How to Make Your Own DIY Oxygen Absorbers

[@daphneraven6745]

Hey there, prepping brother! I started making my own oxygen absorbers just recently as well; it’s gonna be another month before the commercial ones I ordered arrive. There are a couple of ideas that may be useful to you. I’ll offer them up, and you can obviously do with them what you like. The first thing about these is that you don’t actually have to make them with water. The salt on the steel alone is enough with moisture in the air. When you start them to rust, you’re already starting to use them up. Because that’s what rust is, as you pointed out. The other thing that may or may not be a concern to you, is that not everybody’s comfortable with having their food come into direct contact with rust. That’s one thing the commercial guys have covered pretty nicely. When we use a teabag or a coffee filter, and rust starts to bleed through, it will come into contact with food, particularly in a situation where things are packed and tightly or vacuum sealed. There needs to be something between that absorber and the food, that lets the air pass through to the filter. If things are not gonna be totally packed or vacuum sealed, a person could use a clean, empty medicine bottle,kinderegg, One of those little capsules from a vending machine made a whole toys and candies for little kids, or you could even make one out of a food grade plastic, almost like an envelope. Whatever you choose to use, if anything, needs to have airflow. These things do work. When I made my first prototype, I put a coffee filter. I just twisted it shot, no staples. Because it was going in the end of a test tube, it was never going to touch food. Really, to test the capacity of these things, almost any long skinny tube would do, as long as it’s closed on one end. A shot glass would do the job nicely. Even the flavour injector for roasting poetry. Just take the needle off, and stick a lot of gum on the end if necessary, and you can use that as your test tube. So then, you make note of the temperature and atmospheric pressure readings, and take that tube with the absorber in the end, and turn it upside down in a bowl or beaker of water. You can mark the level of the water on the tube. Check it every day and keep making your marks until it stops falling water up into the tube. The amount of water that gets pulled up into the tube to displace the oxygen that was absorbed in the rust reaction, will tell you how much oxygen your absorber will take care of. If you leave in a really dry area, you might have to keep an eye on the bowl. You don’t want your bowl of water going dry before you figure out the limitations of your absorbers. Once you stop getting water pulled up into the tube, you can make one last mark on the tube, and you said to figure out exactly how much water was pulled up. That’s important to know. Because if you don’t know how much oxygen your absorber is capable of taking care of, then there may be a situation where your absorber can’t take care of the oxygen, but you won’t find out about it until you go to open the food. That’s not a place you want to be surprised. The other thing I would be concerned about with teabags, is that they are gauzy. Steel wool rusts best when it’s really fine. But the downside of that, is that the fibres can easily slip through holes in a teabag, and end up in your food. You could be a whole world of hurt for a little tiny fragment of steel spike in your body, if that happens. I guess that’s the thing about experimentation, isn’t it? We figure out so much, then there’s always another step or two that a person can take to perfect the idea. That was a nice clear video. Thank you very much for it. It’s nice to see that there’s a few of us working on these issues, and that people are willing to share their knowledge. That’s how we’ll all get through it.

[@stonehouseforge]

Well you started with an incorrect premise, that rust is not good for you. It is iron oxide, and a great source of iron when you are eating less meat. We cook in cast iron almost exclusively and my wife never had iron problems during pregnancy, because the pans do rust when you leave water in them to soak. Iron can constipate you if you take too much, but it is certainly not unhealthy, or something you would need to protect your food from. I probably mentioned that in the companion article, which is why you should always click out to the article. This is not infotainment clickbait. Your whole premise was incorrect. And I disagree you should get the rust going right away before the available 02 gets into the oil in your food.

[@daphneraven6745]

@@stonehouseforge : I agree that iron is absolutely important for every person. I also cook and cast-iron. But I’ve never cooked in rust. I guess it’s about how you’d like to season your pans and pots. The form of iron that most people eat it’s not rusted steel. If that were the most bioavailable and useful form, people would not bother to wash and dry their pots. They certainly would not bother to season cast iron. But again, that’s up to you. Enjoy your rust!

