Dexas Ice-Ology Ice Molds

Throwing my two cents into the slog between Ray and everyone else. In short, there's a chance everyone's wrong, but Ray is far and away the worst. If clear ice were impossible, you wouldn't be able to buy bags of it from every grocery store and out of coolers in front of every 7-11 on the planet for a few bucks, let alone have been able to do this for the past 30+ years (maybe longer, but I wasn't born yet back then). There are several methods that can be employed to achieve this, most of which take FOREVER unless you're a high-end restaurant or personally own distilling/scientific-grade filtering equipment, but that all changed once people started figuring out directional freezing. Directional freezing has been a common practice for several years now and is currently the backbone of most of the easiest methods of making clear ice without specialized equipment. The best tutorial I've seen for it is on Cocktail Chemistry's YouTube channel. He showcases various tricks based on the method Rob uses to get various shapes of clear ice. There are also molds similar to the one being sold here that work VERY well. I own the sphere mold popularized by Wintersmiths (but NOT invented by them and at least half as cheap from any other seller) and I've gotten a few perfect ones out of it so far, despite using the filthy tap water in my area and not even bothering to put any extra work into it beyond setting the faucet to "hot" first. Unfortunately, I'm not so sure this product is going to work very well as a directional freezing mold. While it is obviously BASED on the type of mold I use, if you look closely, you can see that some really big corners were cut. In order for directional freezing to be effective, you need an absurdly large reservoir of "sacrificial" water below the mold(s) to take in all the impurities that get pushed out through the bottom holes. This reservoir needs to contain much more water than is actually going to be used to make the ice, itself. In this product, the reservoir that would have normally taken up almost as much space as the foam sleeve has been cut down to nearly the size of the rubber molds, which have also been significantly decreased in size, most likely to cut manufacturing costs. There is still SOME empty space below the molds, but not nearly enough, possibly even less than in the molds, themselves. I've learned this the hard way from using similarly laid out molds that didn't even come close to working, even when I covered every other possible contingency. Further, the tops of the molds are completely uncovered, which will allow impurities in the surrounding air into the water before it freezes, defeating the purpose of having pushed the original impurities down in the first place. So, in short, probably don't buy this if you want clear ice, but also don't insist something can't be done or is too much work just because you don't know how to do it.

what sizes are the cubes? it looks like the 2 pack are larger than the 8 pack