HVAC Tech here, normally what we do to remove all the refrigerant from units is use a pump that puts it into a recovery bottle. The reason why that guy messed up is because we use the gauges to check the pressures and he didn't realize that the king valve was closed thinking and the lines had no pressure. Normally working with copper lines is pretty safe if you know what you're doing, though I must state it's probably not the fault of the HVAC Tech as king valves are quite rare I've only seen two or three and I've been in the business for 3 years or so
One thing I hate is that 410a is already on it's way out. I've still got a r22 system, and every time I get it serviced they try to convince me to switch to a new unit. And I'm like "and go through this again in 5-10 years when the 410a phaseout starts? No thanks!"
I also have a construction background, having been directly in it for 15 years, and am still working maintenance, so I will attest something that I have seen, and heard--that a third year apprentice is usually one of the most dangerous, as you've seen enough to feel confident in what you are doing, but not experienced enough to have seen a significant portion of the perils that can get you into a pickle--stuff like that king valve that keeps you from getting proper pressure readings unless you know to open it, but yet it feels like opening it would take the cap off and release raw refrigerant to open air., possibly also creating a projectile.
My professor just told us a story of how she accidentally evacuated the entire class when she was a student. They were worried the ventilation on the fumehoods was acting up and were working on a reaction that produces Hydrogen Sulfide, her professor said if something smells foul we are evacuating the room. Well, she just started dating her boyfriend(now husband.) He was from Ireland and so was curious about American food, so they ate taco bell bean burritos for dinner. She farted and said nothing, and her professor freaked out and had everyone run.
I work for a hazardous waste disposal company, so I deal with all kinds of random chemicals and substances. Most things are not that bad, especially when everyone working with it knows what it is. That being said, one of the certified chemists gave me a couple of high BTU solvent 55 gallon drums. They consisted of hexanes, acetone, gasoline, and chili oil. The "chili oil" was a solution of concentrated capcasin, so as I was pumping out the solvent to take sampes for some other drums EVERYTHING started to have light burning sensations. I was wearing full PPE, so the only skin showing was my neck and the sides of my face beyond the resperator. As the drum emptyed it got worse, and when I was done, I was washing up and nothing was working for my arms. Turned out the sleeves had been hit with so much vapor that they held on to some of the capcasin and was just transfering it to my arms. The only comment from the chemist was "I did not realize it would be that destructive" and our saftey guy just said "at least it was just vapors, I know what spilling it can do. And yes, the resperator is the reason you are not begging to go home with a gallon of milk." Needless to say, close call, but still far from the worst thing
what the hell is anyone doing that they end up with 55 gallon drums of hot sauce mixed with gasoline. Obviously a separation but if they didn't want the capsacin why use hot peppers?
I am a volunteer fire fighter and we have a lot of agriculture here so a lot of NH3. We have training on how to deal with it, and I have a lot of the numbers memorized as well. It can get very bad and we also might have to start evacuations, but you don't always want to do a false evacuation. Wind can change as well making it difficult. I did a 7 week preplanning for things like it, and that was only the basics.
Could anhydrous ammonia be a better fuel than hydrogen despite the risks? I mean, it’s much less flammable, it doesn’t explode all the time, you can neutralise it quickly with stuff like wet citric acid, it can be easily liquefied at low temperature with most conventional refrigerants (and decently low pressure) and even if liquid ammonia is exposed to normal room temperature and pressure it has a huge heat of vaporisation so it stays a liquid for quite a long time (enough that you can pour it into a glass flask and conduct chemical reactions in it as a solvent) and on top of all this is incredibly smelly so if there’s even a small leak everyone will know.
you can always tell some of the mishaps lab professors have experienced by the way they conduct themselves and the warnings they give in some labs .. the PTSD is palpable lol
Regarding the refrigerant, you'll note that he did check for pressure before cutting the tubing. The problem was that the king valve had isolated the service port, resulting in a false reading. I think the lesson is to understand the peculiarities of the system you're working on. FWIW, tubing cutters don't generate heat. They look like a c-clamp with rollers and a sharp cutting disk instead of clamp pads. You fasten the cutter to the tubing and just rotate it around by hand, tightening the knob after each rotation.
