Homemade ice machine tests, viewer requested! #385

Welcome back everybody. My name is Andrew and you're watching the Kelly's Country Life. So we are back with another, well, guide ice episode right here. I'm gonna test a few more theories that y'all have all had. And this episode's not gonna be about one thing specifically. We're gonna test lots of different things, just kind of dive into it, see where production gets. So today I have put the ice maker back to its original position, as in I took the chiller out because we did chilled water in the last episode until we decided if I'm really gonna build a chiller or not. I've got a lot of data running without a chiller. So that's what we're gonna compare it to since we already have some good baseline numbers. But today it's gonna be about thermal mass. It's been a big debate on the channel. I've been curious about how I wanna pursue thermal mass, if I wanna make block ice, put things in there. And I realized probably the easiest way to do it is let's just start right now. We're probably half full, maybe a little over of ice. So there's a good amount of volume in there, a good amount of mass. I'm gonna let this run for 48 hours before I test. No point in opening it every day. I'm also curious if opening it less, not testing every day, if my production's gonna go up. I think absolutely it will. I'm not putting hot air from the room in there. I'm not making the compressor work harder, get everything back down to temp. But I'm gonna do 48 hours with all the ice in here. And here's the killer. We're gonna empty this thing completely. So we're gonna go from one extreme of a decent amount of thermal mass to none. And then we're gonna see if we make the same amount of ice less. We're also gonna track energy usage in this. I think that's gonna be the biggest thing. When it's got more thermal mass in here, I have a feeling that the compressor's gonna cycle less, energy usage is gonna be less. Whenever it's completely empty, we may make just as much ice, but it may cost us a lot more per pound to make. I really don't know. That's why we're testing. It's gonna take four days just to get this first little test done. So let's get started now. Let me show you where we're at. All right, so as y'all can see, all my lines are back to the water valves, plumbed straight into the water coming outside. Nothing going on there. The cooler is out of the way. No chilled water. As far as the inside, let's give you a good idea on ice here. Looks like it just dumped. I haven't started my test yet, so ice out of there. So we're about to here. Just about halfway full, but a good amount of thermal ice and mass in here. And we're gonna run for 48 hours. Let's go ahead and get this closed. Two fans, since I have a lot of data on a two-fan test. Cut everything off. Unplug our kilowatt meter so it starts over. Turn everything back on. Good, we're zeroed out. Time everything. So we'll start tracking energy usage as well as production for one 48-hour run. Take everything out. Do another 48-hour run and see if thermal mass plays a more important role in production, efficiency, both or neither. Well, it's been 24 hours. I just realized after I told y'all yesterday I was gonna wait 48 hours. I do not have the catch pan capacity for 48 hours. Ice would spill everywhere. So I'm gonna have to continue to do the 24-hour test. Now, once we completely empty the freezer and I do two 24-hour empty tests to test the thermal mass, I may let it run for 48 or more hours, maybe up to 96 hours. My gut says we're gonna get more production without me opening and closing this every day, putting extra load on the freezer, putting the warm air in there. So we'll test that as well. My goal, which I have not told a lot of y'all on video, but I have in the comments, my personal goal is 10 pounds a day. I think I'm already there if I were to put this in the air-conditioned room where it's eventually gonna go. I just don't have room in there right now until our house gets built and I clear some stuff out of there. But we're very close. Right now, we're just tinkering. We're playing. I wanna push these ice makers to the limit, see what I can do. A lot of people are having fun with this. So that's why some people are wondering, why on earth are you dragging this out? Because people keep giving me suggestions. People keep telling me they love watching this. So I'm gonna keep making the content until the majority of people are saying, all right, we've had enough. Let's move on to something else. Because I've got a million other projects I can do around here as well, including the big house that I'm building. All right, I did drop one piece of ice. So I'm gonna steal a piece, put it over here. 7.34 pounds. And again, these are just baseline numbers to test thermal mass. 1.35, about 8.69 pounds. This is almost spot on with all the other tests that we did. I think they're around 8.7. So looking extremely consistent out here. Okay, so it's been right at 24 hours. We're gonna do another 24 hour two fan baseline test. No chill or no nothing. So we can get some results on thermal mass versus no thermal mass. So let's see what the weight is. All right, lost one cube of ice, but it went over in the other tray. Perfect. 