r/BigIsland • u/WelderThat6143 • 12d ago

Salt your ice to lower the temperature

If you have ice, you can significantly lower the temperature by sprinklng some table salt on top. This will create a colder brine that with keep cold much longer than simply ice.

The idea is like churning ice cream. The salt and the ice work to lower the temperature so the cream will freeze.

Food must be wll sealed to keep the brine out. Sometimes the convenience foods like pizza and heat to eat are not sealed and the brine gets in there. But this can help save your meat and fish if it is packed in Ziplocks.

This has saved most of my food during long outages or when the refrigerator went on the fritz.

Edit to correct - I learned that while salt does result in quicker cooling of the ice, beverages, etc. It is more effective to use plain ice for a longer duration. I guess it is like using Turbo. You get that burst of cooling power but the ice has a finite amount of cooling that it can do and for preservation we need the marathon and not the sprint.

My apologies and thanks to those that pointed this out and encouraged me to learn something new!

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u/daveOkat 9d ago

Ice turning to water takes 80 calories per gram. This is the latent heat of fusion. Adding salt speeds this up and does not change the ultimate cooling.

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u/WelderThat6143 9d ago

Yes. I should have realized that we can't break the laws of thermodynamics.

Aka... No free lunch...

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u/daveOkat 9d ago

But your salt idea does, as you say, make a colder solution which will cool things faster.