This is the world's first ever actual pool of jell-o, and while it may look simple, it's actually a very difficult engineering challenge to pull off as proof. If you, google, jello pool you will either find bad cgi or a handful of videos of people who tried to do this, but it really didn't work out. So today we're going to answer possibly the longest, annie question from my childhood. What would it be like to actually belly flop in a pool of jello, but before we do that, i want to talk about what we actually have to go through for the past six months to pull this off.

The idea of a jello pool has been on my bucket list for over four years. In fact, when kevin from the backyard scientists - and i made the 25 million orbeez pool, our first idea was to do a pool of jello. But it's really hard because if you've ever made jello, you might recall, you first have to boil water, then mix in the powder. And then you have to refrigerate it for it to actually get firm and that's easy enough to do for a small dish.

But how do you boil and then refrigerate an entire pool? This seemed like a very worthy engineering challenge. So last year thanksgiving my brother and i came up with a plan and then in the middle of winter we started digging a hole in his backyard. Then, over the course of two months, we set up a bunch of small scale experiments because we needed to answer questions like how much gelatin powder does it actually take to get to the ideal firmness and how hot and then cold does the mixture actually need to Get for the jello chemical reaction to take place, so it will actually get firm from our experiments. We learned the jello always got firm as long as the mixture got hotter than 160 degrees fahrenheit.

So we decided we could scale this up by using six 55-gallon drums with a custom propane burner underneath and a spigot we welded to the sides, but more on that later so now we knew how we were going to heat it up. But how do you refrigerate? An entire pool for that we teamed up with mother nature and just picked the perfect location and time of year we installed a thermometer and starting in january we tracked the temperature in his backyard. Every night we needed refrigerator temperatures at night, but not freezer temperatures, because that would freeze the jello and our experiments showed that totally ruins it. And so after looking at our data plus historical temperature plots, we knew we had about a three week: sweet spot window towards the end of april.

To pull this off. Our goal was to have a jello pool party in his backyard. That would make even phineas and ferb jealous, so the plan was to start seven days before the party and fill the pool with an average of 10 barrels every day. That would give each layer a chance to get exposed to the cold night air to more efficiently.

Get rid of the heat, and so with that first thing, saturday, a full week before the party we got to work didn't want to waste actual food. So this is just water and gelatin powder and food coloring, but there's no sugar. We intentionally placed our barrels much higher than the pool, so when we were ready, we could use the potential energy to move the jello from the barrels to the pool we had to tackle about a thousand other issues. That came up that i won't bore you with, but day by day and layer by layer the pool began to fill up because the jello went in with so much heat energy we needed to remove before it could get firm in addition to using the cold night Air, my brother's neighbor nick happened to have a spare swamp cooler in his shop, so we kept that running over the top of the pool pretty much the whole week.

This gave us convection cooling, it's the equivalent of rolling down a car window for the pool or like when you blow on the top of a hot cup of soup. This constantly replaces the boundary layer of air right at the surface, with fresh cold air that will suck out the heat more efficiently, and so, as we put in the final batch friday night with ominous weather, threatening to ruin the whole effort. At this point we had done all we could. We were exhausted after a week and i wasn't feeling super confident, because my specialty is more with mechanical things, and this project was more about chemistry and thermodynamics, and i didn't want that.

Lame. Jelly buff stuff people try and pass off as jello, and so even if it didn't last long in the sun, i wanted to at least have the experience of seeing even a single belly flop on a smooth pool of actual jello. If this was gon na be a total failure, it wouldn't be from lack of effort, and so we woke up saturday morning with a forecast for a warm sunny day and we pulled off the tarp to find a pool filled with actual freaking jello by this point. Word in the neighborhood had definitely spread around as to what we were up to and my brother asked if some of their friends kids could have first dibs, and so with that i'm happy to report.

This is what it looks like to belly flop in a pool of jello not will be yet pokemon channel. So so, oh, when i first got in myself, it was closer to the middle of the day, and one of the things we discovered was that direct sunlight over time had the effect of undoing some of the solidness of the lower layers. When you go in it. Just like feels fills your nose and like ears, it's a very surreal feeling of just being like it's kind of hard to move, but it's just slimy and slippery.

It actually feels really cool. We have some pool toys, uh, hidden, underneath oh got it wow it's. Unlike anything, it's i mean it's like swimming in snot, if that makes any sense, but like a good snot to keep it solid for even longer. If we were to do it again, we might put in a heat exchanger pipe system beneath the surface sort of like how they freeze indoor ice skating, rinks and maybe use a little sugar.

That's disgusting! Now at this point you might be thinking. Why would anyone spend the effort of six months of planning and then a solid week of back-breaking effort just to make a stupid pool of jello? And to that i say why do people go through the effort of climbing mount everest? Why did neil armstrong go through the effort of stepping on the moon and why did pam and jim go through the effort of convincing dwight that jim had always been asian? This is jim. Sometimes you don't do a thing, because you should, but simply to prove that you can now that my curiosity was fully satiated and in my ongoing quest to be the favorite uncle, i told my nephews. They can invite some of their friends over and my brother's family set up a neighborhood barbecue and at this point, after a lot of hours of belly, flops and bowling balls and direct sunlight, the jello was pretty broken down.

But that didn't stop us from setting up a jelly pool slip and slide and i love their sense of adventure. But it was a bit of an uncle fail moment because apparently none of them have ever used a slip and slide and everybody starts to move. Didn't actually put any sugar in here, so it's kind of disgusting, so we've got some real. You.