More Coffee Please

Dried coffee grounds melt ice?  What?  I had to try this!

As I've mentioned before, we drink a lot of coffee around here.  It's the good stuff.  So for this test, it wasn't hard to come up with the grounds, though it did take some time.

I've been drying coffee grounds for about 4 days.  I put them on a cookie sheet and put them in the lazy susan to keep the pets off them.  They dry in about a day, but I just kept adding to them so I would have plenty around.  You can also get free coffee grounds from any coffee shop, from what I hear.

For this test, I used Caffe Ibis's Hawaiian Hazelnut coffee.  Oh my yum.  It's like liquid caffeine candy.

First, I started with dried coffee grounds.

You can see that's about 4 days worth of coffee grounds.   I put some in this container, and I also put regular ice melt in an identical container, but I forgot to take a picture of it.

I took this container outside and found a good spot to test the melting capabilities.  Our house faces North, so there are spots that never see the sun and never melt.  Perfect spot!

Here's the ice spot.  It has been here for like 10 months.  Okay, probably not that long, but winter is feeling endless around here.

I dumped the containers on two separate spots on this ice sheet.  One is the coffee, as seen here, and the other is the ice melt which you can't see.

I poured them both out at 11:10 AM, and I work until 8:00 tonight.  I don't expect it to get any sun in this spot, and the temps are right around 30, which should keep the ice from melting on its own.

I'm gonna say right now, I wouldn't go through and sprinkle my whole driveway or sidewalk with coffee grounds.  It would look like dirt, and if you had to walk through it and then into the house, I'm almost positive it would stain rugs and carpets.  But that's outside of the scope of this test, so let's just see how it melts first.  Stay tuned!

Edit:  Here is what I found at 8:30 this morning

You can see clearly the ice melt did exactly what it's meant to do, it melted the ice.  You can also see clearly the coffee grounds did nothing at all.

So to sum it all up,

Is it worth the mess?  Nope.  It's a pain to dry all the coffee grounds, and then they don't even work.  Not to mention the fact that if you spread this all over your sidewalk or driveway, then walked through it, it would make a mess of your rugs and carpets.

Does it work?  Nope.  Not at all.  'Nuff said.

Would I recommend it?  Nope.  Doesn't work, too mess, and it's a pain.

Just go buy a bag of ice melt and go about your day.