ChillCast: Fridge Timer

You put a warm can in the freezer, and then you forget it. ChillCast tells
you two things a kitchen timer cannot: when your drink will actually be
cold enough to enjoy, and when it is about to freeze and burst.

Both come from the same cooling curve, calculated for the exact container
you put in.

TWO ALARMS, NOT ONE
Set a drink going and ChillCast schedules a notification for the moment it
reaches your target temperature — and, in the freezer, a second warning
before it reaches its freezing point. Beer freezes near minus two degrees,
wine much lower, plain water at zero. A sealed can that gets there makes a
mess. ChillCast warns you first.

IT KNOWS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A CAN AND A TWO-LITRE BOTTLE
Size and shape decide almost everything. A 330 ml can in the fridge takes
roughly three and a half hours from room temperature; a two-litre bottle
beside it takes about six. Pick a container and a volume — aluminium can,
glass bottle, plastic bottle, carton, metal flask — and the curve changes
with it. Any volume works, not just the presets.

WHERE YOU PUT IT MATTERS JUST AS MUCH
Fridge, freezer, still iced water, stirred iced water, ice with salt,
running water, a fan blowing on it, or just the worktop. Stirred iced
water can chill a can in about four minutes — roughly fifty times faster
than the fridge — and ChillCast shows you exactly that.

TEACH IT YOUR OWN FRIDGE
Every fridge is different, and so is how full it is. If you have a
thermometer, measure the drink once partway through and enter the reading.
ChillCast solves for your container's real cooling rate from that single
measurement and saves it as one of your containers. From then on the
estimate stops being a guess. No thermometer? The presets work on their own.

WATCH IT ON THE LOCK SCREEN
A Live Activity shows the estimated temperature right now, the time left
until it is ready, and — in the freezer — the time left before it is at
risk. A widget keeps the countdown on your home screen.

WHAT YOU GET
• Cooling curve drawn as a chart, with your target and the freezing zone
• Alarms for ready-to-drink and for freeze risk
• Presets for beer, sparkling wine, white and red wine, water, fizzy drinks, sake
• Any container, any volume, plus your own calibrated ones
• Live Activity, Dynamic Island and a home screen widget
• Celsius or Fahrenheit
• Works offline, no account, no adverts, no tracking

HOW IT WORKS
ChillCast models the drink as a lumped thermal mass losing heat to its
surroundings, so the temperature approaches the ambient exponentially. The
time constant comes from the liquid's heat capacity and the container's
surface area, adjusted for the wall material and for how vigorously the
surroundings carry heat away. The presets reproduce what people already
know from experience — about an hour in the freezer, a few minutes in
stirred iced water.

These are estimates, shown as a range rather than a single number, because
a packed fridge and an empty one do not cool the same way. ChillCast is
not a food safety tool: it is built for chilling drinks and does not judge
whether anything is safe to eat or drink.