Freezing Time for Pool Water

Well, you can do experiments and write your own formula. However there is also W, the windspeed, V the exposure, U the relative humidity, T the level of insulation and S the saltiness to bring in. You do know that water is at its densest at about 4degC and that is the reason ice forms on the top, don't you?

I was generally speaking. but we can complicate it.

lets go with 10 MPH wind speed, although maintaining that consistency over time the time it takes to freeze 8000 gallons or so could be tough.

wood fence surrounding pool area so limited cross wind exposure.

wouldn't I need the temp variable to find the relative humidity? should we get a dew point or freeze point also in the mix what's another number/letter anyway right?

lets say 14 gauge G-115 Galvanized and 25MIL liner for side insulation. 28Mil PVC vinyl with laminated layers of polyester mesh, lets say 3 layers, I went cheap they only last 3 seasons anyway right?. R value cant be more than like 2.

chlorinated pool so hopefully saltiness is irrelevant, tap water was used to fill pool so EPA levels standardize pretty low and rainwater shouldn't matter either. but based on your response your saltiness seems high.

I always freeze water inside out.

OK, so measure it and mark that point on the multidimensional surface that is your equation. What are you going to change to get your next point on that surface?

Does it have a pool cover?

Material? thickness? color? insulation effect? absorption of heat? any entrapped air under it? In direct contact with water? Air support large ball? UV/IR absorption of cover? Any rain/snow during the winter? What depth of rain/air? Any dirt or darker particles blown onto the top of the cover causing increased heat absorption from the sun? many, many more?

These are for the cover only! There are many more things that must be considered in your pool winter dormancy period.

How accurate do you want the answer to be? If accuracy isn't important I have a quarter coin in my pocket that will give you an answer.

Good Luck, Old Salt

my cover is made of unicorn hide and the air ball is filled with Shakespeare's breath. hopefully that makes it a little easier.

Except for the last short paragraph of answer #10, which is also true if there is a wide acceptable range of answers, all the questions concerning the cover are extremely important for developing an answer!

Also, residents of the "Garden State", which you claim to be from, would not post a message as #11 is. Some may be reckless and of questionable motivation, example Teresa and Joe Guidice who get sentenced today, but most of them are smart enough to "go down the shore" and not "go to the shore". What would Phila. residents do without traveling East to go down to the shore.

Google NJ and you see how the rest of NJ is much more intelligent than apparently some are. You don't state where in Jersey you are from but that is also very questionable since residents of Newark, Paterson, Camden and Trenton and other locations are smart enough to know it is completely idiotic to have a pool, especially an above ground type, in those locations. Everyone knows that pools don't last more than overnight! Either they are stolen and sold on the sidewalk in front of your house or during the daylight hours they get mysterious holes in them. Vinyl pool liners with metal outer shells don't last long when they are the object of target practice with a .44, .38, .25, .22 or a RPG!

Don't bother putting the pool on sale at Englishtown. Some Jersey residents are so dumb they don't realize that Jersey is the center of the research industries. It also has more patents issued to its resident than most states, i.e. Edison, Bell, Bell Labs, Princeton Corporate Center and many others.

Keep the unicorn hide and Shakespeare's breath to yourself. If you must have it in NJ keep it in Grover's Mill. While there look for the monument of the water tower. Who knows, you might even meet Mr. Wells there. Do you really know what a unicorn hide is? What does it start out as, what is done to it, where is it done and what does result in? Check that in your Google also.

If you have any questions about this reply and any humor contained within it, simply look at several of the replies to your original posting. Motivation for this reply was on behalf of my relatives and friends who are residents of the great state of NJ. They aren't as daft as some of the other appear to be.

Good Luck, Old Salt

Thank you for that beautiful overview of NJ

Work near Edison.

Grew up near Princeton.

Live by Bell labs currently and close to the shore. The old Bell/Lucent facility is being turned it into a cancer center.

I'm happy with your daft reality TV infatuation.

Wife and kids wanted a pool so we got a pool. I'm sure you already know the water table is high in many places, so an in-ground would be quite expensive and out of the question with the high taxes here. I'm sure you know that too.

I knew when I asked the question the amount of variables would be astounding and the idea of it would be close to impossible without a weather machine. I used the word basically to get a general idea if something like this was possible naturally.(my fault for using a silly word like formula) I know in many of your current and past lines of work using generalities is foreign and deemed as incomplete. I guess my question should have been more along the lines of is it possible for an above ground pool to freeze throughout in an NJ winter. The dumb simple answer would have most likely popped up in this Google thing I assume.

let me see if I can get an old homework question for you guys to answer.

