Alright everyone! Welcome back to Cody's Lab.
As you can see I am back in the city and have been
shoveling off the porch because a lot of snow had
accumulated while I was gone.
Unfortunately though, the mailman and the religious solicitors
had really packed it down so it's been really
difficult to remove the packed snow from the
porch and this is about as far as I've gotten.
So I think this is an excellent opportunity
to try something out that I've always wanted to do,
and that is to melt the ice using sugar.
That's right! Regular table sugar.
Let's see if I can melt the ice with it.
I don't just want to use sugar for the curiosity but also
because salt really is damaging my bushes here.
Also the grass is really salt-damaged right around here
as we try to melt all the snow with the salt.
But sugar would not damage the plants.
So what I've got set up here is a little experiment I'm gonna try.
On one side of this porch area I'm gonna add
four pounds of rock salt, and on the other
side I'm gonna add four pounds of granulated sugar,
and then I'm gonna compare the two.
Alright, so on this side of the porch I'm
gonna put rock salt, and on this side
I'm gonna use the sugar.
This'll be pretty sweet I think, eh?
[chuckle]
You see, us lazy humans use rock salt to help
melt the ice because the salt, as it dissolves into the water,
lowers the melting point of the water
and makes it so it'll melt off so we don't have to spend
a lot of time actually digging the ice off of the road surface.
And I'm no exception here.
Alright, so there's the last of the salt.
So this side's salty and this side's sweet.
Very nice.
It looks like both have actually already started working.
We can see the salt is beginning to melt the ice.
It's starting to look wet now,
but the sugar's doing the same thing
you can see over here.
So it looks like it's working.
So it's the next day, and as you can see
most of the ice has indeed melted.
Here's the side with the salt,
and here's the side with the sugar.
The sugar actually has a little bit of ice still left,
so that would mean that the salt did better.
But honestly this side probably was a little
bit more packed down than the other side
because it was right in front of the door.
One thing I would like to point out is
there actually is still salt here though.
Most of the salt did not get used up.
Most of the salt is still right where I left it
because it didn't take very much salt to melt the ice,
whereas all of the sugar is gone.
All of the sugar has run off the porch.
You can see that the water has basically run off.
This is because the sugar has a
much less melting capability than the salt does.
Also the salt was a little bit more granular
so maybe if I had really giant chunks of sugar
there would still be sugar left there,
but then I'd bet there'd be less ice melted as well
even though there was the same mass of salt as sugar.
The thing about the salt, though,
is it's 58 grams per mole, where sugar is
like 340-something grams per mole.
So there's much less moles of sugar.
There's much less sugar molecules than salt molecules,
and it's actually the number of molecules
that does the melting work for you.
Because in order for water to dissolve the salt or sugar
or whatever it needs to actually bind to it,
it needs to have an electrostatic attraction to it,
and if the water is attracted to another particle
then basically that spot on the water molecule is taken up.
It can't attract to another water molecule.
It's actually the attraction of the water molecules
that causes them to combine and stick together
and turn into a crystal.
Sugar, because it has much less particles for the same amount of mass,
it was able to inhibit the water less.
But also the salt had an extra benefit of being able to
break into two particles while it's dissolved whereas
sugar does not do that.
So the salt has an even better chance of melting the ice.
But still I think that's pretty cool because now my
bush here is probably gonna be much less affected.
This bush.
So it might be interesting to see which bush does better.
But unfortunately I can't do this experiment multiple times,
like, I can't do a whole year of putting sugar on the porch because...
Well, let me show you.
[sticky shoe sound]
Hear that? It's sticky.
The floor is sticky.
So when I walk in I have sugar on my boots,
and sugar is sticky.
[laugh]
This is definitely probably worse than salt
and is likely the final nail in the coffin of using sugar to melt ice.
Because Kanyon hates it!
[laugh]
You see, sugar's pretty hygroscopic so it actually
holds onto the water better than the salt does.
You can see this side's almost dry whereas this is still wet.
It's very difficult to remove the water from the sugar
whereas salt gets rid of it very easily.
Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed, and I'll see you next time.
[upbeat guitar music]