How do you make long-lasting ice please?

Hi there brian-deb, I just use ice cream containers with water stick them in the freezer -25 degrees normally 2 weeks prior to leaving home and stick them in the esky 90 litre and they will generally last me 6/8 days. If I use party ice will last about 4 days. Great eskys. Use it more than the engel fridge.I am lucky I have access to dry ice so we use a separate foam esky for that and will keep our meat frozen for an easy 5 days or longer. We just transfer from the dry ice to the esky the day before any meat we are intending to use. Don't know of how else people do it will be interesting to see. Take Care Vitara

"brian-deb asked for information on How do you make long-lasting ice please?"

personally, I've never been 'pleased' by long-lasting ice !!
however chockolate icecream and strawberries is a different story...

I thought all ice was hard??

Yes, the EO 'think tank' will see things differently.

bought ice is at best only -15 (my experience)

make your own with freezer set at lowest temp....it should get down to around -20 or a little more maybe -25?

G'day.

I have similar results as Vitara and here is my method.

Use 3 liter milk bottles. Cordial bottles are no good because they split when the ice expands and so leak as it melts. You can't drink the water because it's too hard to cleen the milk bottles out properly.

Use plenty of bottles of ice.

Freeze everything you can before putting it in the esky. Milk can be frozen but goes funny if kept frozen too long. Don't know why.

Chill everything else such as tomatoes and eggs. Be careful that the tomatoes don't touch the ice or they'll spoil.

Keep the esky out of the sun and wind.

Don't open the esky unnecessarily or for too long.

Don't leave the milk out to warm up and then put it back in the esky.

Freeze your ice in the deep freeze, not the freezer section of the fridge which isn't cold enough. Freeze for at least a week. We keep ice in the freezer all the time.

My esky is home made out of an old caravan/bar fridge. Don't know if the insulation is any better than the good quality eskys.

I have bought good quality block ice from the fish coop at Bermagui wharf. There must be other places where you can buy good ice when traveling. Look for a port with a trawler fleet. They run it through a crusher straight into the boat's tanks by the tonne. Of course, you need it solid so it lasts longer.

I suppose you knew most of that.

Regards,
Laurie.

Hi Brian - Deb

Back before I purchased my engle I used to use a 60 (about) ltr platic esky.

The trick to adding a day or two to the ice is to pre chill the esky. I was lucky i could fit my esking in to a large freezer a few days before.

I would pull it (the esky) out the morning of leaving pack the items to be used last on the bottom and then smash the milk cartons full of ice and pack it layer by layer. The milk cartons hold the ice together while you smash it and then tear the carton over the items to be taken. the colder the ice the better. Given it (the ice) is not taking the heat out of the esky first is molds back in to a hard lump as you pack other foods on top (vacum sealed bags are good as some plastic containers leak) As you get highier the ice cunks shoud become larger so you can move them around to access the highier layers of food. The botton ice should be fairly well smashed as this helps it to mould around the packed items with little or no air to heat and then melt the ice.

It helps if you freeze the meat and any thing else than can be frozen.

This setup lasted nearly 7 days before reverting to party ice from the caravan park. This was in January with high 20's low 30's temp in a tent.

That was how me grand pappy packed for his holidays defore they had them there modern convienaces (fridges)

TM2CW

Regards

Trevor

If salt is added to ice it will decrease it's temperature by a few degrees. Even if you put salt over ice that is starting to thaw it will refreeze to some extent.

buy Dry Ice from places like Air Liquide or ICI..

My understanding is that the longer you freeze the ice the colder it will get. Down the bottom of the deep freeze for a few weeks or few months if possible. A couple of degrees can make a difference.
As said above fridge/freezer generally not as cold as what deep freeze can get.
Salt works but of course then ruins the water.

I also believe (as explained by science teacher) that snap freezing increases the ice life. The ice molecules don't have time crystalise as much while freeezing and the ice becomes more dense (not as much expansion) and will melt more slowly.

Compare to party ice that is full of air and melts quickly. Part ice of course has more ice surface area in your esky and will cool the stubs well.

My two cents worth.

Prior to owning the fridges we now rely on we always used a 70lt evercool/baily,s ,we made our own ice in stages using empty 3lt plastic orange juice containers [stronger than milk containers] ,,,, system was fill to 1/3rd only then freeze [lid off ] in deep freezer , when frozen add next 1/3rd ect , until bottle full , theory was that excess air bubbles escape during the longer freezing period ,pure h2o ,, we used 3x bottles and would last upto 5-6 days ,always reused same water ,made for "old " ice ,seemed to last longer than any bought ice.
Now use 80lt Waeco+15lt Engle so can make own ice for the G+T on the track.

G'Day,

The best way to get ice to last it to get it as cold as you can before placing in the eski, etc.

Adding salt does can affect the melting point of ice, however, as the maximum amount of heat transfer, that is, efficiency of ice is the two degrees either side of melting point, the greatest amount of cooling comes from -1 C to +1C. Think of your fridge, it converts gas to liquid via compression, then uses the cooling energy released as it turns back to gas to cool the contents of your fridge.

So, having ice at -20C will stay solid for longer the ice at -10C but until it reaches -1C the efficiency of its cooling is no different.

You really need to look at how long you want to cool the eski, if only for the week-end then -10C ice wil provide more cooling as it will change to liquid by the second day. If you were staying for a week then you would want -20C ice as it would last until the fourth day before turning to liquid.

A lot of the time you will get a greater benefit by drinking the water in the container at 5 C than you will be getting the effect of cooling available within the ice, so having ice with no salt added is of more use.

Hope this make sense

Rolande

Make sure you dont have the ice in a pool of liquid- this will hasten the thawing. Keep the esky dry inside and the ice will stay as a block longer. found this with drinks bins at parties- ones that leak will still have ice in the morninig. Ones that are watertight are just a bucket of water.

The real benefit of ice in an Esky is that when it melts it absorbs the latent Heat of Freezing.

When 1kg of ice melts, it absorbs as much heat as 80 kg of ice heating from -1 degrees to 0 degrees (not melting) or 8 kg of ice heating from -10 degrees to 0 degrees (not melting).

So 1kg ice at -20 degrees is equal to 1.25kg of ice at 0 degrees.

Salt definitely works, but has its drawbacks. I'm sure the amount of salt used is important! One Xmas with loads of relo's over tried the salt method out. One esky, one case of beer(as emergency supply; had plenty in our two fridges!), enough party ice to cover the beer and about a third of one of those big Saxa salt plastic containers over the ice. Result- Still completely frozen the next day. In fact the salt had caused the ice cubes to form one solid block of ice. This was in the middle of Summer on the Far Nth Coast of NSW so the air temp was about 28. An excellent result I thought except for the drawbacks; you had to struggle to get a beer from the solid block of ice and if you forgot to rinse around the bottle-top with fresh water your first mouthful of beer was salty!