Top comments: fan retrofit video
[79 likes] @richardforster5394: As a home dairy and cheesemaking operation we've recently become aware of the importance of rapidly chilling milk for storage in order to avoid the growth of unwanted bacteria that can spoil the flavor the cheese, and I can see this as being a practical way of achieving the desired result. Thanks so much for sharing your work.
[71 likes] @jeffhans1: You should explore the Keep Cells Alive System, which uses shifting magnetic fields to keep water from crystallizing in a blast chiller, then let it freeze solid. This prevents cell walls from being pierced, allowing them to preserve raw fish.
[57 likes] @Coltrabagar: Thank you for your content, Tech Ingredients. By the way, I have built a geothermal AC unit based on your window air conditioner that you guys did. It is working great and runs very efficiently. I'm going to use the design again when I build a small home for my parents. I found out that pool filter sand (which is high quartz content) has excellent thermal conductive properties. Not as good as diamond, of course, but waaaayyy less expensive. I plan on mixing this with bentonite clay in my next geothermal project to help increase the thermal conductivity of the material around my water pipes in the ground.The Bentonite clay just needs to fill in the gaps between the sand particles to reduce air pockets.
[46 likes] @GerardPinzone: I used to make lots of homemade ice cream. When it comes out of the ice cream maker, it's the consistency of soft serve. I bought a small freezer that I dialed down to -20F. The reason is to cool the ice cream as quickly as possible so the ice crystals that form are smaller. I never had an issue with "crunchy" ice cream, so while a commercial mini blast freezer was a dream, I couldn't justify the cost. This is EXACTLY what I would have wanted.
[34 likes] @johnbatzel6196: Convection is more powerful than radiation. But conduction is better than convection. A messy but potentially faster method is to chill salt water in the freezer, and then put the item you want to freeze into the salt water (in a sous vide bag, or a sealed bag with the air squeezed out.) Grandma used to do this to freeze raspberries (delicate berries) quickly. The slow freezer turns them to mush. The fast freeze leaves them almost pristine.
[33 likes] @travis4798: commerical refrigerators typically have one or two high flow fans inside, additionally one outside to keep the components cool. I bet if you add a fan to the condenser also, you should see even better results.
[19 likes] @JMCote112: Glad to see you guys back! A blast chiller is basically the "air fryer" of cold to simplify. It would make help people store food so much safer and higher quality if it became a viable product. I wonder if a much smaller chiller used to blast food down to temp to then transfer if to the regular sized freezer for long-term storage would be something worth trying to manufacture.
[12 likes] @RingpopSmiths: A couple of useful tips for improving the blast chiller performance: 1) increase surface area of the thermal mass (such as using 2 c. water bottles instead of 1 gal jugs — Just make sure you leave room for ice expansion), but using the same total quantity 2) because the phase change takes so much more energy than simply lowering the temperature, The phase change temperature is a much more stable point in the process. You can therefore speed up the blast chill by using a different phase change material (such as salt brine) to lower the freezing point, so that the stable temperature is much lower. A eutectic brine mixture freezes at -21.1 °C so if your blast chiller operates at -25 °C, the eutectic would be an excellent way to have the blast chiller cool at the highest rate possible without having to upgrade the refrigeration system. P. S. I'm a long time watcher, and I love your channel!
[9 likes] @coothethird: The brushless versions of the fans are getting affordable now too. Especially used ones. A little more complicated with a controller, but high performance and efficient.
[9 likes] @Qwertype315: you could consider keeping some high salt content ice in there to speed up the heat transfer. since they remain frozen at around -21 c instead of just 0.
[7 likes] @jiraphat2200: 17:00 If you populate the freezer with saturated salt water. You will have sub freezing thermal mass. This will freeze water even faster.
[6 likes] @firefighter4443: Agreed, fantastic content, auto click when I see a video from yall. But please don’t sell to a private equity firm like some other formerly great channels did. All hail the algorithm.
