Name: World's Largest Jello Pool- Can you swim in Jello?
Uploaded: 2021-08-19T14:28:51.000Z
Duration: 10 min 28 s

This is the world's first ever actual pool of Jello!

Modal verbs - B1

And while it may look simple, it's actually a very difficult engineering challenge to pull off.

As proof, if you Google "Jello Pool," you will either find bad CGI,

or a handful of videos of people who tried to do this, but it really didn't work out.

So today, we are going to answer possibly the longest standing question from my childhood:

What would it be like to actually belly flop in a pool of Jello?

But before we do that, I want to talk about what we

actually had to go through for the past 6 months to pull this off.

The idea of a Jello pool has been on my bucket list for over 4 years.

In fact, when Kevin from The Backyard Scientist and I made the 25 million Orbeez pool,

our first idea was to do a pool of Jello, but it's really hard.

Because if you've ever made Jello, you might recall

you first have to boil water, then mix in the powder,

and then you have to refrigerate it for it to actually get firm.

And that's easy enough to do for a small dish

but how do you boil and then refrigerate an entire pool?

This seemed like a very worthy engineering challenge.

So year at Thanksgiving, my brother and I came up with a plan

and then in the middle of winter, we started digging a hole in his backyard.

Then over the course of 2 months we set up a bunch of small-scale experiments

because we needed to answer questions like:

How much gelatin powder does it actually take to get to the ideal firmness?

And how hot, and then cold, does the mixture actually need to get

for the Jello chemical reaction to take place so it will actually get firm

From our experiments, we learned that the Jello always got firm as long as

the mixture got hotter than 160° Fahrenheit.

So we decided we could scale this up by using

6, 55 gallon drums with a custom propane burner underneath

and a spigot we welded to the sides, but more on that later.

So now we knew how we were going to heat it up

but how do you refrigerate an entire pool?

For that, we teamed up with Mother Nature and just picked

We installed a thermometer and starting in January

we tracked the temperature in his backyard every night.

We needed refrigerator temperatures at night,

but not freezer temperatures, because that would freeze the jello

and our experiments showed that totally ruins it.

And so after looking at our data, plus historical

a 3-week sweet spot window towards the end of April to pull this off.

So the plan was to start 7 days before the party,

and fill the pool with an average of 10 barrels every day.

That would give each layer a chance to get exposed to

the cold night air, to more efficiently get rid of the heat.

And so with that, first thing Saturday, a full week

before the party, [water splash] we got to work

We didn't want to waste actual food, so this was just

water and gelatin powder and food coloring.

We intentionally placed our barrels much higher than

the pool, so when we're ready, we can use

the potential energy to move the Jello from the barrels

We had to tackle about a thousand other issues that

Because the Jello went in with so much heat energy,

we needed to remove before it could get firm,

in addition to using the cold night air, my

brother's neighbor, Nick, happened to have a spare swamp

So we kept that running over the top of the pool,

the equivalent of rolling down a car window

This constantly replaces the evaporating layer of air

right at the surface with fresh, cold air,

that will suck out the heat more efficiently.

And so, as we put in the final batch Friday night

because my specialty is more of mechanical things

and this project was more about chemistry and thermodynamics.

And I didn't want that lame "Jelly-Baff" stuff

And so even if it didn't last long in the Sun,

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World's Largest Jello Pool- Can you swim in Jello?

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