How Long Does It Take For Water To Freeze
How Long Does It Take Water To Freeze? – Water will take roughly one to three hours to freeze in a home freezer. Factors that will affect the exact freezing time include the original temperature of the water, the volume of water, the size of the container, and the purity level of the water. Air temperature and other outside influences can also play a role in freezing time. The type of water also makes a difference in freezing times.

How quickly does water freeze?

How long does it take a bottle of water to freeze? – Want to freeze a bottle of water instead of ice cubes? I like using a frozen water bottle as homemade freezer pack for a cooler. Frozen water bottles are also great if you are wanting ice cold water later in the day.

Can ice freeze in 30 minutes?

Introduction – Time For Ice Cubes To Freeze The short answer is 2-4 hours to be completely frozen. Based on scientific experiments, the initiation of freezing varies between 30 minutes to 1 hour and 40 minutes depending on the initial temperature of the water.

Can water freeze in 2 hours?

How Long Does It Take For Water To Freeze? Have you ever wondered how long it takes for water to freeze? The answer may surprise you. Depending on the temperature and volume of the water, it can take anywhere from a few minutes to several hours for water to freeze solid. Here’s a closer look at how long it really takes for,

  1. In general, it takes longer for larger volumes of water to freeze than it does for smaller volumes of water.
  2. This is because it takes more time for heat to escape from a larger body of water than it does from a smaller body of water.
  3. Likewise, the colder the temperature is outside, the faster water will freeze.

If you’re wondering how long it would take for a specific volume of water to freeze, here are some estimates:

  • 1 cup (237 ml) of water: 30-60 minutes
  • 1 pint (473 ml) of water: 1-2 hours
  • 1 quart (946 ml) of water: 2-4 hours
  • 1 gallon (3,785 ml) of water: 8-16 hours

To get a more precise estimate of how long it will take your specific container of water to freeze, consider using an online calculator like this one from,

How long does 500ml of water take to freeze?

As I looked at them wondering I did an experiment by placing a 500 ml water bottle 6 cm in diameter outside, the temp was -12 C. It took 2 hrs 45 min to freeze fully.

Does water freeze at 0 Celsius?

Water crystallizes into ice at 32 degrees Fahrenheit most of the time, but not always. Courtesy of Flickr user s.alt The title of this post would seem an appropriate question for an elementary-school science exam, but the answer is far more complicated than it first appears.

  1. We’ve all been taught that water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, 0 degrees Celsius, 273.15 Kelvin.
  2. That’s not always the case, though.
  3. Scientists have found liquid water as cold as -40 degrees F in clouds and even cooled water down to -42 degrees F in the lab.
  4. How low could they go? That turns out to be a tricky problem to answer.

When liquid water is cooled below -42 degrees F, it crystallizes into ice too quickly for scientists to measure the temperature of the liquid. So Emily Moore and Valeria Molinero of the University of Utah developed a sophisticated computer simulation of 32,768 water molecules (fewer molecules than can be found in a raindrop) that let them see what happened to the water’s heat capacity, density and compressibility as it supercooled and determine what happened as 4,000 of those molecules froze.

  1. Their results appear in the journal Nature,
  2. As the temperature of the water approaches -55 degrees F, the water molecules form tetrahedrons, with each molecule loosely bonding to four other molecules.
  3. The density of the water decreases, its heat capacity increases and its compressibility increases.
  4. The change in structure of water controls the rate at which ice forms,” Molinero says,

“We show both the thermodynamics of water and the crystallization rate are controlled by the change in structure of liquid water that approaches the structure of ice.” Below -55 degrees F, tiny bits of liquid water may still exist, but it would do so only for an incredibly short time, Molinero says.

This supercooling of water is possible because water needs a small nucleus or seed of ice for the molecules to form crystals and in very pure water “the only way you can form a nucleus is by spontaneously changing the structure of the liquid,” Molinero says. Those nuclei won’t form or grow large enough until the structure of the liquid water molecules approaches that of solid ice, which doesn’t happen until the water gets so incredibly cold.

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Can water freeze in an hour?

How Long Does It Take For Water To Freeze In The Freezer? – If you want to freeze water in a hurry, the freezer is obviously the best option. The majority of freezers are set at or below 32 degrees Fahrenheit (zero degrees Celsius). In these conditions, water will typically freeze in about one to two hours.

Ice tends to start forming within around one hour when water is stored in ice cube trays inside a freezer. But, for the water to completely freeze and become solid ice cubes, the time frame is usually closer to four hours or so. Many factors determine the length of time it takes for ice to form. For instance, the water temperature inside the trays can affect the freezing process.

Very hot or very cold water tends to freeze much faster than lukewarm water. This is down to the Mpemba effect that suggests warmer water can freeze faster than cooler water under certain conditions. However, why this occurs is still up for debate. Another factor is the amount of water present.

Can you make ice in 2 hours?

Super Cool Science: How to Make Instant Ice at Home Water famously freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degrees Celsius). But, like the stuff you buy in bottles from the store, doesn’t have anything but water molecules in it. So there’s nothing to kick-start the usual heterogeneous nucleation process.

