Are these useless or am I?

November 30, 2006 6:41 PM

I bought two of these Piet Hein drinks coolers from Amazon. Am I doing something wrong with them or are they just useless expensive lumps of junk?

They're at Think Geek too and they looked pretty neat - they supposedly cool your drink without diluting it. I followed instructions to put one in the freezer for an hour and it did nothing. The liquid inside was supposed to freeze but it was obviously still slopping about and there was nothing specially cold about it. It certainly didn't work for cooling my drink. I left it in the freezer compartment overnight - same useless result. They're meant to get so cold there's a danger of your fingers freezing to them - this clearly is not the case. Does the freezer have to be a certain temperature for them to work? (I have a freezer compartment in a refrigerator - nothing special, just cold enough to make ice.) Is this the source of the problem or have I been sold a useless lump of junk? If this is the problem, then how cold does the freezer need to be for them to work? Advice gratefully received. I bought them for a gift and need to know whether I should send them back.

posted by Flitcraft to food & drink (9 comments total)

the Drinks Cooler contains 80% Pure Water and lasts twice as long as Ice.

What's the other 20 percent? It may have a lower freezing temp than plain water, which may mean it won't ever freeze solid in a household fridge. But it could theoretically be the same temp as your freezer, and even retain that cold for a long time.

But the other question to ask is ... clearly the steel ball in the glass is meant to chill by conduction, and the dense steel is meant to conduct cold longer than ice or glass. But it would take longer to cool down, too.

So perhaps the glass needs to be in the freezer for a long time (several days?) before using? Maybe it's never meant to be removed from the freezer at all unless you're actually drinking?
posted by frogan at 6:50 PM on November 30, 2006

i gotta say junk. even if it stays cooler twice as long as an ice cube, you have the expensive equivalent of two ice cubes.
posted by Frasermoo at 7:08 PM on November 30, 2006

Ice cools your drink not by just being cold. The latent heat of the water changing from solid to liquid has a lot to do with it. To that extent, if you can't freeze this thing solid, it's not going to work so well.

Have you tried turning your freezer up (or, down, ummmm, you know what I mean)?
posted by pompomtom at 7:08 PM on November 30, 2006

you have the expensive equivalent of two ice cubes.

Which don't melt and dilute the drink, which I imagine is at least part of their point.
posted by smackfu at 7:36 PM on November 30, 2006

Where in your freezer compartment did you place the thing? Did you put it directly on the metal bottom?
posted by Good Brain at 7:49 PM on November 30, 2006

Yes or rather I put it on the layer of ice crystals over that.
posted by Flitcraft at 7:56 PM on November 30, 2006

I had a similar problem with this ice cream maker, which works much on the same principle. The "double-insulated freezer bowl" actually contains some kind of liquid between an inner and an outer wall; you're supposed to put the thing in the freezer for a good long time until the liquid inside freezes solid (i.e. you can't hear it sloshing around any more), and then you take it out and the ice cream is supposed to freeze as the freezer-bowl liquid melts. The first few times I tried to use it, the freezer-bowl liquid didn't freezer solid; and when I tried to make ice cream with it anyways, the ice cream never froze. I finally solved the problem by cranking my freezer temperature down cold enough that the liquid actually froze; and hey-presto, it worked.

As pompomtom says, the key is latent heat. In addition to the amount of energy required to change the temperature of an object, it also takes a certain amount of extra energy to thaw (or vaporize) it. Since my liquid wasn't freezing all the way, it couldn't absorb enough energy from the ice cream to cause the ice cream to freeze; I would bet, since you only have a freezer compartment and not an actual freezer, that this is your problem as well.
posted by Johnny Assay at 8:04 PM on November 30, 2006

Do you have one of the dorm-style refrigerators (only one door for the entire thing, and inside the fridge there is a small freezer compartment)? When I had a fridge like that, I had some plastic liquid-filled "icecubes" that were supposed to work like your product and they never got cold enough to freeze, even with the temp cranked as low as possible.

When I moved into a house with a full-sized fridge (with a separate door for the freezer) the cubes froze within a few hours.
posted by holyrood at 9:27 PM on November 30, 2006

you have the expensive equivalent of two ice cubes

Not a physicist, but I do know that the thermal conductivity of ice and steel are different. If you think of your drink (which is warm) as "heating" up the metal thing (which is cold) and knowing that metal heats up quicker than ice, then you have a drink that will cool quicker.

It may not cool the drink more than ice, but the speed and the non-dilution factor certainly make this an interesting option. Worthwhile? Well that's up to you.
posted by MCTDavid at 5:38 AM on December 1, 2006