On cars you used to be able to throw in a can of R-12 on a leaky system and hope for the best. Usually it worked. But even if you turned off the valve on the can there was still pressure in the line and you'd get a burst of refrigerant out as you disconnected the schrader valve. R134-a seems nastier and gloves and a face shield are a good idea even if you don't screw up. Better still I leave it to the AC techs now, modern cars use a very small amount of refrigerant so it's too easy to overcharge and you can't legally vent any excess. They also don't leak like they used to so there's less need to touch it. I have a 2008 that's still on its factory R134-a charge, the older R-12 systems would leak down in a couple of years.
You can also swap r-134a for r-600a... Isobutane is flammable AF, but also, a gasoline engine car. And also, people have literal fucking natural gas pipelines hooked up to their homes lmao
@@Ariccio123 I agree with you regarding r-600a. Most of the refrigerant leaks occur under the hood anyway where the flammable refrigerant is nothing compared to the flammable fuel. There really isn't that much refrigerant in there anyway. A warning label would be a good idea but you'd do that for any refrigerant.
I'm a PhD student, when I got in I had to do course on lab safety, and well I've heard about some scary stuff, one of the members of the safety team said that once they were checking all gas cylinders in the institute, they found more than a few old, rusty and not labeled cylinders, turns out one of cylinders contained phosgene.
I have to share a story about my school days. My science teacher was teaching us aerodynamics using paper planes, (mine came in second) but due to space restrictions, we had to do it in the lab. Oh dear. One of the paper planes snaked off to a corner of the lab and when we tried to retrieve it, it was smouldering. Ron (yes, he was our teacher, but he was a personal friend to a lot of the guys, and we only called him Mr (insert surname here) if we had pissed him off or if he was in a formal mood that day, which was very rare) told us "Don't touch it, I'll deal with it" and picked up the fuming mass with tongs and threw it into the back passage of the lab, out in the open. Unfortunately, it left an appalling chloriney smell behind it, and it eventually safely burst into flames on good old non-combustible concrete. Poor Ron was at a loss as to what had happened, because nobody was as punctilious at cleaning Lab floors than he was. He came to the conclusion that the lab floor was slightly uneven, and some chemicals had got trapped in a corner he couldn't easily get cleaned. The second half of the experiment was conducted in the gym hall instead!
My favorite lab professor actually got his PhD doing some sort of exothermic reaction that was so slow that he got sick of watching it and went to the pub for a drink. It must have been something that ramped up exponentially though because, when he came back to the lab from the pub, the fire department was putting the lab building out. Somehow he still ended up getting his PhD. He was a good teacher, though, so I'm glad he did.
I once got sprayed with refrigerant spray bottle, meant for checking cold welds in electronics. An intern had been playing with the bottle, delighted to see the frost on stuff he sprayed it on. Relatively harmless and common stuff and chalked up to natural losses in the budget. Then the idiot kid decided that spraying some person would be equally funny. Froze an inch-wide patch of skin and underlying tissues solid. I still have a small scar there. Can't imagine how painful freezing a larger patch could be.
I've always been pretty cautious with matters of chemistry, so I don't have any good stories of my own. (My dad has great stories from working at the world's sketchiest biotech startup.) My worst was when I was trying to take some stubborn crud off a sink with hydrogen peroxide and decided to add some vinegar to help it out. As soon as I poured it, my brain decided to belatedly contribute "Hey, that's probably going to combine into something." One quick search later and I learned about peracetic acid. It probably wasn't that scary in the amount I'd just made, but I carefully washed it all down the drain and suffered no ill-effects.
I just started a new job in demolition in Denmark and our first job is an old chemical lab from the 1920s, its painted with paris green on the outside (arsenic) and some lead paint on the inside, basement storage is ankle deep water at best and solid shoulder deep at worst with all kinds of scarey chemical bottles floating there, on the shelf's and in the fridges. 3 of us wore 3 different kinds of gloves, so if one of us grabbed something and they started smoking we got someone else to try and grab it with different gloves. My amateur chemistry knowledge comes in handy a lot, as we would be dead on the first day by removing the oil from a container with solid 20kg of potassium to make it easier to carry through waist deep water. There is probably some radioactive stuff there too and building is made in like 50% from asbestos. I dont mind working there as its a nice challenge to figure out how to not get killed instantly and i dont care about long term effects as im terminally ill anyway.