  • If you have bottles of purified water, you can pop them into the freezer and leave them undisturbed — no moving, no touching — for a couple of hours.
  • They’ll still be liquid because pure water with no nuclei in it freezes at -43.6 degrees Fahrenheit (-42 degrees Celsius).
  • It’s now a, which does indeed sound super cool.

The exact timing it takes for the water to freeze will depend on the size of your water bottles and your freezer, but it will take about to get the water to this supercooled state. It’s only after these few hours of preparation that the “instant” part of instant ice happens.

But it is amazing. Carefully remove the bottles from the freezer. Then shake one or whack it on the table. Anything can act as a nucleus at this point — air bubbles, a slight dent in the bottle. Any little change will be enough to cause homogenous nucleation. Once that disturbance is present, the uniform water molecules will become ice so quickly that it looks instant.

: Super Cool Science: How to Make Instant Ice at Home

Will ice freeze in 4 hours?

What Is Ice? – Ice is a form of solid water that occurs naturally when temperatures drop below the freezing point. It’s made up of frozen crystals, which can vary in size and shape depending on the conditions in which it forms. Ice has many uses, from being used as a cooling agent to providing a surface for recreation activities.

Does boiled water freeze faster?

Yes—a general explanation – Hot water can in fact freeze faster than cold water for a wide range of experimental conditions. This phenomenon is extremely counterintuitive, and surprising even to most scientists, but it is in fact real. It has been seen and studied in numerous experiments,

  1. Although this phenomenon has been known for centuries, and was described by Aristotle, Bacon, and Descartes, it was not introduced to the modern scientific community until 1969, by a Tanzanian high school pupil named Mpemba.
  2. Both the early scientific history of this effect, and the story of Mpemba’s rediscovery of it, are interesting in their own right — Mpemba’s story in particular providing a dramatic parable against making snap judgements about what is impossible.

This is described separately below. The phenomenon that hot water may freeze faster than cold is often called the Mpemba effect. Because, no doubt, most readers are extremely skeptical at this point, we should begin by stating precisely what we mean by the Mpemba effect.

  1. We start with two containers of water, which are identical in shape, and which hold identical amounts of water.
  2. The only difference between the two is that the water in one is at a higher (uniform) temperature than the water in the other.
  3. Now we cool both containers, using the exact same cooling process for each container.

Under some conditions the initially warmer water will freeze first. If this occurs, we have seen the Mpemba effect. Of course, the initially warmer water will not freeze before the initially cooler water for all initial conditions. If the hot water starts at 99.9°C, and the cold water at 0.01°C, then clearly under those circumstances, the initially cooler water will freeze first.

But under some conditions the initially warmer water will freeze first: if that happens, you have seen the Mpemba effect. But you will not see the Mpemba effect for just any initial temperatures, container shapes, or cooling conditions. This seems impossible, right? Many sharp readers may have already come up with a common proof that the Mpemba effect is impossible.

The proof usually goes something like this. Say that the initially cooler water starts at 30°C and takes 10 minutes to freeze, while the initially warmer water starts out at 70°C. Now the initially warmer water has to spend some time cooling to get to get down to 30°C, and after that, it’s going to take 10 more minutes to freeze.

So since the initially warmer water has to do everything that the initially cooler water has to do, plus a little more, it will take at least a little longer, right? What can be wrong with this proof? What’s wrong with this proof is that it implicitly assumes that the water is characterized solely by a single number — its average temperature.

But if other factors besides the average temperature are important, then when the initially warmer water has cooled to an average temperature of 30°C, it may look very different than the initially cooler water (at a uniform 30°C) did at the start. Why? Because the water may have changed when it cooled down from a uniform 70°C to an average 30°C.

It could have less mass, less dissolved gas, or convection currents producing a non-uniform temperature distribution. Or it could have changed the environment around the container in the refrigerator. All four of these changes are conceivably important, and each will be considered separately below. So the impossibility proof given above doesn’t work.

And in fact the Mpemba effect has been observed in a number of controlled experiments It is still not known exactly why this happens. A number of possible explanations for the effect have been proposed, but so far the experiments do not show clearly which, if any, of the proposed mechanisms is the most important one.

While you will often hear confident claims that X is the cause of the Mpemba effect, such claims are usually based on guesswork, or on looking at the evidence in only a few papers and ignoring the rest. Of course, there is nothing wrong with informed theoretical guesswork or being selective in which experimental results you trust; the problem is that different people make different claims as to what X is.

Why hasn’t modern science answered this seemingly simple question about cooling water? The main problem is that the time it takes water to freeze is highly sensitive to a number of details in the experimental setup, such as the shape and size of the container, the shape and size of the refrigeration unit, the gas and impurity content of the water, how the time of freezing is defined, and so on.

Because of this sensitivity, while experiments have generally agreed that the Mpemba effect occurs, they disagree over the conditions under which it occurs, and thus about why it occurs. As Firth wrote “There is a wealth of experimental variation in the problem so that any laboratory undertaking such investigations is guaranteed different results from all others.” So with the limited number of experiments done, often under very different conditions, none of the proposed mechanisms can be confidently proclaimed as “the” mechanism.

