discussion Boiling temperature is Soooooooo unrealistic !!!

[alone sniper]

Hi guys !! 
How are you today??  

https://besurvival.com/guides/how-long-should-you-boil-water 

According to link Boiling water in 70 C for 30 minutes make it safe for drink !! 

So something is wrong !!

1- heat out put !!!
2- boiling temperature !!!

What do you think ??? 

 

[nicko]

As they say it's not a real life simulation. It's a game after all.

and I don't know but once your water boils all is good after a few minutes. Plus we might assume we are boiling clean snow and not some crap out of a cesspool.

sheesh surely fresh falling snow you would just collect and let it melt in a container inside, so no boiling?

[EternityTide]

@alone sniper, you need to understand that the "heat output" figure is simply describing how much the fire is warming the surrounding area. The fire itself will be burning at anywhere between 250°C to 500°C, and that is just your regular wood burning fire. This heat dissipates rapidly the further you get from the fire (much like planets which are further from the sun are colder than those closer to it).

So no, the fire is not unrealistic, it is much hotter than the heat it gives off, but the radius in which its heat output exceeds 100°C is too close to be safe.

[EternityTide]

I would also take that article with a pinch of salt, as they don't seem to understand the mechanics of boiling water at altitude. You see, at higher altitudes air pressure is lower. This means that water requires less energy to go into vapour form.

At 14,000 feet, water boils at 85.5°C, meaning that the higher you get, the less dependable the boiling water technique becomes. If you were boiling water near the summit of mount Everest, you would need to boil the water for 20 minutes according to their figures, because at that altitude, the boiling point of water is 71°C.

I would rather err on the side of caution, and boil all my water thoroughly, rather than risk infection. 

[alone sniper]

42 minutes ago, EternityTide said:

you need to understand that the "heat output" figure is simply describing how much the fire is warming the surrounding area. The fire itself will be burning at anywhere between 250°C to 500°C, and that is just your regular wood burning fire

Thanks for info. 

But didn't that mean water should boil faster when you got bigger fire ?? 

[alone sniper]

And i got another problem !!!

When you start fire that will burn for 10 hours. Why should it give you the "same amount of heat output" at the first and last ??? 

For example i burn 10 coal and now my fire will burn for 10 hours and 1 minute . After 10 hours i will add stick to fire And I still have that massive heat output !!!

[EternityTide]

20 minutes ago, alone sniper said:

And i got another problem !!!

When you start fire that will burn for 10 hours. Why should it give you the "same amount of heat output" at the first and last ??? 

For example i burn 10 coal and now my fire will burn for 10 hours and 1 minute . After 10 hours i will add stick to fire And I still have that massive heat output !!!

Take that up with Hinterland, if I were you. There really should be an upper limit to how hot a fire can get, as I have had camp fires in the not so distant past that have reached +50°C output, leaving me sitting comfortably at 40°C in a forest, skinning a wolf.

[selfless]

I think you are all missing the point.  The act of boiling does not purify water.  Heating bacteria to the point where their internal structures break down beyond a survivable limit renders them effectively dead.  And that is a function of high temperature and time but also of the lifeform in question.  You for instance might enjoy sitting in a 40C bath for a while, but a 50C bath is immediately painful and you must exit quickly, and a 60C bath does damage on contact.

There are in fact many lifeforms that will survive even temperatures of 110C (10 degrees above the boiling point at sea level) for long periods.  Thankfully, a side effect of high temperature survival is slow reproduction rate so most of those will pass through your intestine before they can again become a hazard.  (This incidentally is why you want to cook your food immediately before eating it and not a week prior.)

So the article is saying that if you can render food and water relatively safe by heating it to 70C and holding it there for 30 minutes, such an act could require less fuel than actually boiling and need less time to cool to the point were consumption is possible.