Always confirm the refrigerant is evacuated before you cut the line. If you close a valve and it’s magically 0 psi at your gauge, you just turned off the valve to the GAUGE. Refrigerant burns are dangerous, glad that guy is okay
As a farmer myself, I never use anhydrous ammonia for this exact reason. I work with plenty of chemicals (for spraying weeds) but none of them are horribly harsh. But anhydrous can quickly go from safe to you’re dead if a mistake is made
Third hand story here, but... My brother worked in a Plastic Metal Injection Molding plant as a metallurgical quality control tech. Process boils down to 1,)mix metal powder and plastic resin, 2) injection mold the mixture into final shape, 3) In a heated chamber debind the part using fuming nitric acid, 4) sinter the parts in an oven, 5) complete any heat treating or machining processes. Now, you probably caught that part about debinding the resin from the metal powder, yes? They used multiple large barrels of fuming nitric acid on a daily basis. One day, one of the process techs was getting ready to switch the barrels of acid and pulled one that had been sitting around for longer than usual, fully sealed. He noted that the top of the barrel was bulging a bit, but proceeded to unscrew the clamp holding the lid on. Needless to say, he took a few gallons of fuming nitric to the face, and despite wearing safety glasses and a face shield, he lost vision permanently in one eye, significant impairment in the other, and had deep acid burns of his face, upper body, and arms. Luckily the chemical shower was working, he was guided to that and sat under it while waiting for the ambulance. I believe he got a rather large settlement out of it, but he was back to working for the company after a few months. So, turns out that fuming nitric oxidizes face just as well as it oxidizes plastic.
Thank you for making these public! I love these videos so much, even if I don't know much about chemistry, it's so fun to learn about the dangers of it
8:00 It sounds like the HVAC tech mostly followed the protocol, but the king valve threw a curve ball. If you're going to work on HVAC equipment, you have to watch out for those things. Part of the procedure for working on those things includes hooking your gauges up ~~and then opening the king valve up.~~
Damn this got me confused for a moment because in my first language "refrigerants" is almost word for word the word for soda. That could also be a video, breaking down the chemical differences between different sodas. What makes a lemon soda a lemon soda, what do we know in coca cola that makes it specifically coca cola? What do they change in the diet variants, how does the body take the changes?
There's a LOT of fascinating physics as well as chemical history involved with refrigerants. The first time I saw someone use propane as a replacement for R-12 in a classic car...
You could do a video just on the Einstein-Szilard Refrigerator alone . BTW , H2S has also seen use as a refrigerant , although it isn't used today for obvious reasons .
The refrigerant story reminded me of when we were getting rid of a fridge at work, and the guy who came to scrap it just took an axe to it to get it all in his truck. I figured he'd just cut the door off and stuff but he chopped right into the meat of the thing, including the refrigerant lines. Just rawdogging it with no ppe out in the alley. I'm sure it was technically fine because it was outside, but I still noped out of there, and I can't imagine the cumulative effects of doing that all the time are very good.
@@calvinwilliams9547Toxic runoff from agriculture is a major environmental damage factor here(Denmark) but the government doesnt care because one of the dominant parties mainly getting votes from farmers looking for easy ways out and special treatment/exemptions from environmental regulations.. Meanwhile government makes state media only focus on water treatment plants and their rare dumping of overflowing organics. And then all the green voters wonder why all the fish are dying in the Kattegat while eating their industrial produce falsely advertised as organic.
@@calvinwilliams9547 I don't know. When large quantities of fertiliser get into a waterway it causes algae to bloom, which takes all the oxygen from the water and kills all the fish.