6.77 pounds. 2.32, that's 9.09 pounds. And yes, that's actually slightly up from our normal two fan test. The reason why, it rained the majority of the day yesterday. Overcast and it's been overcast and kind of misting rain all morning. No doubt, the shop is cooler. The freezer's more efficient and the incoming water has cooled down. But we're only talking, what, 0.3 pounds up from yesterday's test. So still very consistent results. I have a feeling we're gonna hit that 10 pound mark here before long. All right, now something that hurts, but it's all in the name of science. We're gonna start emptying this. You can see I got my flip flops on. I'm about to go throw my swimming trunks on. Even though it's a nasty day today, we're about to load the coolers up. We're getting on the boat. This is what we do all the time. So I'm gonna use a lot of this ice for coolers for the next couple of days. Then I'm gonna completely empty this, leave the frost in it, so we can see if that makes a difference. Test it with no thermal mass in there for a couple of days. See what the numbers, see what the power consumption is. Then we're gonna defrost it, because a lot of people say that frost is killing me. Then we're gonna run two more day tests and probably wrap this video up and answer a lot of very common questions that y'all have been having about that. For now, I'm gonna enjoy my ice that I've been making. And a lot of people ask why I don't wanna put a third and fourth ice maker in here. As you can see, room's already cramped as it is right now for me to have one side to scoop the ice out of. As y'all can see, the ice is still coming out, relatively loose, even with all the opening and closing that I've been doing and allowing moisture to get in here. As we get toward the bottom, there could be a block down there, but I have yet to ever see it. But I've never opened and closed it this much either. Now for the most painful test yet, and one I have not been looking forward to. I'm going to take every bit of ice out of this freezer and I'm gonna throw it away, all in the name of science. So now that we've got our good baseline with a good amount of thermal mass in there, we're gonna take it all out, we're gonna run the test, we're gonna monitor the energy usage, compare the figures, and keep moving forward with testing. So I'm gonna go fill the cooler up with some drinks and at least enjoy that the next few days. The rest of the ice, we're just gonna put in the sink, let it melt away, start this all over again. After this test, we're gonna do the full defrost, clean out test, and see if the freezer's much more efficient and makes any more ice without all that frost on the walls. That's been a very common question. All right, I just went outside and filled up an 80 quart cooler. I've got a ton of ice in the sink in here. And to answer everybody's burning question, did I wind up with a huge block of ice in the bottom? Nope, sure didn't. I have yet to have that problem. And I've been letting this ice sit in here for several weeks, opening and closing this constantly. You see it's building up ice frost because I'm sucking in so much hot air, testing and opening it every day. No block of ice in the bottom. There was a couple of chunks in the corner that was slightly frozen. Literally tapped it with a scoop, fell right apart. Scooped it out, no problem. Not a single ice cube, whoop, I lied. There's one ice cube. No ice cubes in here at all. So I don't even have to put my pans in here. We can just let this run. And now we're gonna do our thermal mass test. Gonna unplug this, plug it back in, which restarts the timer. Zero hours, zero kilowatts. I wanna check the wattage and the capacity. Let's see what thermal mass really does. That's been a very common theory on the channel that we're gonna make a lot less ice, use a lot more energy, having no mass in there at all. See y'all in 24 hours. All right, so it's been a full 24 hours since we have did the zero thermal mass test. And I haven't opened it up, looked in there, anything, and I already see interesting results. And some of them we already thought would happen. So check this out. So if we look at our thermostat, it's about to go back to 24 hours. I have been noticing something. And I've been out in the shop all yesterday and today. So let's let it do a full 24 hours here. Two degrees to 39 