Does hot water freeze faster than cold water?

Question

hot H20 or cold H20 Freeze faster

Answer 1

no, but when you dump boiling water into the winter air it vaporizes and then the vapors get frozen which is actually faster then the water cooling down in droplet form and freezing.

Answer 2

While you'd think that cold water would freeze faster (it's closer to freezing already), in an experiment that I either read about (Scientific American) or watched (Mythbusters?) they found that hot water in ice cube trays actually froze more quickly than cold water.

While they didn't have a good explanation, part of the cooling is caused by "delta-T" - the difference in temperature. The thought is that the hot water cooled more quickly than the cold water...

Here's an article that explains the phenomenon:
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/hot_water.html

Answer 3

If you have 2 pots of water one with some heat (cold) and the other with double amount of heat (hot). Then you put them in an environment with lack of energy (somewhere cold enough). Since things want to be more stable, both water will lose heat and reach freezing point of water. The one that was hot will take longer to reach that point since it has more heat. So basically cold water will freeze faster than hot water.

Answer 4

Wow. What a question.

Let's attack it this way: Just before it freezes, the water is cold water. Hot water can go all the way up to 100 degrees Celsius before it becomes steam. Cold water can go all the way down to 0 degrees Celsius before it becomes ice.

So cold water is closer to freezing than hot water therefore it must freeze more quickly.

What an answer. Hope it helps.

Answer 5

Cold. For water to freeze it must be at zero degrees. To reduce the temperature of water to zero degrees, energy must be transferred from the water to the surroundings. If it is cold water, it has less energy than hot water, and will therefore take less time to remove the remaining energy.

There are certain conditions where hot water will infact freeze faster, but i think they must be carefully controlled. See this link:

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/hot_water.html

Answer 6

No, it doesn't