Above we described four ways in which the initially warmer water could have changed upon cooling to the initial temperature of the initially cooler water. What follows below is a short description of the four related mechanisms that have been suggested to explain the Mpemba effect.

  1. Evaporation — As the initially warmer water cools to the initial temperature of the initially cooler water, it may lose significant amounts of water to evaporation. The reduced mass will make it easier for the water to cool and freeze. Then the initially warmer water can freeze before the initially cooler water, but will make less ice. Theoretical calculations have shown that evaporation can explain the Mpemba effect if you assume that the water loses heat solely through evaporation, This explanation is solid, intuitive, and evaporation is undoubtedly important in most situations. But it is not the only mechanism. Evaporation cannot explain experiments that were done in closed containers, where no mass was lost to evaporation, And many scientists have claimed that evaporation alone is insufficient to explain their results,
  2. Dissolved Gasses — Hot water can hold less dissolved gas than cold water, and large amounts of gas escape upon boiling. So the initially warmer water may have less dissolved gas than the initially cooler water. It has been speculated that this changes the properties of the water in some way, perhaps making it easier to develop convection currents (and thus making it easier to cool), or decreasing the amount of heat required to freeze a unit mass of water, or changing the boiling point. There are some experiments that favor this explanation, but no supporting theoretical calculations.
  3. Convection — As the water cools it will eventually develop convection currents and a non-uniform temperature distribution. At most temperatures, density decreases with increasing temperature, and so the surface of the water will be warmer than the bottom: this has been called a “hot top.” Now if the water loses heat primarily through the surface, then water with a “hot top” will lose heat faster than we would expect based on its average temperature. When the initially warmer water has cooled to an average temperature the same as the initial temperature of the initially cooler water, it will have a “hot top”, and thus its rate of cooling will be faster than the rate of cooling of the initially cooler water at the same average temperature. Got all that? You might want to read this paragraph again, paying careful distinction to the difference between initial temperature, average temperature, and temperature. While experiments have seen the “hot top”, and related convection currents, it is unknown whether convection can by itself explain the Mpemba effect.
  4. Surroundings — A final difference between the cooling of the two containers relates not to the water itself, but to the surrounding environment. The initially warmer water may change the environment around it in some complex fashion, and thus affect the cooling process. For example, if the container is sitting on a layer of frost which conducts heat poorly, the hot water may melt that layer of frost, and thus establish a better cooling system in the long run. Obviously explanations like this are not very general, since most experiments are not done with containers sitting on layers of frost.
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Finally, supercooling may be important to the effect. Supercooling occurs when the water freezes not at 0°C, but at some lower temperature. One experiment found that its initially hot water supercooled less than its initially cold water. This would mean that the initially warmer water might freeze first because it would freeze at a higher temperature than the initially cooler water.

If true, this would not fully explain the Mpemba effect, because we would still need to explain why initially warmer water supercools less than initially cooler water. In short, hot water does freeze sooner than cold water under a wide range of circumstances. It is not impossible, and has been seen to occur in a number of experiments.

But despite claims often made by one source or another, there is no well-agreed explanation for how this phenomenon occurs. Different mechanisms have been proposed, but the experimental evidence is inconclusive. For those wishing to read more on the subject, Jearl Walker’s article in Scientific American is very readable and has suggestions on how to do home experiments on the Mpemba effect, while the articles by Auerbach and Wojciechowski are two of the more modern papers on the effect.

Can water freeze in 6 hours?

In a Garden Hose or Sprinkler System – People often forget to winterize their their outdoor water systems, whether that’s faucet pipes, sprinkler lines, or a garden hose. You’ll always have some remaining water in your garden hose no matter how much you try to spray out. If you have a winter evening where the temperature dips below 32 °F (0 °C), which is the freezing point of water, in only 4 to 6 hours you could have smaller amounts of water in all these locations becoming expanding, solid ice, which can cause a lot of damage quickly.

Does water freeze faster than Coke?

Freezing Various Liquids Most recent answer: 10/22/2007 I have a science project to finish regarding ‘which liquids freeze quicker’. I am trying with water, coke, coolaid & orange Juice, so far all the times water seems to freeze quicker and I was curious to know that if i am right or am doing something wrong.- Lavesh Dhanani (age 10) Panther Run Elementary, Pembroke Pines, FL, Broward Lavesh – When water freezes, the water molecules arrange themselves into special patterns – this is why we can sometimes see neat patterns in water crystals.

  1. If there is something like sugar mixed into the water (an ‘impurity’), then it is harder for the water molecules to form the proper patterns.
  2. The sugar molecules are not the same shape or size as the water molecules are, so they don’t fit into the ice crystals, even though they do fit nicely into the liquid water.

Because of this, it’s actually harder to freeze liquids like juice or soda than plain water – you have to get them colder before they will freeze. This is why these ‘impure’ liquids did not freeze as quickly as plain water. In chemistry, this is called ‘freezing point depression.’ -Tamara (published on 10/22/2007) Uhm Hi Im doing a Science Fair Experiment on wha liquid freezes the fastest.

