Using dry ice to cool

How would one go about using dry ice to keep things frozen? Just thought this could be useful for transporting frozen feeders or stuff like that (I know quite a few of you are moving).

Sorry dude I can't help although I've heard that dry ice is a good method for killing rats and mice.

Well, when I had frozen mice shipped, they came with a block of dry ice. It was wrapped in some sort of plastic-lined brown paper. I'd never messed with the stuff before and thought it would be cool for the kids to see...so I put it in the freezer to show them when they got home from school. By the time they did, the whole block had evaporated. I guess the stuff they had it wrapped in kept it from evaporating, even though it wasn't being stored at cold temps during shipping. :shrug: Weird stuff, that dry ice!

When I got my package from RodentPro, it came in a big box. The dry ice was not wrapped in anything. The mice were in a freezer bag, the blocks of dry ice were laying on top of the bag and the box was lined with insulation. The insulation was just your basic pink panther, line your walls type insulation. I hope that helps.

Just get ya cooler (Igloo etc) and you be set - avoid the styrofoam ones though as the dry ice can make it even more brittle than it already is. Works great for keeping that bottle of Cuervo Gold nice and icy.

Ok...for you really brainy types out there... :P Why did the dry ice evaporate into nothing in my freezer...but it will keep in a standard cooler, or even a cardboard box (like what they ship in)???

Ya know Judy, that makes no sense to me at all because we put the block of dry ice we had in our sink & ran hot water on it & it must have taken four or five hours to completely dissappear.

And don't touch the dry ice with your bare hands! It's much colder than regular ice and can cause tissue damage.

But you MUST bust off a little chunk and drop it into a glass of water. Very cool!

K

I know not to touch it. LOL It's really weird how it vanished from my freezer in just a few hours.

why did you run hot water on it for four hours? that seems like such a waste of water

Dry ice is the solid form of carbon dioxide. Its cold because the freezing point of carbon dioxide is -190F. Carbon dioxide has a very large Solid to liquid and a quick liquid to gas ratio. When dry ice warms up it turns directly into a gas instead of water hence "dry ice". The best way to have fun with dry ice is to put it in the sink filled with water but be careful to have some ventilation because it is carbon dioxide and could knock you out from lack of oxygen.

Maybe the freezer has an exhaust - or some other form of air-circ system so it depletes itself faster? Compared to a cooler or closed plastic where it can get CO2 saturated? OK that was an awful stab in the dark - no hopes of the Hardy Boys Award this year fo me.

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Originally Posted by freakoverdose1

why did you run hot water on it for four hours? that seems like such a waste of water

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LOL My mistake for a poor explanation! The water was NOT running for four hours!! We ran some hot water on it a couple of times just to see how cool it looks when it has hot water put on it but we didn't run the hot water for anywhere near four hours. After having fun with it for a few minutes using the hot water, it then took about four hours or so to dissappear. Sorry for the misunderstanding Freak! :)

You may be right, Smulkin. Maybe it is the saturation of CO2 in small spaces that keeps it from evaporating too fast...whereas in my freezer, the gas was able to escape fast enough to let the stuff "melt".

*places a Hardy Boys sticker on your shirt* .... "A" for effort! :P