Thank you for your accolades but the whole basis for the intellectual resources of the USA being slightly higher in the Garden State is that "Jersey Girls don't pump gas!" Only one other state can claim that. In fact, no one in Jersey has to pump their own gas! Sort of makes some of us very jealous.

If you work near Edison you must be familiar with the pyrotechnics that occur every time the old arsenal has a brush fire or the "status" of being employed along the one of the many corporate business parks. Could it be the old Revlon area which unfortunately got a new neighbor next door of questionable tactics, The Municipal Building. While on the subject of Edison, how are the corn beef on rye sandwiches at Larry's Deli? As good as always? Make sure you have a Dr. Brown's Cream Soda with it and a lot of "new" pickles.

Grew up near Princeton? What old farm area did you live in that is now an overdeveloped corporate business park or condo made of highly flammable wood trusses. The youngsters now don't know that a "farm" is not a field full of strip malls.

Which Bell labs? Holmdel, Murray Hill or even perhaps the "Princeton Development Labs" that were actually located in Hopewell? Most of them don't need to be turned into cancer centers, they already were. They have been causing cancer for a long, long time.

No infatuation with reality TV. Joe and Teresa aren't real Jersey folk. They have to eat at the "Brownstone" and not a good old diner on a road to nowhere like the Tick Tock Diner. Want a good cup of java, go ta da diner! Have a pork roll sandwich while yus ar der.

Also, most people don't consider me foreign to generalities, quite the opposite. I'm a get it done without all the crap type. If clarity and specifics make the solution more obtainable and easier in terms of time, costs, effectiveness, and meeting the stated or necessary goal then a hopefully clear statement will expedite the completion and get what really needs to be done accomplished. For example, to go from Newark to Paulsboro you can either follow the GPS or just "get on the turnpike south and get off when you see the pollution". What pi$$es me off is when idiots post things that are irrelevant and confusing to the original posting.

Back to your pool question--- If you want to know is it possible for an above ground pool to freeze throughout in an NJ winter there is an easier and more accurate method of determining that. Based on statistics and astute observations you can develop a method, not a formula requiring tetra bits of processing with giant gobs of input, to easily determine this. Statistics involves a thermometer, a watch not a stop watch calibrated to the national standard, a pencil, some paper and a map or GPS. During a cold spell (record the temp) take a ride around the neighborhood. Look in the back yards, carefully so you don't get shot, for above ground pools. When you see one look at it. Has it bulged around the sides like a guy who drank to many Ballantine Ales? If it does it froze completely through. When it comes to the ice vs. thin galvanized with a flimsy liner the ice always wins. Straight sides, it didn't freeze completely.

Without going into reams of research and development records, ice expands when it freezes. If it is frozen completely through the ice expanded the liner and walls to a point that it bulged or maybe even blew the walls out so much it drained itself when the thaw came. That is the "quick and dirty" method of doing it without a "formula". I feel certain that a genuine Jersey Guy would think of that first. If not, ask a Jersey Girl, they know everything or at least claim to.

Sorry for being so long and using so much verbiage but if I abridged it some other contributors may take their calipers and force gauges and sneak around frozen pools during a cold spell. That's a very dangerous think to do in Jersey. Any kid with half a brain can make a zip gun and knows how to use it. Go to your local Emergency Room, I bet they collect more lead than they do tonsils!

Good Luck, Old Salt

"...In fact, no one in Jersey has to pump their own gas!..."

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Hmmm, '...no one in Jersey has to pump their own...' or '...no one in Jersey is trusted to pump their own...'?

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Maybe another example will help sort this out. When I visited New Jersey, one of the conspicuous differences was that you can't turn left in New Jersey.

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'No one has to turn left in New Jersey' isn't actually true. We had to turn left several times, and each time it took three rights and a silly amount of time to arrive at a destination that I could have hit with a hand chucked a pirogi when we saw it to our left.

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'No one is trusted to turn left in New Jersey' . There is no other choice this is obviously the answer.

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and for pumping gas it is the same. 'No one in New Jersey is trusted to'.... there is no other choice.

