Hydrating In Sub-32f Commute

[mstone]

Water bottle. Insulated one.

[hozn]

Add vodka to the water.

[Lt. Dan]

I have a bigger problem REMEMBERING to hydrate in these temperatures- I find myself going a lot farther between drinks from the water bottle.

Regarding the freezing problem- I’ve had good success with the Polar brand insulated bottles. Just make sure the water is at least room temp when you head out the door, and it’ll be good for a couple hours in my experience…

[Vicegrip]

Water bottle. A 50/50 mix of vodka and water is good at 10 below for hours. I kid I kid. (besides with a 50/50 mix I never make it more than 20 min)

I put real warm water in insulated bottles. This delays solidification and I don’t get an ice cold water shock when taking a drink for the first couple of hours. I found that Camelback hoses freeze up way faster than bottles.

[sjclaeys]

I add the tears from my suffering.

[dkel]

Antifreeze, duh.

(Really don’t drink antifreeze. No matter how sweet it tastes. :p)

[Tania]

Blowing back into the camelbak line can help – I’ve been out hiking many winters in single digits and had decent enough success with this. The mouthpiece may freeze but you can bite through that to break it up. There’s usually nuun or some sort of electrolyte in there when I’m out for a few hours.

My water bottle didn’t start to freeze up until about 50 minutes into my ride yesterday morning and even then it was still drinkable.

[Emm]

If the ride is an hour or less, I actually grab an insulated coffee mug, cover it in a cozy for extra insulation, and fill it with herbal tea and put that into my water bottle cage. It stays hot for maybe 10-20 min, but stays warm for the rest of my 40-50 min commute. Bonus is I use whatever random berry herbal tea I have at home which is delicious, and makes me drink it more often on the ride.

I don’t do >1 hr rides below freezing, so I’m no help there. Sorry

[bentbike33]

I use a Camelback with just water, regular tube, no insulation. Tuesday morning (sleezed it yesterday), I was getting a mouthful of slush with most initial sips, but the whole line did not freeze through my ~50-minute commute. I had room temp water (I fill it the night before), although putting in hot tap water can help. The dry air was making me extremely thirsty so I drank more than usual which helped keep the line mostly clear.

Consider routing the tube so it remains closer to your body, or even putting the whole works under one or more of your layers. To keep the mouthpiece warmer, hold it near your face by running the tube under your helmet strap.

[hozn]

In more seriousness I have added vodka to my bottles, but I think to really get it to not freeze you need to add a lot of vodka; my “couple shots” of vodka didn’t seem to make much difference. And I felt that showing up to work after taking a couple shots of vodka was maybe not the most exemplary decision.

Back when cycling was all casual, I also used a camelbak (on mtb only of course!) and I did find that blowing back into the tube helped, as Tania suggested, but when I switched to riding pretty much exclusively with bottles I found they were much better in winter — and really do last a long time (~1 hour?) in very cold temps before freezing through. Usually my body’s extremities are freezing through around the same time the bottles freeze through, so that worked out great.

[dbb]

@hozn 131146 wrote:

I think to really get it to not freeze you need to add a lot of vodka; my “couple shots” of vodka didn’t seem to make much difference.

I just checked the chemical handbook and see that a 10% alcohol mix will depress the freezing temp by about 8F and a 20% mix will get you about 20F depression (to 12F). The problem is that 20% alcohol means about 47% vodka when you are pouring it from an 86 proof bottle. Hozn says that his work skills may have suffered. I’d expect riding skills at that level would also suffer.

[huskerdont]

@hozn 131146 wrote:

Back when cycling was all casual, I also used a camelbak (on mtb only of course!) and I did find that blowing back into the tube helped, as Tania suggested, but when I switched to riding pretty much exclusively with bottles I found they were much better in winter — and really do last a long time (~1 hour?) in very cold temps before freezing through. Usually my body’s extremities are freezing through around the same time the bottles freeze through, so that worked out great.

My water bottle will generally freeze on my half-hour, 8-mile commute when it gets down to the low teens. Last winter, for instance, it froze a couple of times, but it wasn’t a hardship since I didn’t have the dexterity to use the bottle anyway in those conditions. The other morning, at 14 degrees, it just got refreshingly icy.

[mstone]

@huskerdont 131152 wrote:

My water bottle will generally freeze on my half-hour, 8-mile commute when it gets down to the low teens. Last winter, for instance, it froze a couple of times, but it wasn’t a hardship since I didn’t have the dexterity to use the bottle anyway in those conditions. The other morning, at 14 degrees, it just got refreshingly icy.

Freezing solid? Insulated or uninsulated bottle? There’s a lot more thermal mass in a water bottle than a camelback tube, so a half-hour to freeze-through seems fast. You can also provide more pressure to a bottle to break through a thin crust of ice than you can provide suction on a tube (<15psi assuming a perfect vacuum and that neither the tube nor your face collapse).

[hozn]

This may be obvious but you can also open the top of the bottle to drink slush that might not squeeze through. I wouldn’t be drinking on an 8-mile ride in those temps. Vodka or not.

@dbb, thanks for the science!

[huskerdont]

@mstone 131154 wrote:

Freezing solid? Insulated or uninsulated bottle? There’s a lot more thermal mass in a water bottle than a camelback tube, so a half-hour to freeze-through seems fast. You can also provide more pressure to a bottle to break through a thin crust of ice than you can provide suction on a tube (<15psi assuming a perfect vacuum and that neither the tube nor your face collapse).

Uninsulated. Froze to the point that it wouldn’t squeeze and I couldn’t get water out through suckage or chewage when I got to work. It felt like a solid rock, but you could hear some water moving inside the ice. As I think about it more, those were the couple of days when it got down to about 6 degrees, not low teens.

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