Slashdot Mirror
Self-Heating Can
nickprecision writes "Ontro has been working for a while, and they are about ready to get to the public market. Quite a nifty little self-heating can... imagine the uses. Read up so you know about it when your friends pull one out on the ski hill."
"anytime, anywhere"
and they trademarked it. am i the only one who thinks that this is stupid?
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
Self-heating cans were in use by the military during WWII!
Just a sidenote - in Europe (well - London) Nestle already sell similar cans of self heating coffee. Works quite well - shame about the taste of whats in the can though. I can't remember the reactants - but the oxidser is diluted hyrogen preoxide.
It looked like a nice idea, but I didn't try it - mainly because of the price: £1.30 IIRC, which is about $2. It seems a bit much IMHO for a normal cup of takeaway coffee, even if it does have a neat self-heating function! Good for camping trips, perhaps, but not in the roadside service station where they were selling it: you can buy normal fresh coffee for the same price and get a seat and newspaper to go with it...
http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/review/349432.html
You have been able to buy self heating nescafe coffee at my local service station for a month or so now. The volume of actual coffee in each is quite low but I keep one in the glove compartment for cold morning trafic jams.
UKians shouldn't be too smug; this product has been available in Japan (where foul sweet milky coffee is more popular) for donkeys' years
-- the most controversial site on the Web
I can see this getting slashdotted fairly quickly if they had more information on the site, since they seem to want to do everything as images. And the site has one paragraph of text and no links when viewed in Lynx. Not very geek-friendly.
Follow me
I'm not surprised. This is not a flame (nor a self-heating post, for that matter), but what I experienced of coffee in the UK... let's just say I stuck to tea while I was there -- the tea was tasty, thankfully. And I had a capuccino as soon as I landed in France, so I felt better. :)
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
How about some prior art from "Taxi Driver":
Cab Dispatcher: Can you drive to the Bronx? Manhattan?
DeNiro: Anytime. Anywhere.
Cab Dispatcher: Do you work on Jewish holidays?
DeNiro: Anytime. Anywhere.
Cab dispatcher: How's your driving record? Clean?
DeNiro: Clean. Just like my conscience.
-metric -- you talkin to me?
I hate going for a crap on a cold winters morning and freezing my arse off.
A self heating can would be really nice - great big thanks to all those boffins!!
Clearly neither you, nor the dumb-assed moderaters who modded you up, nor the other dumb-asses who posted the exact same thing as you, nor the dumb-asses who modded them up, bothered to follow the link.
... a beverage container that would heat its contents without the benefit of external energy sources (microwave, heating element, etc.). They soon found similar products in other parts of the world, but all had two very significant problems."
If you had, you would have seen:
"While on a trip overseas in the early 1990s, Ontro's founders, Jim Scudder and Jim Berntsen, came upon an interesting product
Followed by information about what makes their product different.
This is what is known as promoting your product. What do you think they would say? Our product is exactly the same as the others? It's more expensive?
There is nothing revolutionary about this product. It works in pretty much the same way as the products available in Europe and other places.
Don't be so critical of other posters and moderators. People might think you're a dumbass yourself.
Since thses cups are already out everywhere else, why don't they warm the toilet seat for those cold winter days. Or just ignore me :P
If I wasn't so lazy, I'd have a sig.
Disposable cans are bad enough, but with a heating element there's much more waste to be disposed of. And I suspect these would be much harder to recycle - it would have to be dismantled into its component parts.
Made Ready to Eat meals have been in the Army for a long time, and they're self-heating. How is this new technology? At best, it's an MRE in can form - but you can already buy MREs from surplus stores if you positively have to have them!
I'm the stranger...posting to
In part of their description, they state that their product will...
- "...heat its contents approximately 75 degrees Fahrenheit above the starting temperature of the product."
Let's see... the forcast for Killington, VT (USA) today is for highs of 34F (1C) and lows of 5F (-15C). (There's a popular ski area there for those of you who aren't familiar.)Wind chill doesn't apply, so figure ambient (plus a gimme factor for residual temp + insulation) plus 75F, and you're looking at 109F (43C) during the day, and 80F (27C) at night while you're trapped in a tree and the ski patrol's searching for your freezing ass. Not exactly what I'd call 'toasty warm.'
So, if you're skiing and packing your coffee | soup | chili in a backpack... don't expect the warmest meal. As for less extreme situations... I can nuke my hot chocolate a lot faster in the microwave at work, and I'm not so damn lazy I can't get up from my desk to do it.
I think this'll sell for a short period just due to the "Hey, cool!" factor, and then die due to expense.