[alone sniper]

12 minutes ago, selfless said:

I think you are all missing the point.  The act of boiling does not purify water.  Heating bacteria to the point where their internal structures break down beyond a survivable limit renders them effectively dead.  And that is a function of high temperature and time but also of the lifeform in question.  You for instance might enjoy sitting in a 40C bath for a while, but a 50C bath is immediately painful and you must exit quickly, and a 60C bath does damage on contact.

There are in fact many lifeforms that will survive even temperatures of 110C (10 degrees above the boiling point at sea level) for long periods.  Thankfully, a side effect of high temperature survival is slow reproduction rate so most of those will pass through your intestine before they can again become a hazard.  (This incidentally is why you want to cook your food immediately before eating it and not a week prior.)

So the article is saying that if you can render food and water relatively safe by heating it to 70C and holding it there for 30 minutes, such an act could require less fuel than actually boiling and need less time to cool to the point were consumption is possible.

Thanks for sharing your idea !!

But since it is just "clean" snow we shouldn't worry about bacteria i guess !!!!!

[selfless]

That snow is anything but clean.  It has been collecting debris since it started to condense up in the clouds.  Now it is lying on the ground collecting a constant shower of particles from the blowing air.  There are many organisms that live in snow; actually rely on snow.  It is a virgin territory with available water and collected nutrients.  Of course life will be there.  

Life always finds a way.

[EternityTide]

45 minutes ago, selfless said:

I think you are all missing the point.  The act of boiling does not purify water.  Heating bacteria to the point where their internal structures break down beyond a survivable limit renders them effectively dead.  And that is a function of high temperature and time but also of the lifeform in question.  You for instance might enjoy sitting in a 40C bath for a while, but a 50C bath is immediately painful and you must exit quickly, and a 60C bath does damage on contact.

There are in fact many lifeforms that will survive even temperatures of 110C (10 degrees above the boiling point at sea level) for long periods.  Thankfully, a side effect of high temperature survival is slow reproduction rate so most of those will pass through your intestine before they can again become a hazard.  (This incidentally is why you want to cook your food immediately before eating it and not a week prior.)

So the article is saying that if you can render food and water relatively safe by heating it to 70C and holding it there for 30 minutes, such an act could require less fuel than actually boiling and need less time to cool to the point were consumption is possible.

Thermophiles aren't really a concern as they generally aren't that common in day-to-day foodstuffs. I am aware that it is the denaturation of essential proteins due to heat that kills bacteria in water, not the process of boiling, but the point I'm making out is that the article states "you don't need to boil water twice as long at altitude". The fact is that water boils at a lower temperature at higher altitudes, meaning that whilst your water might be boiling, you should not assume it's at 100°C, and so you should boil it longer, as it might well be at a lower temperature, and so something may well survive in the water.
Whilst it is technically true that most pathogens will be long dead by the time you reach 80°C, I wouldn't risk it, and I would be happier taking it to 85-90°C before declaring the water "safe".
As for chemical contaminants, the only truly renewable means to purify the water is distillation, but that's overkill unless you harvested your snow from an industrial waste site, or from under a car's bonnet.

[KD7BCH]

Water boiling temp is a function of pressure. Lower pressure, lower boiling point, higher pressure, higher boiling point. The reason you bring water to a rolling boil is to ensure you have actually reached the boiling point. At sea level with 14lbs per sq inch water will boil at 100C. Bacteria can endure temperatures and thrive in the temperature dangerzone of 40-140, this is where they grow the fastest, and it is true that above 160 they die.