I am using Water Coke Diet Coke Orange Just Vegetable Oil, Motor OIl and Car Gasoline. I was wondering Why Car Gasoline Doen Not freeze. Thanks- Jana- Jana (age 12) Orlando Before going any further let me say that it sounds like a very bad idea to be using car gasoline. It can catch fire or even explode very easily.

It gives off highly toxic fumes. Switch to something else. Some good examples of fluids that are a lot different from the ones you’ve tested are isopropyl and/or ethanol rubbing alcohol (70% and 90%). Water, coke, juice etc. are all water with some molecules dissolved in it.

  • The oils don’t have water.
  • Their molecules don’t have the electrically charged regions that water molecules have, so that takes away one of the main things that helps water molecules stick to each other to make ice.
  • However, the oils are made of fairly long molecules that can still get stuck to each other pretty easily.

Gasoline is made of similar types of molecules but much shorter, so they tumble around more easily. You might want to check this site for more information. You can look in the answers in “melting and freezing” in the “states of matter and energy” category,,

This program is supported in part by the National Science Foundation (DMR 21-44256) and by the,Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this website are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

: Freezing Various Liquids

Can water freeze at 3?

What Is Freezing Temperature Of Water? Water needs to be at the freezing temperature of 0°C or 32°F for it to freeze.

Does salt make water freeze faster?

Have You Ever Wondered. –

Does salt water freeze? At what temperature does ocean water freeze? Is polar ice freshwater or salt water?

Today’s Wonder of the Day was inspired by Drusilla. Drusilla Wonders, ” does salt water freeze ” Thanks for WONDERing with us, Drusilla! Isn’t ice WONDERful? On a hot day, nothing goes down quite as well as lemonade poured over a glass full of ice cubes.

In fact, ice makes so many things better. For example, we love to use ice to make homemade ice cream ! When Old Man Winter comes calling, falling temperatures can turn creeks, lakes, ponds, and even rivers into frozen rinks you can skate on. But what about the ocean ? If you’ve ever been to the ocean in the winter, you’ve probably noticed that it doesn’t freeze like a small pond might.

So does the ocean ever freeze ? If you’ve seen pictures of the North Pole or the South Pole, you know that there are polar ice caps in those places. If the ocean freezes in those areas, why doesn’t the rest of the ocean freeze during the winter? The freezing point of freshwater is 0° Celsius or 32° Fahrenheit.

  1. The presence of salt in water, though, reduces the freezing point of water,
  2. The more salt in the water, the lower the freezing point will be.
  3. When freshwater freezes, water molecules of hydrogen and oxygen have bonded together into a crystalline structure of ice,
  4. The presence of salt makes it harder for water molecules to bond to the ice structure, because ice naturally repels salt molecules.

So in a sense, the salt gets in the way of water molecules, blocking them from joining the ice, The salt also bumps into the ice, knocking water molecules off of the structure – and that’s how salt melts ice, When salt molecules displace water molecules, the freezing rate slows down.

  • This is why salt is often used on icy roads to slow down freezing and make them safer to travel upon.
  • Although the saltiness of ocean water varies, often ocean water has about 35 grams of salt for every 1,000 units of water,
  • This lowers the freezing point of ocean water to about -1.8° C or 28.8° F.
  • So ocean water will freeze,

It just needs to reach a lower temperature, Another factor that affects the freezing of ocean water is its movement, Unlike ponds, ocean waves move around constantly. This helps ocean water retain heat. As a result, only really cold areas, such as the North Pole or South Pole, usually get cold enough for ocean water to freeze,

Does ice melt at 0?

At temperatures above 32°F (0°C), pure water ice melts and changes state from a solid to a liquid (water); 32°F (0°C) is the melting point. For most substances, the melting and freezing points are about the same temperature.

What liquid doesn’t freeze?

Making ice cubes is a simple process: you take a plastic ice-cube tray like you’d find in most households, fill it with water and put it in the freezer. Before long, the water crystallises and turns to ice. If you were to analyse the structure of ice crystals, you’d see that the water molecules are arranged in regular 3-dimensional lattice structures.

  1. In water, by contrast, the molecules are unorganised, which is the reason that water flows.
  2. Glassy water Led by Professors Raffaele Mezzenga and Ehud Landau, a group of physicists and chemists from ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich have now identified an unusual way to prevent water from forming ice crystals, so even at extreme sub-zero temperatures it retains the amorphous characteristics of a liquid.

In a first step, the researchers designed and synthesised a new class of lipids (fat molecules) to create a new form of “soft” biological matter known as a lipidic mesophase. In this material, the lipids spontaneously self-assemble and aggregate to form membranes, behaving in a similar way as natural fat molecules.

These membranes then adopt a uniform arrangement to form a network of connected channels that measure less than one nanometer in diameter. Temperature and water content, as well as the novel structure of the designed lipid molecules determine the structure that the lipidic mesophase takes. No space for water crystals What’s so special about this structure is that – unlike in an ice-cube tray – there is no room in the narrow channels for water to form ice crystals, so it remains disordered even at extreme sub-zero temperatures.