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
Maybe I"m getting old, but I remember something called Sterno - Heat in a Can. The Sterno website is pretty sparse. Perhaps some other aging geek remembers it.
Everytime you look at porn a devil gets their horns.
If you are interested this product, then you're most probably willing to wander in some places where you would neither have time to cook...
So, you're probably trekking.
The problem is with the container itself as you can't obviously just drop it in a bush and it may be an oversupply in terms of volume, once used.
Especially if, as they say, you use it for Baby-food : you will need its place to store the pampers... If you at least have some respect for the environment.
I saw such self-heating doses of food here in Switzerland and they actually took care of this detail by storing these (and their self-heating chemicals) in plastic/metal bag which advantage is to occupy very little space, once empty...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
"Ha ha! Look, everyone! Jimmy plugged in the cranberry sauce and it exploded!"
Not something I'd like near my coffee, thanks!
When mixed with water it turns into Slaked Lime and heat. So the waste problem goes from recycling cans to recycling cans full of Slaked Lime! Oh well, perhaps the sewage and effluent treatment industry would buy it off the recyclers?
As someone who did read the web site, I can say that the product they have produced, is virtually identical to the nescafe coffee cans other posters have mentioned.
According to the Ontro web site, they got the idea from similar products released in the early 1990s. Those ealry products had flaws, such a bulkiness, which Ontro wished to overcome.
Admitedly those early products (at least those released in the UK - there was a spate of self heating and self-cooling products released on a trial basis in the early 90s) did suffer from the flaws the Ontro founders identified. However, the product currently available from Nescafe, is a complete redesign of those early ideas, and has overcome the flaws in a very similar way to the Ontro product.
Ontro state that their product is 16oz in size, holding 10oz of beverage, and that it heats up within 5 minutes after pressing a button on the base, and stays warm for around 20 minutes.
The nescafe self-heating coffees are more or less the same size, stay warm for the same length of time, and heat up in around 3 minutes.
Nescafe and Ontro have produced solutions to the same problem, and ended up with very similar products.
I think that you should consider the fact that maybe, just maybe, some of the people who posted about the Nescafe products in the UK, actually did read the Ontro web site, and were commenting on the fact that the current UK product is virtually identical to the Ontro product and has been available for some time now, but is a different product to those available in the early nineties.
Personally I wish Ontro every success, as I would love to see the technology become more widespread (and cheaper), and I doubt that Nestle will take their product much further.
The one flaw that still remains (IMO), is the weight of the cans. They always feel as though there is some drink left, despite being empty.
www.vurt.co.uk
Since it is patented, is this the company supplying Nestle with these cans or are there two manufacturers of these? and how could there be
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
Firstly, it looks to me like the can just has two compartments with a plastic bit on the base, so it's probably recylcable once the plastic has been removed. And secondly, who cares if it's recyclable anyway?
Sig is taking a break!
Since the reaction of water and CaO is what creates heat here, how can it work when the puck of water is solid ice?
Doesn't seem like a reliable way to enjoy a hot beverage on the slopes.
So, wake me up when there's a self cooling can of Jolt Cola available....
I'm sure this will be great for coffee, tea, soups, and such. But what about beer? I think the better way to carry beer has been a longer quest.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
People walking around in supermarkets pressing the button, laughing maniacally, then walking off to find another can.
The concept of a self-heating container is not new. Armed services personnel used a self-heating can introduced in 1939 that relied on the burning of cordite to provide the thermal energy.
"Write once, run anywhere"
Ha!
I don't know if I'd want that. There'd be people wanting to use it all the time, and people using it when I'm not around (and then leaving a mess)...
I like our Amana anyway... It can reduce popcorn to a smoking pile of carbon faster than you can say "It's only a microwave! How powerful can it be?"
Besides, I don't have a 220v plug at my desk. (And thank God for that! I'd probably glow in the dark if I spent too much time near that thing!)
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
Someone please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but toilet seat technologies have given us cans that are warmed already.
/. -- have you no shame?
Although the technology, as deployed, is still rather uncommon, I believe self-heated cans have been around for nearly as long as I have. I was sitting on the can just the other day wishing I had one of those. Sometimes nothing will prepare you for that shock of the morning.