whenever I had it open. But two degrees to really about six degrees. I've been watching the thermostat. This freezer has absolutely struggled and has not gotten any colder than two degrees. And the majority of the time I come out here, it's between four and six degrees. It's on the same setting that I've been running the test this entire series. And I've had no issues getting it down to minus two, minus three consistently. Now it always swings a few degrees. The other thing I have noticed, I've been watching my kilowatt meter every time I come out here. And it's always, and I mean always pulling wattage. I haven't seen the compressor cut off not one single time in 24 hours. It has me a little bit concerned. I don't want to sit here and run this test over and over and over and burn my compressor out. But before I even look in there at production, I can already tell you, based on the temperature swings I'm seeing, the fact that we can no longer get down to zero or colder, and the fact that I have never seen the compressor kick off, thermal mass absolutely makes a big difference on efficiency. Not really a shocker there. I had already called that. A lot of y'all have called that, but it does seem to make a big difference. So if I don't fill this freezer up, it looks like it may potentially run for days before the compressor would ever cycle off. They may be built to run that long, but I don't think so. We definitely want to put something in there for efficiency. The other thing, before we even look at production, if I go over to our kilowatt hour usage, it's the highest of this entire test series. We're at 2.00 kilowatt hours to make whatever ice that we have in there. Now keep in mind, whenever I was running this test, two fans, no chilled water, just like I'm running right now, we were averaging around 1.86 to 1.88 kilowatt hours in a 24 hour period. So energy usage is definitely up as well. Makes sense. Compressor is yet to ever cut off. So thermal mass is very important. It does provide something here, no doubt. All right, here is the part that I am curious about and have no idea. Let's see what all this weighs. So 4.63 pounds, 5.14, or no, 5.15. So we have some very, and I mean very, interesting results here. 9.78 pounds, almost the best we have done this entire test. So with those results, which I was not expecting, I now feel compelled to do another 24 hour test, even at the risk of potentially burning my compressor up, all in the name of science, right? I was gonna go ahead and defrost it and do a 24 hour test there, but those were some very unexpected results. Kilowatt hour usage was up, yes, but production almost through the roof. We're getting what I got with chilled water without. Why? I think I already have a theory as to why, but we're gonna run this test for 24 more hours, see those results before I spew my theory out at y'all. But this is very interesting that ice production went up with no thermal mass. That kind of makes sense why kilowatt hour usage was up, but we also did that on a much higher than called for temperature too. Very interesting. See y'all in 24 hours. Okay, we are now back for our second 24 hour no thermal mass test. Yesterday's results were so impressive, I decided to run this test one more time. And I'm happy to say the freezer's still running. I have yet to see the compressor cut off again in 24 hours. Makes sense, there's no mass in there. And it's been struggling with temperature like it did yesterday. But it did not burn up. So let's take a quick look. All we're cared about is this outdoor thermometer. You see it's still four degrees in there, never made it well. In the last 24 hours, it's anywhere from two to 18 degrees. Now the 18 degrees is when I had it open real quick yesterday getting the ice out. It cooled back down relatively quickly, but I did the same thing the day before. So the test results are consistent. Now the thing of it is, it still cannot get it down to zero. It hasn't got below two degrees. So thermal mass is making a huge impact, excuse me, on the efficiency of the freezer. No doubt about that. We don't want this running 24 seven nonstop. Eventually our compressor will probably fail on us. Now the other thing is, kilowatt hour usage is up as expected. The compressor didn't cut off. However, not quite as high as yesterday, but very, very close. We'll jot these numbers down and kind of compare everything. All right, we're teared out. I'm gonna take this off so it's not wobbly. Let's spill much more of this ice. A lot of ice in here today. 