What the article doesn't mention is, in a camp cooking situation or survival situation you have no way of knowing, typically, what the temperature of the water is at any time when it is between 0C and 100C all you can verify for sure is that it is liquid, cold, cool, warm, or hot, but if it is not boiling which is at a known temperature you can't determine if you hit the 160 level or not without a scientific measurement device. All liquid water has to be between 0 and 100C, water below 0 C is ice, or solid, and water above 100C is all gaseous which is water vapor. So the reason you boil water which is suspect of containing bacteria is because you have no way of knowing for certain if the water is 50C, 60C or 70C. The boiling temperature falls but even if the boiling point falls to 80C that is still hot enough for the water to have reached a safe level as soon as it begins to boil and can immediately begin allowing the water to cool. There is no need to continue to apply additional heat indeed doing so only reduces the total amount of water you will secure doing this because that liquid water doesn't get hotter it vaporizes i.e. it becomes a gas, evaporates and isn't recoverable in a survival or camp cooking situation.

Another concept to know is that water takes more energy to heat while liquid than it does while gas or solid. This is called specific heat. 

Here is a chart showing a constant heat being applied to an amount of water. You can see that while the H20 is ice, i.e. solid it will heat up faster from -100C to 0C than from 0C to 100C even though the same rate of energy is being applied. This is due to the molecular nature of the universe or something. Anyway the moral of the story here is, that while things may not seem to be realistic there are many factors affecting the real world and many of them are beyond the scope of the game. H2O also undergoes a phase change at 0C from solid to liquid and 100C from liquid to gas, it also takes much more energy to free the same amount of liquid from being a liquid to gas, than from solid to liquid. However, due to the nature of the molecule, it takes less energy once it is a gas to raise it's temperature than it does while it is liquid. Really cool stuff this water that we have on Earth.

There is also a study that was done regarding different insulating materials for boiled tea and how fast the temperature would decay from boiling, you can search for that online or on these forums as I posted that a while back as well. 

[EternityTide]

Put it this way, Charles Darwin, in his notes regarding his voyage through Argentina, when crossing mountainous terrain, which said that the camp put potatoes on to boil, they had them boiling through the night, and the next morning the potatoes were still hard, because despite boiling, the water was not hot enough to break down the cell walls of the potatoes.

It's this kind of ambiguity that I don't like, and I'd like to see some data on the subject.

This is me being devil's advocate, as I know that most organisms don't survive long above 60°C, but I am sceptical about certain things stated in the article cited, which calls the veracity of all the other claims into doubt.

[KD7BCH]

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/09/14/does-waters-boiling-point-change-with-altitude-americans-arent-sure/

[EternityTide]

I know boiling point changes with altitude, that's the entire crux of the issue. My argument is that at altitude, you'd need to boil the water longer than at sea level because your water will boil at a lower temperature, so to be sure you have sterilised the water, you need to extend the boiling time.

[KD7BCH]

Actually no, there is no point on the surface of the Earth where the air pressure enables water to reach the boiling point at a temperature inside that danger zone. According to this chart in the pew research on Mt. Everest water would boil at about 160F, which is far enough outside the danger zone to kill any bacteria. You have to cook a turkey and get it to an internal temp of 165/160 to ensure that the whole thing is cooked through because it has a variable density and is solid, but water if it is boiling anywhere the liquid is connected to other liquid water rapidly diffuses heat, which is why water cooling is so effective at removing heat. Anyway, I do believe it would take longer to boil potatoes, as well as cook pasta etc. There are pressure cookers which reduce the time cook things and they work by increasing the boiling point so you can achieve temperatures of 110C 120C even higher. If you cook with oil rather than water, even higher since oil melts at a higher temp and doesn't boil for a much higher point than water does. 

[EternityTide]

Fair enough. Only one criticism: Fahrenheit. Use Celsius, man, it's these backwards US customary units that cost you guys a Mars orbiter.

[KD7BCH]

Yeah units of measure are differnt

[mystifeid]

Is it necessary to kill all pathogens?

Compare to pasteurization:

Quote

Pasteurization or pasteurisation is a process that kills microbes (mainly bacteria) in food and drink, such as milk, juice, canned food, and others.

Quote

Unlike sterilization, pasteurization is not intended to kill all microorganisms in the food. Instead, it aims to reduce the number of viable pathogens so they are unlikely to cause disease (assuming the pasteurized product is stored as indicated and is consumed before its expiration date).

