June 13, 2012- Boiling Water is Difficult

In order to succeed you must fail, so that you know what not to do the next time.
- Anthony D’Angelo –

This quote is pretty fitting of my project thus far in my internship. I have failed at every Water Boiling Test that I have attempted (including today), but I have learned a lot from these failures. Today I again could not get water to properly boil, even after using about two hours of the three hours of available gas. I narrowed my problem down to several possible causes.

1.       The pots (again). The family found me two pots that I later realized were from a rice cooker. I believe, therefore, that there is an air pocket in the bottom of the pot meant to distribute heat evenly so as to not burn the rice (kind of like a double boiler). This works great for water, but bad for boiling water because the energy is dissipated before reaching the water. I came to this conclusion when all the water in the pot was of one uniform temperature (ie no hot spots) and the bottom of the pot was the same temperature as the rest of the water. The water also stayed at 91C for over ten minutes and the local boiling point is around 97C.

2.       It was a windy day.

3.       I can’t use a lid with the test, but this theoretically shouldn’t affect it at all since water will not really evaporate until it begins to boil.

4.       The stove just didn’t have enough fire power to boil water. However, this was not a logical answer since my host mom and grandma told me they use the stove to boil water all the time. It just takes a little longer than the wood stove.

I ended up spending all day thinking about how to address all the possible causes and decided to address the easiest first: the pot. After consulting with several of my bosses, I have now decided to use different pots for the different stoves as is normal. Therefore, I will be using the heavy pots for the wood stove and the aluminum ones for the gas stove. I guess tomorrow will tell if I can in fact boil water.