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by jws 2667 days ago
Or contact your local ice sculpture company. They have special ice freezers for making large, clear blocks of ice.

But I’d much rather make an ice lens on an arctic beach from an iceberg than walk a couple blocks and get an off cut from the ice sculptors.

1 comments

You can also make (mostly) clear ice by increasing the time it takes to freeze, such as freezing water inside a cooler.
You need to control the direction of the freezing. As water freezes it will push the dissolved air out, and if it's freezing inward from the outside faces (like a normal ice cube tray) those bubbles end up pushed inside your ice block.

Using a cooler means the sides and bottom are insulated from the cold and won't start freezing as quickly. As it freezes top down there won't be any bubbles stuck there.

Demo on clear ice using a cooler from Cocktail Chemistry on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUHcCHbgX_o

Another trick is to drill holes in the bottom of the wells of an ice cube tray and rest the tray on a frame above the bottom of a basin. You fill the water up so that it's level with the top of the tray. When the water freezes, the air gets forced down through the holes in the bottom of the tray. Then you can chip the tray out and remove your clear ice cubes.
I find boiling the water does wonders too. Left overs from the kettle, room temp, make for clear ice cubes.
Hacker News is so wonderful, there's a never-ending array of amazing ideas to be found within these readers' posts.

I wonder if patent trolls ever snoop around here. ;-)

Because recently boiled water has far less dissolved gasses. So no bubbles.