Day Two

Yesterday evening we all tried to pump the fridge down. Hard work. It all seemed to be working well - the pump pumped, the pressure got lower and lower, the containers all withstood the low pressures - but the blasted water temperature didn't go down very impressively. 2 degrees Celsius, maybe? That's hardly going to cool Ellen in Death Valley, and we'll all have died of heat exhaustion. Really disappointing.

We seemed to reach a pressure that we just couldn't get lower than. Jonathan's PhD required a lot of playing around with vacuums, so he has loads of experience with them, thankfully. He says we just need to be really careful about potential leaks, that seals can work really well until you hit a particular pressure, when they would start to leak, which means you just can't get to a lower pressure.

I spend the day trying to make improvements. Everyone is helping everyone else, and we're all beginning to discuss other ways of trying to reduce the temperature. For instance, chemical reactions that cause a big temperature drop. Various reactions are used to make mixtures that can freeze water (they've been used to make ice cream), so Mike B is starting to think about of trying something else ... we need all the help we can get!