Thursday, November 20, 2008

Keeping it cool


This is a zeer pot. It cools food inside the inner pot as the water evaporates from the sand between the pots. Definately worth a test if it keeps the electricity use down.

2 comments:

Chelsea said...

Works best in very dry climates, not western Washington. I have looked into it too :)

Anonymous said...

This one is controlled by the wet bulb temperature, which in not ChE terms is the lowest possible temperature which can be obtained by evaporating water into air. The weather services keep track of this stuff for each region. Here's a link.

http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/htmlfiles/westcomp.wb.html

Looks like you can get as low as 40 degrees, but you can only get 60 degrees in the summer months. Also, this assumes perfect efficiency. Although a pot inside of another pot is very simple to do, there will likely be a reasonable discrepancy between the wet bulb temperature and the temperature that is obtained.

Dieter