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The lipids don’t freeze either. Using liquid helium, the researchers were able to cool a lipidic mesophase consisting of a chemically modified monoacylglycerol to a temperature as low as minus 263 degrees Celsius, which is a mere 10 degrees above the absolute zero temperature, and still no ice crystals formed.

  • At this temperature, the water became “glassy,” as the researchers were able to demonstrate and confirm in a simulation.
  • Their study of this unusual behaviour of water when confined within a lipidic mesophase was recently published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology,
  • The key factor is the ratio of lipids to water,” explains Professor Raffaele Mezzenga from the Laboratory of Food & Soft Materials at ETH Zurich.

Accordingly, it is the water content in the mixture that determines the temperatures at which the geometry of the mesophase changes. If, for example, the mixture contains 12 percent water by volume, the structure of the mesophase will transition at about minus 15 degrees Celsius from a cubic labyrinth to a lamellar structure.

  1. Natural antifreeze for bacteria “What makes developing these lipids so tricky is their synthesis and purification,” says Ehud Landau, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Zurich.
  2. He explains that this is because lipid molecules have two parts; one that is hydrophobic (repels water) and one that is hydrophilic (attracts water).

“This makes them extremely difficult to work with,” he says. The soft biomaterial formed from the lipid membranes and water has a complex structure that minimises the water’s contact with the hydrophobic parts and maximises its interface with the hydrophilic parts.

  • The researchers modelled the new class of lipids on membranes of certain bacteria.
  • These bacteria also produce a special class of self-assembling lipids that can naturally confine water in their interior, enabling the microorganisms to survive in very cold environments.
  • The novelty of our lipids is the introduction of highly strained three-membered rings into specific positions within the hydrophobic parts of the molecules,” says Landau.

“These enable the necessary curvature to produce such tiny water channels and prevent lipids to crystallize.” Soft matter for research These new lipidic mesophases will serve primarily as a tool for other researchers. They can be utilised to non-destructively isolate, preserve and study large biomolecules in a membrane-mimicking environment, for instance by using cryogenic electron microscopy.

Biologists are increasingly turning to this method to determine the structures and functions of large biomolecules such as proteins or large molecular complexes. “In the normal freezing process, when ice crystals form they usually damage and destroy membranes and crucial large biomolecules, which prevents us from determining their structure and function when they interact with lipid membranes,” Mezzenga says.

But not with the new mesophase, which is non-destructive and preserves such molecules in their original state and in presence of the other key building block of life, that is the lipids. “Our research is paving the way for future projects to determine how proteins might be preserved in their original form and interact with lipid membranes at very low temperatures,” says the ETH professor.

Can you freeze pure water?

Thomas Whale, from the University of Leeds, explains how freezing water works. First, it usually requires small particles of another solid to be present. ‘Contrary to popular perception, pure liquid water does not usually freeze at its melting point, 0°C, and can instead supercool to temperatures as low as -38°C.

How long does it take for 1 liter of water to freeze?

Freezing Water Bottles

Water Bottle Size Hours until Frozen
8-ounce bottled water 3 hours
16-ounce bottled water 4-5 hours
1-liter bottled water 8 hours
1-Gallon bottled water best done overnight

How long can a human last in freezing water?

Expected Survival Time in Cold Water

Water Temperature Exhaustion or Unconsciousness in Expected Survival Time
50–60° F (10–16° C) 1–2 hours 1–6 hours
40–50° F (4–10° C) 30–60 minutes 1–3 hours
32.5–40° F (0–4° C) 15–30 minutes 30–90 minutes
Under 15 minutes Under 15–45 minutes

How long does a 2 Litre bottle of water take to freeze?

Download Article Download Article Freezing water is a basic task that everyone should know how to do. Even if you know how to make ice, you may not realize how many tricks there are to do the job faster and more efficiently. So if you’re ever in need of a nice cold drink on a summer day, follow these simple steps.

