When I leave my ice in the ice cube tray for an extended time (1 week?) it seems to cantract and shrink.
Does anyone know what is going on? Is it evaporating? Is my freezer too cold? Not cold enough?
Please help me save my ice.
It’s sublimating (look it up in the dictionary).
Ice sublimates (goes directly from solid to gas). Live up north where it snows a lot and you’ll see it happening!
And you thought sublimating only happened in the shrink’s office! If you want it to stop happening, put your ice in an airtight container. The ice freeze-dries because of all the breeze swirling around in your frost free freezer. The breeze is meant to evaporate the frost, but it does the same to your ice.
You can simply throw away the dinky ice and make more. After a week or so, ice will pick up food odors, and your Seven-and-Seven will taste a little like onions.
Sublimating? I don’t think so.
Modern so-called “frost-free” refrigerator/freezers use a magical thing called “heat” to get rid of the frost. Some use room air, but most actually contain heating elements that are activated regularly by a timer to introduce enough warm air into the freezer compartment to melt, then evaporate the frost. In the process, the ice cubes also begin to melt and some of the water in them also evaporates. After the defrosting cycle, the ice cubes refreeze, but they’ve lost a little of their size. Over long periods of time (many weeks or months) the ice cubes will eventually disappear completely, making your seven & seven taste positively, um, warm.
What an annoying answer. Did you catch this part:
You sound like my mother did when I was 4.
The best part of people like you is when someone comes along with the real answer shows how foolish your response really was.
Read the rest of the threads answers for a better understanding of how GQ works.
[Thread carefully edited in an effort to avoid pit-worthy material]
While frost-free freezers do have heaters to warm up the coils, the actual food in the freezer should never get above freezing - that would defeat the purpose of the freezer. So, in most freezers I would say the cubes must be sublimating. Some poorly designed freezers may melt the ice.
One way to check would be in a machine with an ice-maker. If all the cubes stick together, then they are melting a bit. If they do not stick but just shrink, they are sublimating - if they ever had liquid water on them they would stick. The sub-zero at work has a box of ice that never sticks together, so in that case sublimation is happening.
Oh, and Bizerta, how hard would it have been to say this?
They do.
My sub zero has small ice cubes that are stuck together in the bottom of the ice tray.
I’m with TBone, it’s a function of the frostfreeness.
[sub]I LOVE making up words![/sub]
No, Freedom, sublimation and evaporation are two distinct (albeit similar) actions. I assumed that you would be willing to expend some effort to do research on your own. I apologize for my incorrect assumption.
Oh, come on bizerta. What if I was as curt and short every time someone asked me a question about coal? You gotta expand upon the answer a bit, otherwise:
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The person asking it feels dumb. And I assure you, from what I have seen Freedom is certainly not that. But if you make them feel dumb, what is accomplished really? They feel bad, and are reluctant to ask again? Or it starts a fight? Hey - I sometimes am curt if I am in a hurry, or my odd sense of humor is at work, but I do try not to be.
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It doesn’t really answer the question in a way that is totally informative to the casual reader. One could have written a couple sentences, to entice someone to think about the science and the physical processes at work. I mean, shit - to an engineer like me, sublimation is cool! Look at my coal threads as an example - I get lots of follow-up and related-topic questions, because I am way too wordy and descriptive in my answers. Which I feel is fine, because people think about what I am telling them. Which also means, IMO, I have successfully fought ignorance even more.
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It just makes you look arrogant. And few want to appear that way.