Does putting ice in front of a fan work?
Yes, putting ice in front of a fan will work to keep you cool. This is mostly true if you sit directly in front of the fan and the ice. Locally, melting a kilo of ice will noticeably reduce the temperature of the air.
However, cooling an entire room by melting is a much trickier thing to test. It depends a lot on the size of your room and how much ice you plan to melt.
There are also other factors to consider. You will generate heat by cooling down the ice in the freeze which may counteract some of the benefits of melting the ice. This might be a negligible difference, however, given you were likely already running the freezer.
Another potential issue is humidity. Melting ice will introduce more water vapor into the air. This will raise the humidity which will make the room feel hotter. This probably wouldn’t counteract the effects of melting the ice in the short term but it would make it a less efficient air conditioning option.
One hack that I like to use is to freeze a lot of large bottles of water. By large I mean ideally gallon bottles and by many, I mean 8 – 10. Empty the gallon bottles a little so that the expanding ice doesn’t make them explode.
The point of using gallon bottles is that you don’t have any water evaporation to increase the humidity of the air. Also, you can reuse the same water to freeze again. Use the same 8-10 bottles all summer if you like. A bonus benefit is that this limits a lot of the mess that melting ice tends to create.
You need a lot of gallon bottles because the ice becomes useless once it comes up to room temperature. So you’ll want to swap them out once they melt. Also, it takes a long time to fully freeze a gallon of water so you’ll need a lot of replacements in order to have continuous cooling.
Does putting ice in front of a fan actually reduce overall room temperature?
How does putting ice in front of a fan compare to an evaporative cooler?
Mark is a journalist who has written about home products for two years. He holds a masters degree with distinction from the London School of Economics and an undergraduate degree from the University of Edinburgh.