  1. 1 Adjust the temperature of your freezer to -24°C or -11°F. It takes several hours for the temperature in your freezer to adjust if it’s not at that temperature already.
  2. 2 Put water bottles in the fridge for 2 hours and 45 minutes exactly. The water should still be liquid, but the temperature is actually below freezing. If the bottles are frozen, then something has gone wrong. Recheck the temperature and try again. Advertisement
  3. 3 Give the bottle a firm jolt. The entire bottle should slowly turn into ice. You can also open the bottle which may start the freezing process.
    • If you freeze the bottle with the cap off, or carefully remove the cap, then you can try dropping a piece of ice into the water to instantly change it to ice. You can also pour the water over ice and make yourself ice sculptures.
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  1. 1 Remove impurities from water. Water from the tap often contains minerals and other impurities, which makes it more difficult for the water to form ice crystals. Use water with fewer impurities for fasting freezing times. Any of the following options have less impurities:
    • Bottled water
    • Boiled water
    • Filtered water
  2. 2 Increase surface area. The bigger the surface area in relationship with the total amount of water will reduce the amount of time it takes for the water to freeze. For example, an ice cube tray will freeze much faster than a bottle of water. Another example is if you take a bottle of water and empty it out onto a cookie sheet, the cookie sheet will freeze faster than the bottle. The ice cube tray and cookie sheets freeze faster because they have more surface area directly touching the cold air.
  3. 3 Chill ice cube trays. Leaving an empty ice cube tray in the freezer will help quickly freeze water when you are ready to make ice.
  4. 4 Use metal trays. Metal conducts heat better than plastic. If you have an ice cube tray made out of copper, then it helps remove the heat from the water faster than its plastic counterpart.
  5. 5 Boil water before freezing. This may seem counterproductive, but hot water can actually freeze faster than cold. This is called the Mpemba effect. There is some debate among scientists about why this is the case, but many agree that it has to do with the fact that the bonds that hold hot water together are similar to the bonds in ice crystals.
  6. 6 Increase the power of your freezer. Most refrigerators have a temperature setting that you can adjust. It sometimes takes several hours before a temperature change can take effect, but if you have the freezer on the coldest setting, then it will help to freeze water faster.
    • Refrain from opening your freezer too often. Every time you open the freezer door, cold air escapes, increasing the temperature inside of it. If you really need to check it periodically, avoid doing so for one hour intervals.
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  1. 1 Fill a container with water. Any container that holds water without leaking will work fine. You can choose to fill it all the way or part way with water.
    • Don’t use porcelain cups or hard bottles. Water expands as it freezes, so if you use a mug or Nalgene bottle to freeze water in, then it is possible that it will crack the container. A metal cup, ice cube tray, or a plastic disposable water bottle are all good options.
    • If you boil water before freezing it, the ice will come out crystal clear instead of cloudy.
    • There are several molds you can find online that will let you freeze ice into different shapes, such as a fish, skull, or even a shot glass.
  2. 2 Place the container in a freezer. The freezer’s temperature should be well below 32°F or 0°C. Find a flat spot in your freezer. Place the container on the surface carefully without spilling any water.
  3. 3 Wait for 2 to 5 hours. It will take a while for the water to completely freeze. The bigger the container of water, the longer it may take. For example, water in an ice cube tray will freeze faster than an entire bottle full of water.
  4. 4 Take it out. Your water should be totally solid. Enjoy your cold ice with a refreshing drink.
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Add New Question

  • Question How do I freeze water more quickly? If the water is warm, it seems to be freeze faster than normal water. You can use a container having large surface area, which will release its latent heat fast. The faster the release of latent heat the faster the freezing.
  • Question How long can water be stored in a freezer? Water can be stored in the freezer indefinitely.
  • Question At what temperature (in Fahrenheit) does water freeze? 32 degrees Fahrenheit.

See more answers Ask a Question 200 characters left Include your email address to get a message when this question is answered. Submit Advertisement

  • You can make ice lollies this way! Add a few drops of flavor to the water and stir it up a little before freezing.
  • You can also try freezing water outside. Check the weather report to see if the temperature will be below 32°F or 0°C for several hours in a row. Then find an area that won’t be under sunlight during that time period. It may even help to bury the container in a little bit of snow.

Thanks for submitting a tip for review! Advertisement

Water expands as it freezes. That means if you fill a hard bottle completely full of water and then try to freeze it, it might break your bottle! An ice cube tray won’t break. A plastic bottle might bend out of shape a little, but won’t usually break.

Advertisement Article Summary X To freeze water quickly, freeze it in a metal container since metal conducts heat better than plastic. You can also make water freeze faster by boiling it first, and then freezing it while it’s still hot since hot water freezes faster.

Can water freeze in 6 hours?

In a Garden Hose or Sprinkler System – People often forget to winterize their their outdoor water systems, whether that’s faucet pipes, sprinkler lines, or a garden hose. You’ll always have some remaining water in your garden hose no matter how much you try to spray out. If you have a winter evening where the temperature dips below 32 °F (0 °C), which is the freezing point of water, in only 4 to 6 hours you could have smaller amounts of water in all these locations becoming expanding, solid ice, which can cause a lot of damage quickly.

How long does a 2 Litre bottle of water take to freeze?

Download Article Download Article Freezing water is a basic task that everyone should know how to do. Even if you know how to make ice, you may not realize how many tricks there are to do the job faster and more efficiently. So if you’re ever in need of a nice cold drink on a summer day, follow these simple steps.

