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Anonymous at Tue, 12 Mar 2024 04:47:31 UTC No. 16069528
When refilling a drink cooler / chest / esky with ice and the water is still cold. Is it better to dump the cold water before adding ice?
Is it better to have more total mass of cold water and ice, or will the cold water make the ice melt faster and drop temperature faster? Or does it not matter either way.
I think it's better to have more mass of cold water/ice as it will melt the ice but lose overall temperature at a slower rate in the long run due to containing it in a wider volume. Thoughts?
Anonymous at Tue, 12 Mar 2024 04:52:59 UTC No. 16069536
>>16069528
Probably depends on how often you open it etc. If you constantly open it to take out drinks, you'll fill it with warm air. In that case it's preferable to have some inertia, i.e. water inside.
Anonymous at Tue, 12 Mar 2024 05:03:44 UTC No. 16069552
>>16069536
Let's assume the same parameters for both. Obviously the point of it is to open it to get stuff out, so let's say it's semi regularly opened. The argument would be that if it's being opened and the air is filling the top, it would retain the cold better since theres less volume for the warmer air to fill.
If the parameters were that it was to be filled and transported somewhere without being opened, would the only ice without water have better ability to maintain "optimal" temperature? That being the contents would not spoil. Or will it be negligible? since the volume of the ice would spread evenly into the water and still maintain similar optimal conditions.
Anonymous at Tue, 12 Mar 2024 06:18:43 UTC No. 16069609
>>16069528
It's easy enough to think that a cooler loses energy at a fixed rate regardless of it's contents based on the internal temperature and that filled cooler looses less energy when it's opened than an empty cooler. From that it's easy to see that more "negative energy" or rather difference between energy of the outside and inside you put in initially the longer it will stay cool. The result would then be that the cold water helps keeping the cooler cool even if rapidly melts the actual ice so long as the difference between the temperature of the water + ice is sufficiently lower than the point at which you consider the cooler to be too warm. You can pretty easily come up with a math formula for this, either completely imaginary or you can even measure few real world datapoints (and the cooler probably has that data visible somewhere anyways) and then make a model based on that.