From my travels through the Garden State, concerning the gasoline statements "...In fact, no one in Jersey has to pump their own gas!..." is very true, legally. The downfall is that apparently demographics have changed and affected the retail gasoline market. No longer are there "motor heads want to bee's" or the occasional bikini clad girls, Hooters style. The most difficult part of getting gasoline is to find a station where the attendants speak at least more than one syllable of a rough English language. Those that do speak English are a endangered species but they do attract a lot of customers. "Twenty dollars of regular, cash" once got me a full tank of premium. Since the $20 bill was all I had they had enough English words to call the cops when I refused to pay for their mistake.

As I see it, the good things about the state that stands behind the Statue of Liberty are:

Its close proximity to the bright lights of NYC

"Down the Shore"

Pork roll, egg and cheese sandwiches

The diverse variety of geographic attractions and cultures.

The food

The high level of education including grammar, high school, Universities and Colleges, Post Grad and Corporate R&D

You don't have to pump your own gas.

A very low rate of above ground swimming pools freezing complete through. The "ice cube" type of malady. There is enough hot air coming from their politicians that the pools evaporate during warm spells in winter.

Joe and Teresa got jail time this week.

My wife is a Jersey Girl. Therefore she knows everything.

The apparently bad things about Jersey are:

That's where my mother-in-law lives. She knows even more than everything.

The crime in the cities. Newark has the highest heroin addiction rate in the state follow by Jersey City at #2 and Camden at #3.

Bad drivers from NY and PA driving through it. Even worse than Jersey drivers.

There is only 8,722 sq miles of it. There should have been at least 7,000 sq miles of beach and sand. Not the "Sandy" type though.

The "House Wives of NJ".

Pauly D, Mike the Situation, Snooki, Jwoww, Sweetheart, Vinny, and the rest of the social misfits.

The portly guy who has his governor's office in Trenton. Who ever heard of taking public employees pension moneys to pay off the idiotic state debt? Heaven help you if you are a public employee! Uses a state police helicopter to transport him to his kid's little league games. Some of the most angry friends and relatives I have in NJ tell me that when the world is given an enema they hope it starts in the governor's office.

A past governor who resigned because of his personal preferences in mates.

I am by no means an anthologist on Jersey. As I said, my mother-in-law lives in Jersey, therefore she knows everything. As her son-in-law, I'm the dumbest creature ever created. One of the other one's is the dumbest!

Good Luck, Old Salt

So, I saw bad driver in the bad list... which makes sense. But I didn't see anything about the weird traffic rules in either list.

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Some might say a requirement to honk when passing, and the prohibition on left turns is necessary due to the population of bad drivers, but rules as strange as this might just inflame the problem.

So, weird traffic rules weren't listed since, to me at least, Jersey's aren't any worse than all the other states including our countries capital! You've got to admit all of them are enough to get a sober driver to DUI with excess of an 0.08 (federally mandated if states want to get highway funds). They are all messed up, Jersey included.

From my travels there I haven't noticed a prohibition on left turns but then again I wasn't looking for one. That doesn't say they aren't dangerous, at least no more dangerous than any other state. I'll look next time I drive in that state. To me Florida has the most messed up right turn rules. No Right Turn, Right Turn on Red, Right Turn on Red After Stopping and so on. Maybe it is to avoid those crazy alligators from getting out of the Everglades.

A recent study said there are drivers much worse than Jersey drivers. Louisiana has the worst (and angriest) drivers in the whole country! South Carolina is 2nd and Jersey was a lowly 34th worst!

http://www.carinsurancecomparison.com/which-states-have-the-worst-drivers/#Table

As you say, Jersey may have weird traffic rules but they have drivers very accepting and compliant with weird traffic rules, are they weird too? Forget the "Jersey driver", watch out for the ones from South Carolina.

Good Luck, Old Salt

That is an interesting link. Thanks for posting.

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The method used to determine the ranking is curious. Montana, the state topped all others in drunk driving and fatalities per 100M miles wasn't even ranked in the top 10%.

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It seems that the low number of internet searched for traffic tickets for that state, compared to other similar searches with that state name, was important enough to pull the rating up to 9th.

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Internet searches for terms about traffic tickets in a state is a weird metric to use, but even if the actual number of tickets per 100M vehicle miles was known, it would still be an ambiguous indicator.... Would few tickets indicate good drivers, or just a minimal effort at enforcement?

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It looks like in Montana, given the number of deaths per vehicle mile, it might be an indication of comparatively relaxed enforcement.

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Still, your point is taken regarding the good job New Jersey and a few other northern/northeastern states are doing regarding fatalities per vehicle mile. The rate for the worst is almost three times the rate for the best.