  1. 1 Adjust the temperature of your freezer to -24°C or -11°F. It takes several hours for the temperature in your freezer to adjust if it’s not at that temperature already.
  2. 2 Put water bottles in the fridge for 2 hours and 45 minutes exactly. The water should still be liquid, but the temperature is actually below freezing. If the bottles are frozen, then something has gone wrong. Recheck the temperature and try again. Advertisement
  3. 3 Give the bottle a firm jolt. The entire bottle should slowly turn into ice. You can also open the bottle which may start the freezing process.
    • If you freeze the bottle with the cap off, or carefully remove the cap, then you can try dropping a piece of ice into the water to instantly change it to ice. You can also pour the water over ice and make yourself ice sculptures.
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  1. 1 Remove impurities from water. Water from the tap often contains minerals and other impurities, which makes it more difficult for the water to form ice crystals. Use water with fewer impurities for fasting freezing times. Any of the following options have less impurities:
    • Bottled water
    • Boiled water
    • Filtered water
  2. 2 Increase surface area. The bigger the surface area in relationship with the total amount of water will reduce the amount of time it takes for the water to freeze. For example, an ice cube tray will freeze much faster than a bottle of water. Another example is if you take a bottle of water and empty it out onto a cookie sheet, the cookie sheet will freeze faster than the bottle. The ice cube tray and cookie sheets freeze faster because they have more surface area directly touching the cold air.
  3. 3 Chill ice cube trays. Leaving an empty ice cube tray in the freezer will help quickly freeze water when you are ready to make ice.
  4. 4 Use metal trays. Metal conducts heat better than plastic. If you have an ice cube tray made out of copper, then it helps remove the heat from the water faster than its plastic counterpart.
  5. 5 Boil water before freezing. This may seem counterproductive, but hot water can actually freeze faster than cold. This is called the Mpemba effect. There is some debate among scientists about why this is the case, but many agree that it has to do with the fact that the bonds that hold hot water together are similar to the bonds in ice crystals.
  6. 6 Increase the power of your freezer. Most refrigerators have a temperature setting that you can adjust. It sometimes takes several hours before a temperature change can take effect, but if you have the freezer on the coldest setting, then it will help to freeze water faster.
    • Refrain from opening your freezer too often. Every time you open the freezer door, cold air escapes, increasing the temperature inside of it. If you really need to check it periodically, avoid doing so for one hour intervals.
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  1. 1 Fill a container with water. Any container that holds water without leaking will work fine. You can choose to fill it all the way or part way with water.
    • Don’t use porcelain cups or hard bottles. Water expands as it freezes, so if you use a mug or Nalgene bottle to freeze water in, then it is possible that it will crack the container. A metal cup, ice cube tray, or a plastic disposable water bottle are all good options.
    • If you boil water before freezing it, the ice will come out crystal clear instead of cloudy.
    • There are several molds you can find online that will let you freeze ice into different shapes, such as a fish, skull, or even a shot glass.
  2. 2 Place the container in a freezer. The freezer’s temperature should be well below 32°F or 0°C. Find a flat spot in your freezer. Place the container on the surface carefully without spilling any water.
  3. 3 Wait for 2 to 5 hours. It will take a while for the water to completely freeze. The bigger the container of water, the longer it may take. For example, water in an ice cube tray will freeze faster than an entire bottle full of water.
  4. 4 Take it out. Your water should be totally solid. Enjoy your cold ice with a refreshing drink.
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Add New Question

  • Question How do I freeze water more quickly? If the water is warm, it seems to be freeze faster than normal water. You can use a container having large surface area, which will release its latent heat fast. The faster the release of latent heat the faster the freezing.
  • Question How long can water be stored in a freezer? Water can be stored in the freezer indefinitely.
  • Question At what temperature (in Fahrenheit) does water freeze? 32 degrees Fahrenheit.

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  • You can make ice lollies this way! Add a few drops of flavor to the water and stir it up a little before freezing.
  • You can also try freezing water outside. Check the weather report to see if the temperature will be below 32°F or 0°C for several hours in a row. Then find an area that won’t be under sunlight during that time period. It may even help to bury the container in a little bit of snow.

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Water expands as it freezes. That means if you fill a hard bottle completely full of water and then try to freeze it, it might break your bottle! An ice cube tray won’t break. A plastic bottle might bend out of shape a little, but won’t usually break.

Advertisement Article Summary X To freeze water quickly, freeze it in a metal container since metal conducts heat better than plastic. You can also make water freeze faster by boiling it first, and then freezing it while it’s still hot since hot water freezes faster.

Does hot water freeze faster Mythbusters?

Is It True that Hot Water Freezes Faster than Cold Water or that Cold Water Boils Faster than Hot Water? This seemingly simple question continues to generate considerable controversy. Takamasa Takahashi, a physicist at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wis., attempts a definitive answer: “Cold water does not boil faster than hot water.

The rate of heating of a liquid depends on the magnitude of the temperature difference between the liquid and its surroundings (the flame on the stove, for instance). As a result, cold water will be absorbing heat faster while it is still cold; once it gets up to the temperature of hot water, the heating rate slows down and from there it takes just as long to bring it to a boil as the water that was hot to begin with.

Because it takes cold water some time to reach the temperature of hot water, cold water clearly takes longer to boil than hot water does. There may be some psychological effect at play; cold water starts boiling sooner than one might expect because of the aforementioned greater heat absorption rate when water is colder.

“To the first part of the question-‘Does hot water freeze faster than cold water?’-the answer is ‘Not usually, but possibly under certain conditions.’ It takes 540 calories to vaporize one gram of water, whereas it takes 100 calories to bring one gram of liquid water from 0 degrees Celsius to 100 degrees C.

When water is hotter than 80 degrees C, the rate of cooling by rapid vaporization is very high because each evaporating gram draws at least 540 calories from the water left behind. This is a very large amount of heat compared with the one calorie per Celsius degree that is drawn from each gram of water that cools by regular thermal conduction.