For milk:

Quote

-HTST milk is forced between metal plates or through pipes heated on the outside by hot water, and the milk is heated to 72 °C (161 °F) for 15 seconds. Milk simply labeled "pasteurized" is usually treated with the HTST method.
-UHT, also known as ultra-heat-treating, processing holds the milk at a temperature of 140 °C (284 °F) for four seconds. During UHT processing milk is sterilized and not pasteurized. This process lets consumers store milk or juice for several months without refrigeration. The process is achieved by spraying the milk or juice through a nozzle into a chamber filled with high-temperature steam under pressure. After the temperature reaches 140 °C the fluid is cooled instantly in a vacuum chamber, and packed in a pre-sterilized airtight container. Milk labeled "ultra-pasteurized" or simply "UHT" has been treated with the UHT method.
-ESL milk has a microbial filtration step and lower temperatures than UHT milk. Since 2007, it is no longer a legal requirement in European countries (for example in Germany) to declare ESL milk as ultra-heated; consequently, it is now often labeled as "fresh milk" and just advertised as having an "extended shelf life," making it increasingly difficult to distinguish ESL milk from traditionally pasteurized fresh milk.
-A less conventional, but US FDA-legal, alternative (typically for home pasteurization) is to heat milk at 63 °C (145 °F) for 30 minutes.

Source: Wikipedia.

[MarrowStone]

2 hours ago, KD7BCH said:

Yeah units of measure are differnt

Yes, ive always wished we'd just use metric as well.

being from the united states i play the game in metric to help me be accustomed to distance, weight, and temperature. Its quite educational and its helps me get a "feel" for what they are like in my head. Although, being like a second language im still not great at it. 

I highly suggest those who use the forums in the US to do the same in order to avoid confusion

[KD7BCH]

I grew up in the tail end of the Cold War so my education was based on US system, I relate to temperature much easier outside of metric. I apologize in advance for that. I am very comfortable with metric when it comes to 100C, and 0C, understanding where they are on the comparative scale with Fahrenheit, Fun fact while we are on the subject, -40F = -40C so the colder things get from 0C to -40C the more closely Fahrenheit and Celsius approximate. 

[akodo1]

15 hours ago, alone sniper said:

Hi guys !! 
How are you today??  

https://besurvival.com/guides/how-long-should-you-boil-water 

According to link Boiling water in 70 C for 30 minutes make it safe for drink !! 

So something is wrong !!

1- heat out put !!!
2- boiling temperature !!!

What do you think ??? 

 

I looked at that article. 

Why is he a better source than the sources he quoted as being wrong?

Also note specifically what he is quoting " According to the Wilderness Medical Society, water temperatures above 160° F (70° C) kill all pathogens within 30 minutes and above 185° F (85° C) within a few minutes. "

As it gets hotter, the amount of time it takes to kill pathogens decreases.  As most people don't have a thermometer in the pot while they are making their water safe, the EASY thing to do is to heat it until it starts to boil.  As soon as boiling starts, you know you've had it hot enough for long enough for all pathogens to be dead.

It seems to me the game depicts this as the time you see is time to go from 'room temperature' to boiling, and as soon as you reach boiling you are good.  It's not representing the water instantly reaching boiling and then sitting at boiling for a long time.

 

[cekivi]

The amount of science in this post warms my inner scientist

On topic, the "feels like" mechanic is fine but it would be nice for heating rate (for melting/boiling) to better reflect the temperature output of the fire. Taking 30 min to melt and boil a litre of water is not realistic when it's the same amount of time to do so over some burning sticks as a fully stoked forge

[akodo1]

4 hours ago, EternityTide said:

I know boiling point changes with altitude, that's the entire crux of the issue. My argument is that at altitude, you'd need to boil the water longer than at sea level because your water will boil at a lower temperature, so to be sure you have sterilised the water, you need to extend the boiling time.

