Then see how long it takes before somebody punches you. Fun!
I don’t suppose you have a urinal in your house? Dry ice in a urinal is yots of yuks.
Find a buddy with a truck. Have someone sit in the bed of the truck with the dry ice, a large bucket of hot water, and a bottle of dishwashing liquid. While driving along merrily, dump most or all of the dishwashing liquid into the bucket, then drop in the dry ice.
Whee, bubbles! Mounds and mounds of bubbles, filling the bed of the truck and wheeling off in merry chunks as you drive!
Hey Freiheit:
True. It actually looks really cool.
Not sure if it follows the “nothing particularly dangerous” caveat, but you can use dry ice to carbonate your fruit juice/iced tea/whatever. Drop a morsel into your glass of juice, cover, & shake for a bit. The longer you shake, the more carbonation. Also, the more you shake, the more likely your glass is to explode.
If you happen to have access to microfuge tubes (found in any molecular biology lab), you can make mini-bombs that will scare the hell outta people.
-Apoptosis
Whatever you do DON"T let them put it in a coke bottle and then screw the cap back on. It will explode. In our city my sons could have been charged with making a bomb.
Be careful handling it. One of my sons got burned for holding it too long.
Never handle dry ice with bare hands. Use cotton or leather gloves, or better yet, tongs.
Take a bucket and add some dish detergent and water. Mix it together and then add some of the dry ice to the bucket. This will make a foam column bubble out of the bucket. If you pop the bubbles, smoke comes out.
Man, I wish I knew the bubble trick about a week ago. I actually work in a biotech lab, and we get shipments of cells every now and then that come packed in dry ice. I took some home one day to have fun, but all we really did was put it in our drinks…oh, and a pot of water on the floor, which did confuse a lot of people coming into the kitched,
“What the Hell are you cooking?”
Done the bottle trick.
Yeah, VERY dangerous. Took a 20oz, dry-ice and water. Set the bottle on the driveway pointing straight up, put a bucket over it.
That bucket went HIGH. That was a LOT of force.
It’s illegal, and it damn well should be.
(not that I won’t do it again)
Steve
If you drink anything that had dry ice in it, be sure that the dry ice is fully “melted” first. My husband and I, when we were in college, were at a party that had punch with dry ice in it. He hadn’t had much to drink when he became very ill, feeling like he had to vomit but not bringing anything up, mostly dry heaving and his stomach felt horrible. Our best guess was that he had accidentally swallowed a piece of dry ice when he chugged some punch, and when it hit his stomach acid, it transformed to gas, and that made him feel horribly bloated and produced the vomiting reaction.
Years later, he was being treated for an ulcer, and I guess the ulcerated area in the stomach appeared to have a scarred area around/next to it. The doctor said he certainly couldn’t rule out the possibility that the dry ice had first adhered to the wall of the stomach at that point and burned it.
2 chunks of dry ice, a pound of hamburger, pair of shoes (preferably boots) you don’t care about, some water, and an elevator.
Stop elevator at the top of a building just before “rush time” starts.
Put shoes/boots in middle of floor put one piece of dry ice in each shoe.
Throw hamburger around the inside of the elvator. Get on walls. make mess.
Pour some water into the shoes.
Send elevator to lobby.
Don’t get caught.
Sad to say, I’ve seen Big-Ole-Steve’s story topped. Some time back, one of my more foolish coworkers decided to seal up a spilled package containing about 5 kg of dry ice in a 20 gallon steel drum. A few hours later, the lid of the drum had bulged up about 2 inches. When some less foolish coworkers (very carefully!) loosened the bolt holding the lid on, it shot up about 80 feet, bounced off the ceiling, and took a chunk of concrete out of the floor when it came back down.
The moral of this story? Please do not blow yourself to smithereens with dry ice sealed up in closed containers.
P.S. It’s not a bad idea to have your fun in a well-ventilated area so nobody passes out from oxygen deprivation.
I’d be rather careful about putting a large quantity of dry ice in a freezer, especially overnight.