  1. It all depends on how fast the cooling occurs, and it turns out that hot water will not freeze before cold water but will freeze before lukewarm water.
  2. Water at 100 degrees C, for example, will freeze before water warmer than 60 degrees C but not before water cooler than 60 degrees C.
  3. This phenomenon is particularly evident when the surface area that cools by rapid evaporation is large compared with the amount of water involved, such as when you wash a car with hot water on a cold winter day.

“Another situation in which hot water may freeze faster is when a pan of cold water and a pan of hot water of equal mass are placed in a freezer compartment. There is the effect of evaporation mentioned above, and also the thermal contact with the freezer shelf will cool the bottom part of the body of water.

If water is cold enough, close to four degrees C (the temperature at which water is densest), then near-freezing water at the bottom will rise to the top. Convection currents will continue until the entire body of water is 0 degrees C, at which point all the water finally freezes. If the water is initially hot, cooled water at the bottom is denser than the hot water at the top, so no convection will occur and the bottom part will start freezing while the top is still warm.

This effect, combined with the evaporation effect, may make hot water freeze faster than cold water in some cases. In this case, of course, the freezer will have worked harder during the given amount of time, extracting more heat from hot water.” Robert Ehrlich of George Mason University, in Fairfax, Va., adds to some of the points made by Takahashi: “There are two ways in which hot water could freeze faster than cold water.

  1. One way depends on the fact that hot water evaporates faster, so that if you started with equal masses of hot and cold water, there would soon be less of the hot water to freeze, and hence it would overtake the cold water and freeze first, because the lesser the mass, the shorter the freezing time.
  2. The other way it could happen (in the case of a flat-bottomed dish of water placed in a freezer) is if the hot water melts the ice under the bottom of the dish, leading to a better thermal contact when it refreezes.” Still feeling skeptical? Fred W.

Decker, a meteorologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis, encourages readers to settle the question for themselves: “You can readily set up an experiment to learn which freezes earlier: water that is initially hot, or water that is initially cold.

  1. Use a given setting on an electric hot plate and clock the time between start and boiling for a given pot containing, say, one quart of water; first start with the water as cold as the tap will provide and then repeat it with the hottest water available from that tap.
  2. I’d wager the quart of water initially hot will come to a boil in much less time than the quart of water initially cold.

“The freezing experiment is harder to perform, because it ideally requires a walk-in cold storage chamber that is set to a temperature below freezing. Take into the chamber two quart-volume milk bottles filled with water, one from a hot tap and the other from a cold tap outside the chamber.

Time them to freezing, and I would wager again that the initially colder water will freeze sooner than the initially hot water.” Decker concludes that “much folklore results from trying to answer such a question under conditions that do not make ‘all other things equal,’ which the foregoing experiments do.

: Is It True that Hot Water Freezes Faster than Cold Water or that Cold Water Boils Faster than Hot Water?

Does water freeze at 4 degrees?

iStockphoto/Thinkstock We drink water, we swim in it, we wash with it, and we cool things down with it. Because water is so common, many of us fail to notice just how strange it is compared to other substances. When we plop an ice cube or two into our drink during the warmer months, we watch it float above the liquid in our glass without a second thought.

  • But why does ice do this, and, more importantly, why does water freeze from the top to the bottom, when most other substances freeze from the bottom up? Water freezes from the top down—which allows ice to float—because of a strange quirk in how water’s density behaves at falling temperatures.
  • Density is the mass of a unit volume of a material substance; it is essentially a measure of how tightly packed the atoms and molecules of a substance are.

For most compounds, falling temperatures cause the compound’s volume to decrease while its density increases—with the atoms and molecules becoming more tightly packed together. For example, a pocket of warm air rises and expands because it is less dense than the cooler air around it.

Conversely, a pocket of cool air descends and contracts, becoming slightly thicker and denser as it falls. Water behaves similarly but only down to a certain temperature. The density of cooling water will increase until the water’s temperature reaches 4 °C (39.2 °F). If the water continues to cool, its density will begin to increase again, and water (now in its solid state) will expand.

It is this property of water that allows ice to wedge open cracks in sidewalks and rocks and causes cans and bottles of soft drinks to explode in the freezer. At 4 °C water is still in its liquid form. In lakes and rivers, this water will cool at the surface, grow denser, and descend.

  • As water approaches its freezing point (0 °C ), it will become less dense than the water around it, and it will rise to the top of the water column.
  • If water instead froze from the bottom of a lake or river to the top, there would be profound ecological consequences.
  • Shallow lakes would freeze solid; unless the plants, animals, and other organisms living there had some sort of adaptation that would keep their tissues from freezing, they would die.

In larger lakes, a floor of ice and slush would cool the water above, possibly slowing the metabolism and growth rate of organisms that survived in the lake’s liquid upper reaches. Under these circumstances, Earth would look very different; the planet’s polar regions would be nearly devoid of life, and every year midlatitude plants, animals, and other organisms would face the prospect of unobtainable liquid water in frozen-solid habitats.