Ice Farming K.I.S.S.

Normally I over engineer anything I build and had grand thoughts of constructing some monster with walls, dozens of spraying shower heads, hanging chain link fence etc. However, due to time constraints I wanted to experiment and see if something very simple would work and holy ice balls it worked awesome --> K.I.S.S.

I set this up two weeks ago and the only mistake I made was not hanging it 30' higher. It worked awesome and in a little over a week I got 20' columns about 4' thick. I am going to raise the PVC giving a final height of ~50' and get a top rope setup.

Drills tiny holes in PVC --> wraps small 7lb twine around PVC --> Hangs PVC --> Ice!

sweet! i can't tell from the picture. What keeps the columns from falling over?

matt c. wrote:sweet! i can't tell from the picture. What keeps the columns from falling over?

matt c begs an interesting point, they might be fine as they are but if you hang the PVC 50' tall, it's hard to imagine they would be all that stable. I may be oversimplifying, but draw yourself a 50x4 rectangle, and apply some imagination...

What were your temps? What type of water pressure did you have?

Patrick Shyvers wrote:matt c begs an interesting point, they might be fine as they are but if you hang the PVC 50' tall, it's hard to imagine they would be all that stable. I may be oversimplifying, but draw yourself a 50x4 rectangle, and apply some imagination...

That's awesome. Maybe next season if you decide to go taller, arrange your pipes in a big circle or triangle to keep it from crushing you.

Eric K wrote:What were your temps? What type of water pressure did you have?

Just like in a high rise building, (engineers know the numbers) somewhere around 50 ft. I think you will have a problem of getting water up that high unless you have supplementary pumps to push it up that high. Garden hose used for our ice the last 6 or 7 years, from a well. So that might have had more pressure than you would get from city water supply, I dont know for sure.. We had about 38 ft. height we were working with to build our ice. I like the simple idea though. Seems string drippage works pretty good for you.

That is awesome, Chris. I'm jealous! I wonder if there is a danger of the weight of the ice itself pulling the trees down?

The ice isn't hanging on the trees at all, it's self standing from the ground. Wouldn't make sense for them to get pulled down

I've seen similar freeze efforts start like that, with a thin string. Once the column begins to be supportive from the ground, it wont' 'tip over'. Nice formation and love how they all grew together as one massive group . Great start. I did see someone freeze a fir tree once, and it was sort of fun, but the weight of forming ice did bend it down a bit before the base got strong enough at base to take over the mass of the ice.