[5 likes] @jaredbutcher3791: It may be possible to improve the effectiveness of the blast freezer by using 100% ethylene glycol solution instead of water for your thermal mass. Because ethylene glycol has a transition point of -13C, it will still freeze in the freezer. But when warming up due to the introduction of the food, the melting point will hold the freezer air temperature close to -13C instead of 0C. This might allow the food to freeze much faster since it needs to pass 0C to fully freeze. Ethylene glycol also has a higher enthalpy of fusion, giving more effective thermal mass. Ethylene glycol is also highly toxic, so that may be problematic, but perhaps other substances with a similar melting point could be found.
[5 likes] @FireStormOOO_: Hmm, I wonder if there's a cheap way to upgrade this further, buffer some thermal mass in a phase change material that freezes like 10C lower than water (or whatever you think you can get out of the unmodified freezer) so you're not at risk of defrosting other food if you overwhelm the compressor.
[4 likes] @vevenaneathna: cool video, btw a note on radient heat transfer, in sealed electronic enclosures, its actually the dominate mechanism for heat transfer. i believe the delta temp where it starts to dominate is at around 30-40F. i have an impossible to watch video where i converted my dc compressor fridge to run on usb-c from a GaN adapter for more effiency, and also further boosted the efficency with proper application of low/high emissivity coatings. it averages around 5 watts for 54 liters/quarts of refridgerated space... which is kind of insane. thats like an old ipod charging brick average power output lol. i appologize if you try to watch the video. its a unique concept that i came up with on the path to making an as close to free refridgerator as possible. actually saves us money since i use it as a drink fridge and we open the main door of our large fridge less often now.
[3 likes] @josephhfry: My LG fridge/freezer combo has a fan for quick cool or whatever mode. It's doesn't move as much air, or make as much noise, but it does cool things down faster. It's intended for when you get back from the grocery and want to get your items back to frozen ASAP.
[2 likes] @gamesallot6478: I mean he could have saved us a lot of time by saying "Fill the freezer up with some cold stuff and use a fan.", but it is well explained.
[2 likes] @TheNightwalker247: @croakingembryo there are also stirred tanks with a water jacket. but for a home dairy a blast chiller for small quantaties is definetly better than just putting it in the freezer
[1 likes] @perpetual4958: @TechIngredients Now add your vacuumpump(s). In bakery one cools bread quicker using vacuum (commercial application), avoiding over night labour, resulting in thinner crispy crusts), in deep fat frying youtubers divert moisture using vacuum (proof of concept, like your projects)). In vegetables, one chills lettuces by the trainload by sucking vacuum (commercial application). Looks like you are no longer using your twitter, I replied there earlier.
[1 likes] @perpetual4958: @skveery old skool freezers offer supercooling, that is: by pass the thermostat, reducing temperature to ~-36C over an hour of six, to offer the specced freezing capacity, instead of just 'storage'.
[1 likes] @jaysonrees738: Me too. Even though I'm more willing than average to jump through hoops for a project, it's fun to share projects with others. Not many are willing to do stuff like converting a window AC to a geothermal unit, but lots are willing to throw a couple of fans in their freezer.
[1 likes] @croakingembryo: @joshuacheung6518 Dude... Cows get milked every 12 hours. It absolutely takes at least 17 hours to cool 15,000ml of milk from 37C to 3C with 45 Watts of cooling power. That's basic physics. Like I said, the heat mass will work against you because you do not have enough cooling power. It might only take a few hours to chill the first batch of milk but within a few days your heat mass will reach 15C and then what? It will never chill your milk. Honestly, this is really basic stuff, I don't know how I can explain it any more simply. Heat mass does not magically add cooling power. This setup is fine for freezing a couple plates of food every few days. For rapidly chilling milk at a dairy IT WILL NOT WORK.