In any case, I think it's a silly thing to bring up on
Besides, I don 't even use the microwave at work - the 25 cent Mountain Dew is all anyone could ever ask for!
sic transit gloria mundi
I haven't gone camping in a little bit, but I know things like this have been out for a long time. Maybe they're not the same implementations, as I have mainly just used the self heating meal packages, but I'm sure the idea behind it all is the same. You just have a certain chemical mix that will produce some heat when combined, and the chemicals are seperated until the user does something (the ones I used had you pull a string) and then they are combined. Here, it appears that the user needs to push a button on the bottom of the can to mix the chemicals, and they seem to just be mixing calcium oxide with water - which is definitely an exothermic process. From Encyclopedia.com:
Calcium oxide is a basic anhydride, reacting with water to form calcium hydroxide ; during the reaction (slaking) much heat is given off and the solid nearly doubles its volume.
And these setups were no joke, the meals came out piping hot. Anyways, this technology has been out for several years back since the mid to later 1990s, and this appears to just be another implementation of it - although that's not to say it isn't useful. Carrying a can around with you and being able to push a button to heat its contents up is still neat.
A few links to some of the self heating meal packages:
AlpineAire Foods - I believe these were the packages I had previously used. It appears as though they have discontinued production of their self heating meals.
Heater Meals appears to have the user apply the water themselves. I've never used these before, but they look to be more of an emergency situation use. Still, self heating meals!
They're unpopular with soldiers because the rations have less flavor when cold.
Best Slashdot Co
I think all the recent self-heating mechanisms have relied on the reaction between calcium oxide (also called quick lime) and a water-based solution.
Actually, the Japanese had such can since the middle 1980's for cans of sake so the sake can be pre-warmed. I've seen them and they do work quite well.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
The also have them in Manchester. Seems only to be train stations for some reason (possibly because coffee already costs stupid amounts of money there so the extra premium for self heating doesn't look so bad).
I tried one once... not an experience I'll be in a hurry to repeat. Yuk.
The company Uniloy, who did the plastic molds etc for Ontro have this press release about the creation of the can. The PDF was released Dec of 2000. I'm still trying to find a full equation for how much heat is created by the Calcium Oxide (Lime) and Water reaction for given volumes. I'm just intrigued that they get a fast enough reaction from the lime and water... maybe they added some carbon dioxide to further drive the reaction? This would produce mortar (CaCO3) and water.
RudeDude
Perl/Linux/PHP hacker
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If not for moral concerns I might actualy buy one. Seems they have decided to abuse the US Patent system to gain market advantage instead of building a superior product:
"Patent Protection
Ontro has 71 approved Utility Patent claims for the product in the United States, and other patents are pending. In addition, the Company has filed for patent protection in 47 foreign countries, with over 30 approved to date...
Ontro's patent protection should aid its long-term success. Ontro believes competing companies will be challenged to manufacture competing designs at lower manufacturing costs."
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
but not as cool as the widget, from Guinness. The self-foaming can!
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
All I have to do is eat lot of beans. Presto! Self heating can!
...but it never fails to amaze me how industry continues to come up with new ways to increase packaging and reduce product. Now I comepletely understand the utility of this product, although selling it in direct proximal competition with regular coffee stores seems stupid.
However, I have to wonder about the increased waste involved when about half of the net weight is packaging and heating chemicals. I assume the reaction involved would be environmentally benign, but it still seems to add to the waste.
It's kind of like an ad I saw the other day for "Gogurt" or one of those silly products, that from the look of it, seems to be about 4 ounces of product in a long thin container (maximizing surface area). You can walk through a grocery store and notice that many boxes of dry foods are often half empty ("This product is cold by weight, but marketed by perceived volume"), or the fact that cleaning products have been grotesquely over-diluted (a trend which, fortunately seems to be reversing).
Anyhow, as a niche product for those situations when a hot drink would otherwise be difficult or impossible to obtain, it does seem like a good idea. But the idea of something like this becoming common seems to be a bad idea.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Ontro is using the same water/limestone chemistry used with by Toyo Jozo, and a similar inner cone can physical arrangement. But Ontro has a self-contained trigger mechanism. Toyo Jozo required that the user remove a plastic end cap from the bottom of the can, pull out a pin, put the end cap back on, and turn the can over.
The heating system uses up about half the can volume, so there's a big weight and bulk penalty. That's the main reason this hasn't caught on before. It works well for sake, because the usual serving size is small. For coffee and tea, it will require either selling people on small servings or using large cans.
> Ontro has been working for a while, and they are about ready to get to the public market. Quite a nifty little self-heating can
I misinterpreted the intro.
I'm thinking to myself, Big deal.
Who needs a heated toilet seat?
In Japan, literally for years and years, they have been using self-heating cans to heat machine-dended sake in the winter. Way to redesign the wheel guys!
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.