True but not sure how relevant.

The survivor isn't suffering any sort of high altitude issues.  There are mountains around but they seem to be relatively small.  We are close to the ocean.  Therefore no place around the survivor, even Timberwolf Mountain, is going to give the kinds of elevations that give very low boiling temperatures.  Google tells me the highest town in Canada is Lake Louise, Alberta, a little town of right at 1000 people, which is at 5K.  Google tells me the highest mountain on Vancouver Island is the Golden Hinde, and Gold River is a tiny town nestled in the mountains that is where people who are climbing Golden Hinde go to, so it sounds like a good one to look at for elevation to figure out how high up our survivor might be, erring on the side of caution because our survivor is much closer to the coast, and hence lower elevation.  It is 160 M elevation.  Even if we double that to 300 M elevation, we aren't getting CLOSE to having the boiling temp change.  Let's double that elevation again, 600 M, roughly 2000 feet.  We are still talking a boiling temperature of +97 C.

While a few rare biologicals can withstand temperatures over 100C, the ones that are common in drinking water and that can affect your health are going to die after a few minutes of exposure at 80C, so if your water starts boiling, even if it is only 97C,  you can be confident that you have been at or above 80C long enough to kill to make the water safe...or at least switch the safety concern from biologicals to pollutants.

[akodo1]

18 minutes ago, cekivi said:

The amount of science in this post warms my inner scientist

On topic, the "feels like" mechanic is fine but it would be nice for heating rate (for melting/boiling) to better reflect the temperature output of the fire. Taking 30 min to melt and boil a litre of water is not realistic when it's the same amount of time to do so over some burning sticks as a fully stoked forge

Fire in general is whacky in this game.

I can start a fire with a fire long, and get very little heat.  I can throw a stick on 2 hours later and get a bump in heat, repeat throwing sticks on at the last minute and heat builds and builds.  Or  I can throw 10 sticks on immediately after starting and reach a high temperature immediately which lasts the whole time.

I'd say they first need to look at making a system where fire length is 1minute to 100 minutes+  and at one end of the scale adding wood adds very little temperature but the full time value of the item, while at the other end, adds very little to time and a lot to temperature.  (Example a fire with 1 minute left, you throw on 1 stick, it goes up 1 degree and length goes up 7 minutes.  Fire with 50 minutes left, you throw on 1 stick, it goes up 3 degrees and length goes up 3 minutes.  Fire with 100+ minutes, throw on a stick and fire length goes up 1 minute but temperature goes up 6 degrees).  Sticks, books, (and hopefully someday tinders, newspapers, etc) would perform that way, logs would perform similarly but on a somewhat different scale, they'd always add at least half their 'standard burn length' regardless of how hot the fire was.  So throw a log on a fire that's just starting and it adds an hour.  Throw it on a big campfire and at worst it would extend burn time by 30 minutes.

Fire temperature starts to go down from peak temp based on how much burn time is left, because fires don't stay uniformly hot until poofing instantly into cold.  So that would have to be modeled in.

Of course this would necessitate other changes like allowing the fire to exist in 'embers' stage providing a little heat for a very long time after the fire 'goes out' (which I read as no longer having active flame) so you can sleep for a 1-2 hours, wake up to embers, throw on some more sticks to get it going again, repeat.

Also do concentric rings around the fire for how much warmth it's giving.  Be standing almost right on top of it to get the most warmth, less warm as you get further away.

Also do different burn characteristics for outdoors on snow, outdoors on stone, in fireplace, in stove.

And then at the same time do as you say, look at temperature of fire to determine melt speed as well as boil speed.

I'd make cooking independant of temperature though.  I always figured you'd hold the meat closer or further away (on a pointed stick on in a pan) to get the right temperature for a good cooking.  Hotter fire wouldn't cook it faster it would just burn the outside and leave the inside raw (and dangerous)