New England used to ship ice all over the world. To store the product they build palaces in India. To assure that they got nice clear ice each fall they would dump poison into the lakes. In the winter they would cut blocks of ice and store them in huge buildings insulated with sawdust. Sometime after the industry collapsed these building burned in spectacular fires.

It’s hot and muggy here. I got to thinking about using ice for air conditioning. Apparently you need a big 25 foot cube of ice. The phase transition, liquid to solid, stores most of the calories. I gather that block has about 130 million BTU of cooling stored in it.

Converting that into the emerging standard unit of energy; 1 barrel of oil (5.8 million BTU each) that’s 22.5 barrels of oil. At 50$ each that’s $1,120 worth of energy. How big is a barrel of oil?

I wonder how hard it would be to convert my garage into an ice house? Can you be an eccentric if you don’t have a grand scheme involving ice. Maybe the Tammany Ice Trust will rise from the grave.