[1 likes] @kittykatking7882: Finally a tech ingredients project I'm qualified to do. I feel smarter already. Thanks for the idea, I thought this was going to be hard, but it's stupid simple. I have the perfect upright freezer that goes to minus 30 Fahrenheit. It's brutally cold and freezes meat in an hour. I'm sure I can cut that time in half. Cool.
[1 likes] @PexPac-Lite: Pro tip You can find cheap kW grain fans at farm sales. Used to dry the harvests in silos. You will probably need to clamp the freezer down otherwise it will violently twist with the fan startup. Happy cooling.
[1 likes] @mumblbeebee6546: Our freezer is too full to allow air to move, so I still need to remodel 😳 But this is very, erm, cool! I even have one of those fans from a twin pack - I used the other for a home-made fume extractor for soldering and gluing parts :0) Thank you for making all of these amazing videos!!
[1 likes] @doejohn8674: This is great! I wonder why they don't build normal freezers with a circulation fan, I have seen fridges with fans, but no freezers...
[0 likes] @stevesayler1920: I wonder if I could get any professionally experienced opinion on Lonnie Johnson's recent noise about his solid-state, DC, reversible heat cell that differentiates hot/cold and electromotive potential (voltage) using a PEM membrane and hydrogen working fluid. It seems from the infographics that a voltage and PEM can separate hot/cold, as well as waste heat across the PEM can create a usable current. Lab claims only. No other corroboration is known to me!
[0 likes] @croakingembryo: @TheNightwalker247 Even the milk from a single cow will be too much to handle for a setup like the one in the video. He put 800ml of water in there. Now try 15,000ml twice a day. It's just not gonna work. The cooling capacity is too small. You're far, far better off getting an ice machine that runs all day. Then you put the milk bottles in a tub and dump your saved ice on top.
[0 likes] @joshuacheung6518: @croakingembryo do you bring the milk up to 50c before putting it in the freezer? If not, then you get down a lot faster. Also you can load more thermal mass for pre-chilling (note all the frozen water) to help bring temps down slightly faster.
[0 likes] @croakingembryo: @joshuacheung6518 You would need multiple freezers then. As he explains in the video, you only have about 45W of actual cooling capacity. How are you gonna freeze more thermal mass if you don't even have enough to cool your milk in time? Milk comes out of a cow at 37C and it would take at least 17 hours to cool it to 3C using 45W. But after 12 hours you are already adding the next 15,000ml of milk. The only outcome here is that you will end up with rotten milk. This is absolutely NOT a good idea for a micro-dairy. You absolutely need refrigeration power that far exceeds a standard fridge. Thermal mass does not help until you have that, cause it will just warm up and make it even harder for the milk to cool down. What you need is a 1/2 HP glycol chiller and a plate chiller. The cold glycol gets pumped through the even numbered plates and the milk is pumped in the opposite direction and go
[0 likes] @joshuacheung6518: @croakingembryo i don't think you watched the vid if you think it would take 17 hours to get down to 3c. Yes, may need 2 freezers, but no, it will not take 17 hrs. The fan allows for exchange of heat from the "hot" material to the cold thermal masses. This will allow the temps to approach 0c in a couple hours. Then yeah, it might take something like 15 hrs after that to actually get everything re-frozen and ready for the next batch, but you probably don't want the milk to actually freeze.
[0 likes] @joshuacheung6518: @croakingembryo oops missed that you said twice a day. Three freezers then. That would be more than enough to keep up assuming that your 17 hr figure is correct. Even 4 to have a standby unit would be cheaper than the cheapest milk heat exchanger i can find
[0 likes] @NightfallSentinel: This reminds me of when I put a regular 12V PC fan in the freezer just to cool a drink faster! It worked so impressively well!
[0 likes] @thelovertunisia: When I saw the frozen bottles, I immediately understood the "trick". I say this because on its own the compressor of a normal fridge of freezer is too weak to blast freeze anything but a very small object.