7.84 pounds. All right, plus the three cubes that I lost brings us to 1.392 pounds. We're just gonna say 1.39. It's a total of 9.23 pounds. Not quite as impressive as yesterday, but overall this has still actually improved over the thermal mass results. So I have a theory. I'll explain why in just a second. So I would really love to hear your theories and thoughts down in the comments on why you think no thermal mass is producing more ice than when this was over half full of ice. My thought is air circulation. Now that we have this full empty cavity with all coal somewhat exposed other than the frost, I think the fans are actually moving, recirculating air better, even though we're not getting to the same temperature that we were when we had thermal mass. That's all I can think of right now. Now y'all are smart. Y'all come up with some awesome ideas. Y'all may see something that I'm not seeing here, but at this point I'm starting to think we're leaving some low hanging fruit out there. I think we need to really experiment with the fans more, really dive into that with air movement. I've been talking with a lot of y'all the last few days about mini fridges, things like that. I think I'm gonna leave that be for now. A lot of y'all said, let's keep this project DIY friendly. Let's keep it simple. Mini fridges don't really need to be in the equation. Plus all the extra water load I'm gonna put in a mini fridge for a cooler is actually gonna make the mini fridge electricity go up. So we just don't really think the money is there to make a mini fridge be chilled water coming in. But with the increase that we're seeing now with my gut says airflow, I think we got a lot more experimenting to do with fans. Keep in mind that was our biggest increase. Just by moving fans around, we pretty much went up 100% on production. That's a huge increase. There's no way I got it right just messing around with them twice. So I think the next episode we're gonna go into that, but we're not done with this one just yet. One of the biggest requests that I've had is defrost this thing. Everybody says the frost buildup on the side is not good for it. It's not making it efficient and I'll make less ice. So I'm about to open this up, let it defrost, put it outside. This has a drain in it, drain it out. I need to go ahead and clean it anyways. I've been in it so much. It's probably not sanitary now. I'm digging in it daily for this testing. I'm gonna bring it back in, let it cool down for many hours before I even turn the ice makers on, anything. Then I'll probably run, I may even let it run overnight. That way I can know that it's getting back to the temperature it should be. It didn't get hot out in the sun. Then I'll run a full 24 hour test and we'll see, does defrosting this make any difference? Now we have a bunch of baseline numbers for thermal mass, no thermal mass. Let's test defrosting. I just realized I should probably be showing this part. A lot of people ask, how do you defrost this? How do you clean it? That's the beauty of this system. The ice makers come right out. I'm just going to unplug them, take the water tubes out. I can drag this right outside. It's very lightweight. All right, so a couple of quick connections. Here's my ice makers. Did pop the cap off this one in order to get the end off. And by the way, I finally found the adjustment screw. It's on the side, but I'm making such large ice cubes right now. I'm not sure that I want to mess with the size of the cubes just yet, but at least I finally found it. So we do have that option down the road. All right, so it's quite simple. I'm going to let the sun do the work for me. I'm going to pull this drain and I've got it tilted up on this side. It's also already slid forward just due to the lay of the concrete here. The drain's right here in this bottom corner and I'm going to let everything melt, come to this drain and whenever I get back from doing a little hardware store run, I'm going to clean it out, put it inside, cool it off. We'll start the whole process again. All right, so it's been right at 24 hours on the defrosting test and I can already tell you we've got interesting results. By the way, excuse what I'm wearing. I'm soaking wet, dripping, just jumped out from swimming. Remembered I have to do this test. Time is up. So we've got the most kilowatt hour usage yet. This is exact opposite of what I was expecting. Today's temperature, everything has been just like it was yesterday before we defrosted. So I'm really confused why our kilowatt hour usage is highest I've ever seen. We'll jot that down and go over some of this right now. So let's take a look at the last 24 hour temperature. This is what's interesting. It's about to come around here in just a second. If I remember correctly, it actually did better than when the frost was on there, which was to be expected. Just don't know why energy usage is up. So last 24 hours, we went from one to 19 degrees. Keep in mind the 19 was right whenever I opened it, did the test, very similar results to the day before. I actually seen, I