may
The freezing case works fine with most any tap water to, as I noted,
15mK or better... I have a paper on that somewhere. The important thing is to have a lot of well-crushed ice, preferebly in a thermos, and stir it well. The stainless thermos coffee cups, like you can buy at Starbucks, are fine.Most IR thermometers are calibrated for an emissivity in the 0.9 sort of area, so may actually indicate a bit below 0 when used with a really good/black source like ice water.
John