Depending on how tight of a seal you have on your freezer compartment you might have the freezer door pop open.
As for handling dry ice:
Cyro gloves work well for long term handling (more than 15 min)
Short term handling ~2-10 seconds seconds or so CAN be done bare handed. I dig samples out of dry ice barehanded or with latex gloves all the time, but I briefly handle the dry ice and I always keep moving it around on my hands (don’t let dry ice come to rest on 1 part of your hands!!!)
Latex gloves ~10-20 seconds… the main difference is if the ice freezes to wet gloves you can remove the glove much easier…
DRY materials are important, water freezes very quickly with direct contact with dry ice. So wet hands = BAD thing.
CO2 exposure…
Vaporizing dry ice tends to go to the lowest gas imperiable surface… (the whole hot air rises thingie)
I wouldn’t breath the cool/cold cloud of vapor that forms when you dump it in water. Not only is it colder than ambient temperature it also have little O2 in it.
Adding dry ice to pool = cool effect for a dinner party
Dry Ice + pool + swimmer = BAD idea. Cold burns, a layer of CO2 rich air just above the water could cause all sorts of bad ideas.
Fun things to do:
95% ethanol (denatured rubbing alcohol works well for this) + dry ice = a freezing slurry that’s VERY cold (warmer than dry ice) and fluid. You can spread it on your skin (in very very small amounts… we’re talking like 300 uL volume here (a water drop is around 50-100uL) feels tingly, very cold and evaporates quickly while forming little bubbles of carbonation.
Vary the %age of ethanol for different freezing hardnesses. It’s kinda cool.
Richly dyed (I’m not sure if residental retail dyes would work, but reagent grade dyes work) fluids + dry ice CAN give you lightly tinted clouds.
Take a flat relatively smooth surface and vaporize a pellet of dry ice so that it’s smooth on one side. You can now make an ‘air car’. Or an object with a greatly reduced Coefficent of Friction as the dry ice (if its a small piece) will ride a cushion of vaporizing CO2.
Take a metal block with a hole in it (an aluminum heating core from a dry heat bath is ideal) drop a piece of dry ice into it and using a pen press the dry ice into the hole. The ice will vaporize the second it touches the metal (which is so much warmer and conducts temperature fairly well) building up pressurized CO2 under the dry ice… This should warm up the pressurized gas (if I remember my basic chemistry) causing the bottom of the piece of ice to vaporize even faster, the top part of the dry ice that you’re pushing into the hole will melt faster and you’ll have a VERY basic steam whistle.
If you have large chunks of dry ice… you can do some very interesting things… but these are reasonably more danagerous.
Take the dry ice and fully submerge it. Wait 5 min or so… what should happen is a shield of frozen water will surround MOST of the piece of dry ice. There will be holes in it for pressurized CO2 to escape. Now, manipulate the chunck underwater so one end is near the surface, take a pointy dohickey and poke a hole in the ice shield around the dry ice.
This will create a second hole for CO2 to escape, one that works with the water pressure for a more favorable pathway, so the other holes SHOULD close up.
Now you have a piece of dry ice, covered by a gas imperiable shield of regular ice with a hole at one end for gas to escape…
All you need to do is weigh it down and you’ve got a dry ice torpedo.
It’ll get easier to manipulate as the water the dry ice is in gets colder.
And even easier to manipulate 20-30% ethanol.
You forgot the 1/4 pound of artfully draped chitterlings and cheap toupee for maximum effect.
And where exactly does one get liquid nitrogen Rabid_Squirrel? I’ve tasted ice cream made with it and it’s really good. The only problem is I dont think N2 is as easily available as dry ice. Does anyone know where I could get some?
Oh yeah…last halloween the chem major down the hall from me brought a bucket of dry ice home with him. I have video of us dropping the ice in a juice container with hot water, closing the cap and then opening the container moments later only to have the cap shatter into many pieces. We also placed the closed bottle under a metal screen garbage can and let it explode! Good times!