In my first year of undergrad, I joined the rocketry team at my school. Now, our school is pretty large, and we had a fairly large rocketry team as well. I was a member of the propulsion subteam, and one of the tasks we were responsible for was casting the fuel grains for our hybrid rocket engine. As a part of this process, we had to machine down these casings cast from phenolic resin. Well, one day when I was prepping a casing for a grain cast, I noticed that the form we used to prep the casing for the HTPB was slightly oversized and wouldn't fit inside the casing. I decided it would be a good idea to try to sand down the inside of the casing by hand, with no safety glasses or respirator. To this day, I still have a persistent cough that occasionally flares up due to the phenolic dust I inhaled. Moral of the story: Don't work with phenolics if you are creating fine particulate matter.
And I felt like an idiot when I accidentally snorted chlorine! This channel makes me realize how lucky I was. Chronic sniffles is PEANUTS compared to this.
I work in hvac, and just about everybody knows at least one oldtimer who has a story of a close call or a coworker who passed away due to ammonia accidents.
14:50 Can happen in a simple chemistry class experiment when, say, hydrochloric acid is added to a rock and the rock contains sulfide minerals making some hydrogen sulfide. This happened when I was in high school, and the whole school smelled of rotten eggs.
Yup actually did this to make hydrogen sulfide to create sodium sulfide and sodium hydrosulfide. Used iron pyrite pulverized to oblivion as the metal sulfide source. Likely had selenium and other impurities but was good enough for my uses.
I live in a fairly big city, 70,000 population, 4900km^2. We have an abattoir about 10km out which used anhydrous ammonia for refrigeration. I'm fairly used to the smell, having installed the ammonia detection throughout the plant, as well as upgrades directly on the pumps, cooling towers, compressors, and condensers. I will never forget that on the first day, they told us if anything were to happen to the main ammonia tank (i.e. leak, explosion, etc), they would have to evacuate the whole city. That sentence repeats in my head every time I work in or around that place.
I went through a conductor training program, and they beat hazmat safety into you there, because you sometimes have to pull a string of 20,000gal+ tank cars of scary chemicals around. One they really focused on was anhydrous NH3, since it's rather common. To hammer the point home, they showed a dashcam video of a crashed nurse tank (as used by farmers). The cop pulls up, goes to check on the guy laying in the middle of the road in the middle of a vapor cloud, and is himself on the ground within 15 seconds. We got the point...
@@That_Chemist I see it a lot in northern MN heading south. That's all I know. Also, I keep a pdf copy of the Emergency Response Guidebook. It helps identify weird hazmat loads both for curiosity's sake, but also on the off chance you need it (I haven't yet, and hope to keep it that way)
I used to use anhydrous ammonia pretty regularly as part of a modified Birch reduction. I had a specialised piece of glassware like a chunky cold finger that was shaped more like a coffee mug so it was easy to fill with dry ice/acetone that would allow me to effectively condense the ammonia back into my flask. I'd use a 2 litre multi neck flask that was about half full of ammonia and THF. I always loved the blue swirling that would quickly disappear as I dropped pieces of lithium into the top (that was also a fun demo for undergrad project students in the lab). My ammonia source was an upturned cylinder mounted on a sloping carriage that we nicknamed "the sex trolley" for reasons lost to time. Due to the position of the pickup tube inside the tank you could roll the cylinder over one way to dispense ammonia gas or liquid but the valve and plastic tubing which terminated in a cut-off plastic syringe was extremely sketchy, especially when it filled with ammonia. I was always very careful, but due to the size and unwieldy nature of the whole thing it was impossible to keep as much of the tubing inside the fumehood as I would have liked. I made a lot of mustards in my phd on the way to various macrocycles, but the sex trolley was always one of the more fun days in the lab. Perhaps second only to finding out that one of the other new postdocs in the lab had been stockpiling organic linkers for his metal organic framework work as perchlorate salts because "that's what he'd always used in his old lab" and no one ever questioned him!
Not a chemist but a computer technician, I was swapping out computers and under a monitor stand which was on top of a computer, I found a huge dried puddle of coffee residue. My boss tasked me with cleaning it so I sprayed this panel with a load of Dettol surface cleanser. I don't know what chemistry happened but whatever gas it made immediately irritated my nose and throat to the point where I ran to the washroom and nearly vomited. After that, no matter what I ate or drank, I couldn't get the taste out of my mouth for a week (like liquid antibiotics if you have had the pleasure). Just goes to show how everyone deals with chemicals eventually and they are not to be underestimated.