[@Celso_Luis]

Hey @Daphne Raven , thanks for all your explanations here! I'd like to ask you something, if you don't mind: I'm packing beans inside PET bottles of about 17 oz each (I'm doing it that way because they are roughly what my family needs for a month), and the oxygen absorbers I have (500 cc) are way too overdimensioned for them. Do you believe that, if I fill the bottle with the beans (about 98 %), and then add some thick layers of crumpled paper towel separating the beans from the salted steel wool (wrapped in a coffee filter, like you did), it would prevent the beans from touching the rust? Also, since you did your experiment with the water displacement, do you have any idea of how much steel wool would be necessary for a 17 oz bottle? I know there is about 100 cc of oxygen there, but have no idea of the efficiency of the steel wool (at least in your experiment). Thanks a lot in advance for your help! I know my method is not the best for the storage, but the mylar bags I bought are not working with the weak vacuum sealer I have, even with the vacuum tricks I used... so until the new one is delivered (and that will take a while), I have to improvise.

[@daphneraven6745]

@@Celso_Luis : You are really addressing all the important parameters there! I’ve been up to my eyes, and haven’t had a chance to finish off that research yet. I was sort of hoping that somebody take me up on the offer to split the work with me so we could get it done faster. When I did the displacement test, I hadn’t been sleeping until after two in the morning and I was up before six, so I was clumsy. After a few days, I accidentally knocked over the apparatus. And that’s where that test left off. So I never found out the capacity of that set up. I’d be willing to do it again, but am Presently in the middle of something else that’s taking up all the space that needed to run an experiment. It may be a good week before the space is available again. It’s not a hard one to run. If you’re interested, let me know, and I’ll just let you know the quick instructions, if you don’t already have them in mind. About the outside packaging to protect your food from your rusting oxygen absorber: Before taking a chance with your food supply, it might not be a bad idea to take a mini water bottles, and have something in it to stand in for the beans, unless you want to potentially sacrifice a cup or so of beans. You could go ahead and make set up that you propose, shove it in the bottle, and then loading your beans or substitutes. If you want to give it a little squeeze to put it under vacuum conditions, you could, prior to putting the cap on very securely. Then, take a bit of duct tape, the good stuff, and tape that sucker up but good. It’s important to seal the cap. The other thing that you could do, is run to the beer and wine making store, and just buy a cheap bag of those covers For pop bottles. Then you’re sure of a seal. But if you have tape, then that’s money you don’t have to spend on those caps. Sometimes money is at a bit of a premium, and not everybody lives close to one of those shops. Then you can just place your set up someplace where you’ll see it frequently. Take a picture of it when you put it there, and if you could have it close to the bottom or the side of the container so you can get a really good look at it, you might do better. Watch it over the course of the week. You should start to see the rest come through if it’s going to. Personally, I’ve been working on a design for a plastic cover for it. I don’t have a plastic fabric in mind, but I’m thinking that it’s easy to use a foodgrade plastic off of a container. It can easily be made to fit the mouth of the bottle that is to be used. For that matter, if you’re planning to use a gatorade bottle, the one with the larger mouse on it, you could easily use a small medicine bottle, that a prescription would’ve come in. All you have to do, is take a drill or abuse your soldering iron to melt a few small holes in it that would allow air in, but not allow your oxygen absorber to touch the food, even under pressure. If you don’t have a medicine bottle on hand, then what you could do is take a couple of the cheaper type of water bottles that you don’t need for your Food storage anyway, and just cut the tops off and hot glue them together so you’ve got to back to back bottle tops. Poke/melt a couple of small holes in the cap on each side, and that should easily slip in the mouth of the jar. If you’re making a bigger filter, you can certainly use a bottle with a longer neck, and get more of it in there. But if it’s all scrunched together tightly in the Capsule, you get better contact of the salt with the steel. Win-win. If you look online using the brand name of your favourite oxygen absorbers, to see what the patent office has, in the country in which it was packed it, you’ll find their actual formula. Chances are you’ll find iron filings, and that’s analogous to the steel wool. When you find out, that’s a great place to start, and it’ll also tell you how much salt is in there. The information about how much oxygen, or the size of the container that it is supposed to preserve, will all be written right in there. You’ll also see another ingredient or two, and that will be about accelerating the rate of oxygen absorption/oxidation/rust. You can ignore that, unless you want to spend more money. Because, if it takes a week to absorb all the oxygen in the container after we vacuum sealed out as much as we can, that’s not a problem, at least from my perspective. If you don’t find it online, and then another week you still need the information, feel free to drop me another comment. If you’re up for it, I’m glad to work out an experimental situation with you, and we can each work at it from our own end of things and compare results. That way will get worked on at least twice as fast. It may even speak to more information. But if you do find the information, I sure would appreciate it if you’d let me know about it. I’d be very interested indeed! About your mylar bag. There are different grades of Mylar, as you know. To the best of my knowledge, the Church of Jesus Christ of latter day Saint Provident Living Centre has the thickest, most robust ones there are. I believe those are 7 or 8 mils thick. Because they’re so thick, there’s a couple of things that don’t apply to them that do apply to every other bag. Almost every other bag sealed properly with a vacuum sealer, and once it looks sealed is sealed. But not these ones. The LDS ones need to be properly sealed with an impulse sealer. So, if you use your vacuum sealer, it’ll vacuum a lot of the air out, but it won’t look properly sucked in like it would with a vacuum sealing bag. But you’ll still have it under vacuum. Once you get it sort of sealed with your sealing unit, use the impulse sealer. Because that’s what it will take to really do a good job. Otherwise it just looks sealed but is not really. If you don’t have an impulse sealer, call around one of your Latter-Day-Saint friends. Chances are, he or she will have access to one, or can get access to one. Most other excellent brands, like Wallaby and Harvest Right, I believe they are excellent quality bags that are about five mils, and they say that you can use straightening iron or close iron on them. They do a good job, or even an excellent job. The thickness of the miler makes a huge difference to how well a unit could be sealed, and with watt tool. If you end up with access to an impulse sealer, a lot of them need to have the temperature adjusted on them for the thickness of the packaging that’s being used. That would be important to know. Let me know if I missed anything. It’s nice to have somebody else along on this journey. :-) You probably have better ideas than mine, but that’s what I would do if I wanted to do an experiment and didn’t want to put a lot of investment into something that may or may not work. It’s a great starting point.

