Engel fridge works too well?

I find 1½ to 1¾ gives me cold drinks without freezing. If It's pushing over 40º I'll sneak it up to 2.

I have no idea about the freezing business but look forward to some answers.

common occurance except for me it happens with beer in the freezer. it is all about pressure. the carbonation keeps the can under pressure lowering its freezing temp in the same way that pressure raises boiling temp. release the pressure and the product freezes

Hi Sparkiepete,

David is correct, a drop in pressure will lower the temperature, but that generally will only apply to the gas above the liquid. Over the pressure differences between and open or closed lemonade (or beer) bottle the pressure drop in the liquid will not be all that significant. If that was the only factor in what happened the lemonade would freeze on opening but not the cordial.

What's happening in this instance is that the drinks in the bottles were "supercooled." Water normally freezes when it is cooled below 0 degrees Celsius, forming ice crystals. Ice crystals form more easily when they grow on existing ice crystals. Water molecules like to pack themselves in place on a crystal that's already gotten started. It doesn't take much to start the crystallization process going - a little piece of dust or other impurity in the water, or even a scratch on the bottle are sometimes all it takes to get ice crystals growing. The process of starting off a crystal is called "nucleation."

In the absence a starting point, the water can get "stuck" in its liquid state as it cools off, even below its freezing point, down to as low as -20°C. The water will stay liquid until something comes along to nucleate crystal growth. A speck of dust, or a flake of frost from the screw-cap falling into the bottle are enough to get the freezing going, and the crystals will rapidly build on each other and spread through the water in the bottle.

Water releases 80 calories per gram when turning from a liquid to a solid. With your freezer only a few degrees Celsius below zero the specific heat of water is one calorie per degree per gram. This means that your drinks, as they it freeze, warm up the rest of the water until the process stops at 0 degrees Celsius, freezing perhaps ten or twenty percent of the water. This ice may be distributed throughout the bottle, though, as the crystallization process happens very quickly and heat flows slowly.

This is the same process that heats those packs with the metal disk/worm in them that appear at every show.

Cheers

Pete

Greetings

I run mine on 1.5. Anything at 2 or above and things start to freeze. As stated 1.5 and just under 2 will work fine with no freezing.

Regards

Paul

Engel guys- does it matter how much they are loaded up at the time. What if it say full of cans which are getting replaced each afternnoon with hotties. I hire a 40 a couple of times a year and hover just over 2 and it seem OK

We have a new 40 in a transit bag and run just above the 1 mark. The built in thermo is consistenatly 3 -3.5 deg above 2 other, trusted thermos in measuring air temp of the cabinet. At this setting we have the air temp between 1 and 1.5 deg.

(needless to say this is all done with high quality wiring and connections)