I have very little smell. So bad I picked up. Beaker of cleaning ammonia and as my science teacher said honey no! Thinking I would drink it I touched it to my septum and inhaled deeply through my nose. As I went blind and felt like I was passing out I said whoa and fell back into my chair after putting the beaker down
I've taken a whiff of ammonia salts (the kind you're supposed to smell to kick your ass), and yeah that's probably the covid. I had it too close to my nose instead of wafting it, and I was struggling hard for a few minutes afterwards.
I was assembling PVC conduit in a trench on a hot windless day, the PVC cement we were using was mainly Tetrahydofuran, the THF fumes built up in the trench until I started falling over. Luckily my co-worker figured out was going on and pulled me out of the trench, no lasting effects but it was a bit scary
Ammonia is somewhat overlooked when it comes to lab safety and hazards. There are many stories about people getting a lungufull of chlorine or HCl gas, but inhaling NH3 gas is just as nasty.
I was a temporary employee for a Fiberglas pipe manufacturer for the coal mining industry. The epoxy resin is nasty enough stuff and it ruins your clothes. Additionally, the "bunny suits" they had were to fit Big Joe, the 6 foot 8 dude that worked there. So if you put one of those on and you're average size, like me, it's awkward, you get resin stuck all over you, you're hot, and you get snagged on everything. So I didn't wear it. Then Big Joe got burned by cleaning solvent for the resin... it was nitric acid. Looking back at it, I would never go back to work there. They only told me bot to get the cleaner on me, and I only heard later what it was. It was my dad that told me that nitric acid is worse than sulfuric acid that is in car batteries.
You should do a collab tier list with Labcoats and rank the stinkiest molecules! Collectively, I'm sure you both have a fair bit of experience on the subject!
I used to work with fuming nitric acid in electronics. I always double-gloved when having to refill equipment bottles. Nitrile under Trionic gloves. Because if you got a drop or a small spill, the Trionics would get hot and you'd want to get out of them quick.
I posted the first of my experiences with the mysteries of alchemy on a video a while ago, but my other good one deserves posting as well. I work at a small business that deals in firearms, somewhere between a "gun shop" and a bigger organization like Royal Tiger or Atlantic Firearms. Anyway, sometimes we will get in big collections of unsorted *stuff*, usually from estates. I was pretty new but quite knowledgeable with my collectibles and such, so I would be tasked having the first look and sorting the wheat from the chaff, as it were. One time, we got in a few big wooden trunks of *stuff* that we basically paid nothing for. I have a decently unpleasant mold allergy, so I always wear nitrile gloves when going through other people's half-forgotten things. This was also at the start of Covid, so I was wearing a store-provided N95. This will be important later. Suitably protected(ish), I start to delve into the treasures that await. Most of it is just ammunition from the 80's (perfectly safe) and some handguns, but in the last trunk I start to run into some much older ammo - WW2 and WW1 surplus and 19-teens commercial stuff. That can be a little scary, but if it's copper jacketed ammo and it didn't get wet it's generally safe to handle, both in a toxic sense and in an explosive sense. But at the very bottom is a water-damaged cardboard box, about the size of a cellphone box, that says "Henry." Now, commercial production of .44 Henry Rimfire stopped by about the 20s, but this box was clearly older - much older, like 1870s older. That kind of stuff can be worth a pretty good amount just on its own historical value, so I reach into the trunk and lift it into the air - and, stupidly, do not do so *by the bottom.* .44 Rimfire ammo, especially the cheap stuff, was an unjacketed, unwaxed bare lead projectile. That was fine(ish) back in the day, but that means that, given time and/or contact with water, the lead will oxidize. Again, that's fine if they're left alone and the oxide is still in place, but for whatever reason this box had been jostled quite a lot, apparently, in its life. Just my luck. As soon as the box hits about four feet in the air, the bottom falls out, and an avalanche of half-present lead bullets, now empty casings, decomposed black powder, mercuric primer, and, most terrifying of all, a mushroom cloud of now-airborne lead oxides balloons into the air. I can see specs of brain damage flying around in the sun rays of a warehouse window like a ticker tape parade of cancer. And then my fan blows it all over my sweaty self, from face to feet. I'm sure glad I had that mask so it didn't end up in my lungs, but there is so much lead powder that I can see it on my clothes. Luckily, we sold a lot of things, including D-Lead, a heavy metal removal wipe. I quite quickly requisitioned a bottle of D-Lead shampoo and a package of wipes, took off my shirt as carefully as I could before tossing it into the dumpster, and went to a nearby friend's apartment to use an entire bottle of D-Lead on my, well, everything. I got tested for Lead a little while later and it came back within acceptable ranges, but it's still ... probably not the best for my health. Oh well. One time I saw a rat chew his way into a spray bottle of Lucas degreaser, get a full face and mouthful of now released *really* nasty solvent, and die in a minute or two. So not the worst chemical exposure that ever happened to someone in that place.