thought I seen it go to zero or so, but the fact of the matter is the temperature actually was better being defrosted than it was the couple of days of being frosted. That makes sense. Why is our kilowatt hour usage up? Let's see. The only thing I can think of is if we've made more ice. 2.99 pounds. You hear that? We just made a drop, 24 hours and one minute. If I had to call it, I think we would have that highest ice production ever. So 2.99 plus, there's more ice dropping in there, 6.27, 9.276. If I'm not mistaken, if I had to call it this ice dumping there, we'd have been right at 10 pounds. It's all about timing on some of these tests. No doubt about that. Okay, so it's been right at 24 hours. This is the last test and then I'm gonna release this video. So this is the frost free second day test. And we had interesting results yesterday. The highest kilowatt hour usage yet and ice production was good, but not the best we've seen. So I'm scratching my head on this one. Let's see what today's results. We'll go to the numbers and we'll talk about what's coming. All right, 6.65 pounds. 3.07, so a little better today for 9.72 pounds. It's starting to be a common number here lately. Oh, so close to 10 pounds. Okay, so we have crunched the numbers and we have interesting results. I wanna hear your theories. I have my own, I've already said it, I'll say it again. But this was the exact opposite results that I was expecting. That's why you run these tests. Now, this test didn't really prove a whole lot as far as pass moving forward. I have a certain direction I'm gonna go regardless, but this was a highly requested test from y'all. So I figured we'd make a video of it, why not? So let's talk some numbers. The baseline test, two fans running, frost built up like crazy in there, and full, well, not full, over half full of ice. A lot of thermal mass in there. We averaged 8.89 pounds a day between two days of testing. And we used 1.91 kilowatt hours was the average. So 0.21 kilowatt hours per pound to make. That's respectable. So here's where things get interesting. I took all the ice completely out, nothing in the freezer at all, left the frost build up. We went to nine and a half pounds, jumped up a large amount there was the average between the two days. Kilowatt hour usage did go up a decent amount to 1.99 kilowatt hours, but this was the best cost yet, 0.20 kilowatt hours, very small numbers, doesn't matter. But we made more production, we use more power, but the production slightly outpaced when we had all the thermal mass in there. Very weird. I'll include these numbers at the end so you can kind of pause and take a look at them. Now here's where it gets really interesting. I completely defrosted the freezer. I let it cool down for a full 24 hours. So we couldn't say, hey, it was sitting in the sun. It got hot. I let it cool completely down, dumped all the ice out of it. And here are the numbers. We averaged 9.49 pounds, almost identical to when we had the frost in there, 0.01 pounds different. So they're identical. But our kilowatt hour usage went up again. We averaged 2.02 kilowatt hours. The highest it's been throughout this entire test, if I remember correctly. Now that was the shocker. Everybody, including myself, said the freezer's gonna get far more efficient defrosting it. It was the exact opposite. And our cost per pound was 0.21 kilowatt hours per pound, which was tied with the baseline test. So again, small numbers, but at the end of the day, highest kilowatt hour usage. I've been tracking the temperature, even though my inside thermometer failed, we were killing batteries left and right, keeping it at zero degrees around the clock. And without a doubt, just to the eye, we used more power and the freezer struggled. I never seen the compressor cut off over the last few days with no thermal mask and it didn't matter if it was frosted or defrosted. Actually, again, keep in mind, defrosted used even more power. So I'm really confused on that one. But the thermal mask did allow temperatures to stabilize. We actually got down to the minus two and close to the zero degrees that it was looking for. We never once got there with no thermal mask in there. So without a doubt, thermal mask does stabilize the compressor. It just made less ice than any of the tests. My theory why is because of the fan, the air circulation. When you're full of mask, I had a feeling that the air is just moving the top air there. It's not recirculating properly and it's not getting that cold, dense air in the bottom. And a lot of y'all have screamed at me about that. You need to pull cold, dense air off the bottom, run a tube down something. So I really do think you're correct. We need to revisit some fan tests. Let's skip the mini fridge, everything else for now. A lot of people have