[@nadasou]

@@stonehouseforge Ionized iron is one of the metallic ingredients the human body needs, not the ferric oxide resulting from chemical reactions with sodium and active carbon, also in the oxygen absorber of this type.

[@javisierra1517]

thank you so much for this tutorial

[@johnwyman6126]

Don't forget to vacuum seal your oxygen absorbers, just like the commercial ones are vacuum sealed. It keeps the oxygen away from them so they don't get used up prematurely. When you open them and don't use all of them, be sure to reseal the remaining absorbers.

[@mass4552]

I wonder if you could use coffee filters to hold the steel wool and fold the top and just staple them shut.

[@augustsnowfall5189]

Yes. Prepsteaders used them to make silica moisture absorbers. So I don’t see why they couldn’t be used for this.

[@daphneraven6745]

Mass: I use coffee filters. They do a good job so far. The only thing is, I’d reconsider that staple idea. Because I staple can rust, and Not everybody is thrilled about the prospect of rust actually touching their food directly. It’s just as easy to twist the ends shot, or to tie the ends over the piece of string, sort of like a bag. But you still wanna have something between it in your food. Because you don’t want the rust penetrating the filter and contacting the food. It seems to come back to that.

[@stonehouseforge]

Please see what I said above about rust touching your food. Rust is good for you in a survival situation.

[@treehstn]

You mentioned something about canned flour at Walmart... Could you elaborate on that? TY!!

[@katiejon17]

How did these work for you?