No, there is not a formula because you have far too many unknowns. Particularly you do not know the air or soil temperature, wind and humidity your pool will experience. The cooling process from evaporation will slow down once ice starts to cover the top of the pool but from how I read your question this will be after the fact you wish to find.

Then there is that really bizarre condition called the Mpemba effect where warmer water can freeze faster than colder water.

Do you mean how long to freeze solid right through? My guess is that would take longer than the winter. And how would you know? The ice that forms on top and inside the walls is a fairly poor conductor so slows the rate of heat loss, and it can't convect. If you mean something less you need to be more specific.

yeah freeze sold throughout. this is a lost cause. its no more fun. you have beaten me down.

That'll teach ya'....

Perhaps you could ask the guy here standing on his pool and conduct a dimensional analysis of his data to get a ballpark estimate.

That's Crabtree isn't it? played me like a fiddle.

Calculated the time it takes for a liquid to freeze ? | Physics ...

I don't know, but it gets really cold in Duloot hey. I gets so cold dat everbodies words freeze when day come out your mout and ya have ta wait til ice out ta hear em.

Hey Dude, Don't give up, ask an engineer about the weather and he wants to build a weather station. Just so you don't think it's an engineer's thing to obfuscate check out this thread from a physics forum, same action, different philosophy.

Nobody can answer your question directly because it's unbounded, so you're going to get answers that depend upon the practicioners' points of view. Here's some more :answers":

http://van.physics.illinois.edu/qa/listing.php?id=537

http://www.seriouseats.com/2013/10/science-this-is-why-hot-water-can-freeze-faster-than-cold-water-mpemba-effect.html

http://www.answers.com/Q/How_long_does_it_take_for_2_liters_of_water_to_freeze

The best answer to your question is "it depends".

There are at least two things that keep this problem from having a rule of thumb, or even a simplifies formula for getting close.

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First is that evaporation from an uncovered surface is going to be responsible for the dominant heat loss until the water at the surface is very near freezing. This heat loss will be much larger at higher temperatures and depends strongly not only on things like wind speed, temperature, and humidity, but also strongly on what might seem like trivial factors like how far the water surface is below the rim/edge of the pool, the contour of the pool rim/edge, and any surrounding objects that might redirect or trip wind flow.

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Second is how well stirred the pool water is. This will also depend on some of those conditions above that might have seemed trivial, but also on the color and material of the pool sides and bottom, whether it is overcast, or sunny, and the latitude of the pool location.

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There is some good news though. You wanted to know about the time it takes to freeze solid. The time for the surface to freeze will be much shorter than the time for it to freeze solid. As long as you are willing to start from the time the surface freezes, so that evaporation no longer plays a dominant role, ballpark estimates are much easier to make.

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We can do some reasonable simplification and assume that the ground is not a heat source and acts as a perfect insulator. Also since the last place to freeze solid will be the center bottom of the pool, and since the pool is much wider than it is deep, we can neglect heat transfer from the sides and look at this as a 1D problem. And it is also fair and convenient to assume that once there is 1/2" of ice on the pool that most of the water in the pool is pretty close to freezing, allowing consideration of only heat of fusion to be reasonable.

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That brings us to 'how long for air temperatures below freezing does it take for fresh water to freeze 40" deep?'.

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Rates of freezing drop off as the ice gets thicker, but while the heat transfer through ice is the bottleneck when the ice is more than a few inches thick, the ability for air to remove heat is the bottleneck when ice is really thin. So if an estimate on something more shallow were needed, we would likely have to use something more complicated. Luckily, at 40" deep there is a pretty simple rule of thumb that is helpful.

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A coefficient for windiness between 0.5 for flat calm to 0.8 for windy is multiplied with the square root of the product of the number of days since ice formation and the amount the average daily temperature is below freezing in degrees Fahrenheit .... to get ice depth in inches.

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40" divided by 0.67 for some wind gets us close enough to use the nice round number 60. 60 squared brings us to around 3600 Fahrenheit freezing degree days for 40" or 2000 Celsius freezing degree days for about 100 cm.

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So with moderate wind and a lot of other assumptions, if it would take

about 100 days at -4 F

about 200 days at -10 C

about a year at 482 Rankine

and about 40 days at 223 Kelvin.

And when it freezes solid it breaks the galvanized container.

ill take it. give that man a beer.

A better question is, "How long before the ice is thick enough for a hockey game?"

I'll gladly divulge that info in exchange for your method of miniaturizing hockey players sufficiently that a game can be played inside a circle of 9 foot radius.

my 3 year old will love it!