said, that's just taking it too far. We got our biggest increase with fans. We don't have fan placement perfect yet. We don't have fan speed and air speed perfect yet. I think there's still some, again, like I said, low hanging fruit, some money on the table, so to speak, to grab there with those tests. Let me show y'all something. So speaking of that, I've been shopping. This is one of the baddest fans I have seen, if you want to call it a computer fan, with one of the highest CFM ratings. And it's also got a waterproof rating, made by Cooler Guys right here. So we're going to test much higher fan speeds locations. Check this out. It's also even got a diffuser shroud, whatever you want to call it. You see the possibilities here. Not only does this direct and force air toward an ice maker, or I can potentially connect piping and pull air or push air into a certain area of the freezer. I think this is really going to be the path to move forward with the testing here. Again, my personal goal is 10 pounds a day in the heat of the summer. We're already making 10 pounds a day if I stuck this in an air conditioner room, no doubt about that. So let's push these little ice makers to the limit. This stuff was not expensive. I'll include it on the next test video, assuming we use it and it works. Appreciate the guys over at Cooler Guys. They actually stumbled across this video because some of y'all recommended it. I don't know them at all. I bought and paid for all this stuff, but it turns out after talking with them, I ordered some of this stuff on Amazon, ordered the wrong power adapter. So the guys were nice enough to talk back and forth with me, sent me the correct power adapter. So that's awesome. These are the fans to use. I'm going to use them now. They're a small American company out in Seattle, I think if I remember correctly. So that was cool of them to reach out to me. They're not paying me. They're not doing nothing. They're the ones that found me there. So we have some tests coming up. We're also going to jump into an insulation test. I think I'm just going to go for all of it. I'm not going to sit there and drag the testing out for that. We're going to insulate this back wall, the piping outside of our debauched stuff like that. We're going to insulate the backside of this freezer. They keep sweating and getting cold, and I even have something for the lid. So we'll kind of do a one big test there, see if we get the improvements. I want to blow the hot air off of the compressor down there. I've had a lot of people tell me they see a huge improvement doing that. Well, guess what? We're about to have extra fans now, especially if we use this one inside. Now here's the kicker. I ordered two of these fans. Amazon sent me one. They only charged me for one. That's good, but I wanted two. This has such high CFM and output, though. I probably only need one, but we'll play with that. One more thing. So without a doubt, one of the most popular questions, hundreds if not a thousand or more questions, is why are you not using a tabletop ice maker? They're small or compact, and they produce a lot of ice. I've made a lot of claims why I didn't, but I finally decided, you know what? A lot of people have asked. Let's test one. That looks like about 10 pounds. So even though production was down with thermal mass, it's something I absolutely want to do. I need to build this back up quick, fast, and in a hurry. That's gonna help me do that. The reason I want that is I want my compressor to cut off. I don't want it burning up. Don't want to lose my ice maker here. So as far as some upcoming tests, yes, we're gonna test a tabletop ice maker. A lot of people have asked to do that. We have a ton of tests coming. Not everything has to do with the ice maker itself. We're gonna test different types of ice, store-bought ice, tabletop ice, this ice. How long does it last? We're gonna test it in a lot of different areas and some actual uses. That's been a common request on the channel too, and I think an excellent idea, something I've actually wanted to test for years. So a whole smorgasbord of tests are still coming. Version 2.0 build will be coming after some of this testing. We won't wait for all of it to finish because some of it has to deal with the ice maker itself, as I just explained. So if y'all have any more ideas, anything else you want me to test, now's the time to speak. We've got a couple more videos, then we're gonna jump into a new build and try to make it look streamlined, look excellent as far as a DIY homemade ice maker goes, and most importantly, let's don't blow no budget. Thank y'all for watching. Don't forget, if you want a God Ice ice shirt, not the bad God Ice, link is down in the description. Thanks for the channel support. We'll catch you on the next video.