Can You Speed Up Ice Tray Freezing?

[gravenewworld]

Don't know how much of a difference this will make, but try using distilled water instead of tap water. It might make a little bit of a difference since tap water probably needs to be colder to freeze than distilled water because of all the crap in there.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Well, as the water gets colder, then it will take longer and longer to freeze, won't it?

Yes, they'd have to keep reheating it to get it to freeze faster, wouldn't they?

 

[Cybersteve]

I don't have an ice-maker fridge because they are too wide and I've recently re-modelled my kitchen.

Many people here in the UK have a fridge-freezer where the fridge sits above the freezer.
Why doesn't someone invent a fridge-freezer with an ice maker between the fridge and freezer? In that way it would take up the same floor space but just be slightly taller. I'm sure there'd be a market.

 

[daniel_i_l]

About the hot water freezing, this link: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/hot_water.html" seems to say that this effect happens in real life, not just in the lab. What do you guys think?

 

[Chi Meson]

See my first post in this thread. I have read about this effect before (glad to know it has a name), and my teaching guru, Paul Hewitt, has explained this phenomenon in his taped lectures.

I do believe it can happen, however in a controlled experiment I did using equal amounts of water(220g) in identical containers (cylindrical, open top).

For 6 different initial temperatures ranging from 10 degrees to 80 degrees C, we got a nearly perfect linear relationship: the time to freeze is proportional to inital temerature.

I think it would be useful to try different shapes of containers. I believe if this effect works, you will need a larger open surface area per volume ratio.

I remain sceptical even now that this will work in ice trays.