Keep Your Food Cool Without Electricity: Zeer Pots

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What is a Zeer pot?

You don’t need electricity to cool food or medicine with a zeer pot. I’m gonna go over the basics of what zeer pots are and how they work so you can make one yourself. We’ll also go over how to do the same thing without pots.

A zeer pot is a container made of materials that are specially chosen to take advantage of evaporative cooling. Remember the swamp cooler project I told you about? This works on the same principle except it pumps water and blows the air into a room like most swamp coolers do. You won’t be able to freeze anything with it but it’ll extend the life of whatever you’re trying to keep fresh inside.

How does an evaporative cooler work?

In order for water to evaporate from a liquid to water vapor, it needs energy. It gets that energy from the area immediately surrounding it. That’s how sweat works (eww). Your body perspires onto your skin and your body heat or the heat from the air (or sun) then provides energy to the drops. Since it’s touching your skin as it evaporates, it pulls in some heat energy from your skin as it disappears. Less heat means more cool.

Just like the swamp cooler (evaporative cooler), the drier the are is around the pot, the better it works. The amount of water vapor in the air is called relative humidity. Basically, just like a towel, the air at a certain temperature and pressure can only hold so much water in it. If it’s already full, it won’t be able to take any more. If its dry, it takes it more easily.

A zeer pot works exactly the same way.

How do you make a Zeer pot?

A zeer pot is actually two pots, one inside the other. The outside pot is made of a porous earthenware (clay) pot. The inside is made of the same thing but can be glazed on the inside to keep the humidity from the inside, where the food goes. Wet sand is packed between the two pots and a wet towel or clay lid is placed on the top of the center pot.

So how it works is really simple. Because the sand is wet and the clay pot is porous, the water soaks into the pots. The outside of the pot (and wet towel at the top) is in contact with dry air and so it evaporates. As it evaporates, it pulls more water from the sand as well as heat energy. The water in the outside pot starts to cool down, which then cools down the wet sand. The inside pot also cools off because it’s soaked with water. A cool pot means cool food. If you really want to get technical on how it works and how to build one, Appropedia has a good article.

Zeer pot video

I know some of you’d rather watch a movie than read a book, so here’s a video:



The inside temperature will depend on the outside temperature. If you do it right, you can expect to keep your food about 20 degrees cooler this way.

The system works fairly efficiently through wet material but air is an insulator. If you have to keep the inside of the pot dry, it will cool but not as well. In this case, you’d want to glaze the inside of the inner pot.

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