[@lifeoftraveling8330]

if you cut open an oxygen absorber thats new its the same as what you made inside i saw a video similar to this one and cut a store bought one open and found its very fine steel shavings or powder and very fine ground salt in side

[@rwind656]

Thanks for the video. Two questions: How quickly do these work compared to the commercial O2 absorbers? (Will we be able to see the mylar bags compressing by the next day to make sure they're working? Doesn't steel wool rust more slowly?) As there is still some moisture in the steel wool as you are putting it into the tea bag -- is that only because of the demo? Would putting them into the oven to finish drying work, instead of in the sun?

[@daphneraven6745]

R Wind: they work slowly. Over the course of days. It’s well worth experimenting to find out how much they will absorb. Because you don’t want to put a small absorber into a bag that’s got more oxygen in it than the absorber can manage. You’ll end up with oxidized food that way. If you wanted to accelerated a little bit, and not a lot, you could seed your absorber with a little bit of rust. Seems like nothing starts a good rust reaction, like a tiny little bit of rust. And if you live near the coast, salt air. There’s no escaping it there. You’ll know if you’ve got all the oxygen out of your set up, if you’re able to see the absorber, and so much rust happens, but then it stops rusting. Oxygen is necessary for rust to occur. So if it’s not rusting, that’s probably a good sign that you’ve taken care of the oxygen in the container. Happy prepping! :-)

[@stonehouseforge]

This is for sure a long term thing, which is why I suggest you start the rust right out immediately. For when you are going to need your food right now, you don't need even these. It won't even be expired when you need it.

[@daphneraven6745]

@@stonehouseforge : If having rust produced something that you think you need to have done in advance, then you will succeed wildly. My purpose in making them was to absorb oxygen from a sealed container. This is a very different purpose. One will produce the other, in the right environment, But I think our goals are just different. Since the object of the game for me is to remove the oxygen from the container, it makes sense in my case to not use up that potential before I’m ready to take the oxygen out of the container. I save that for the actual container. Otherwise, I end up with rust, and a bag/bottle/container full of air, which will pose a vulnerability to any dry food storage which it is intended to protect.

[@rwind656]

Ty both. I was just hoping someone else had done the experiment and determined how large a piece of steel wool was required for a given volume of air. I do understand that the steel, once it has started rusting, will continue to rust slowly and eat the oxygen, for as long as exposed to oxygen. Just have to make sure there's sufficient steel. But also if using for long term food storage, I assume the steel must be moisture-free or a dessicant included. And if the steel were to rust way too slowly given its not wet at all... meanwhile, food is still exposed to air, and any bugs might hatch and eat.

[@dragosnc4624]

but does OA work without water? Can iron rust without any water, only with the humidity in the air?

[@samsepiol5137]

Hi, thanks so much for the video, I have a question if I put 3 or more of these homemade oxygen absorbers in a mylar bag with full of red beans, will it actually absorb the oxygen ? and Does it last for 10 years or something?

[@BunnyLang]

Wow, thank you! Maybe instead of using water, which causes the rust, use a plastic bag full of salt and shake and shake and shake? Maybe add extra salt in the paper/teabag?

[@dannyneumann4547]

The process of iron rusting is what actually captures the oxygen, so they're going to rust anyway. (Rust is iron + oxygen)

[@BunnyLang]

@@dannyneumann4547 Okay, thank you!

[@daphneraven6745]

You don’t even need to do that. Take your coffee filter. Put your iron filings, or piece of steel wool, the finer the better, in the middle. Crush a little bit of salt so that it’s extra fine in your mortar and pestel; Dump that on top of the steel wall. A lot of it will fall through. Take a piece of thread and tie it off. Then just smoosh the coffee filter bag before you slip it inside your perforated barrier that protects your food from rust, yet lets the air through.

[@BunnyLang]

@@daphneraven6745 Thank you very much, an easy way; I love it. Blessings to you.

[@daphneraven6745]

@@BunnyLang : And to you too. We’re all in it together.❤️

[@ralphmoore9422]

Huuuuh