@@That_Chemist Yeah, that's what the rat said too. They managed to chew their way into most of the lubricant/solvent containers at least once. We'd come in Monday morning to find a dead rat surrounded by a puddle of Hoppes No.9 with alarming regularity.
I used winded, a starch enzym spray & anti bacterial (alcohol) spray on my cloth coated indoor bench, will that hurt my lungs or sinuses? I already feel sick & yet am going to use hand soap & water on it too…
A comment regarding the story at about 9:42 regarding wearing a respirator around NO2: Most filters do not (at least officially) protect against NOx. You need the ones with a blue stripe, and I believe that these are only one-time usable. I have one that I seal up again after each use. No idea if the NOx part it still actually works, but at least it offers psychological protection: -) One anecdote about gas mask filters: A relative of mine told a story about how when he was in the military, someone thought it was a good idea to "clean" his filter using paint thinner. They later found him passed out outdoors.
Was attempting to make 100% nitiric acid and aniline rockets in my fume hood. I had synthesised both reagents previously and they were both sitting in my fridge before i took them out to attempt the experiemnt. I added small amounts of the aniline into a test tube with the fumehood running on full blast, before adding the fuming nitric acid into it. theorising it would look better in the dark, i had turned off all the lights, and added the solution with only a miniscule amount of moonlight permeating through a frosted window adjacent to the fumehood. It was quite mesmerising to watch the flame that formed untill i felt a stabbing sensation on my arm, before i ran to turn on the lights and saw a patch on my arm slowly turning into a brownish-black colour with a searing sensation similar to if you had put your finger onto a barbeque grill and left it there while it was hot. My arm was clearly burned by fuming nitric acid. Tracing back the event i assume what had happened was that the jerking motion of my arm as i flinched from the flame produced by the reaction threw small droplets of the acid in my direction, landing on the hood bench where i rested my arm. Yes i was wearning gloves (i guess they werent long enough), yes i was wearing a labcoat (somehow permeated through it). For the first 1-2 weeks, it seemed fine, a brown golden patch the size of 2 coins had formed, untill that layer slowly came off, underneath was like a scene from a horror move with small bloodvessels visible as well as hair folicles. Even now it bleeds alot and has not fully healed (this was a recent accident.) All i am saying is BE VERY CAREFULL WORKING WITH FUMING NITRIC ACID, THIS STUFF WANTS TO KILL YOU AT EVERY WAKING MOMENT.
Still get the phosgene gas even after purging the lines with nitrogen, the refrigerant oil holds refrigerant and slowly boils off over time, if im brazing on a system i just hold my breath, i always evac the system.
We recently had an anhydrous ammonia leak west of town where I'm at. Thankfully it was away from residential areas but the smell carried far and as to be expected smelled terrible.
@@andrewbounds yeah I was coming back into town and got somewhere close. I don't exactly know where the leak occurred but I definitely smelled it and found out later what happened. We have tons of farming land around us here.
Here is my story. I am not a chemist, But I might have accidentally made some sort of toxic gas by burning a cleaner that wasn't meant to be burned. I had an engine that was running poorly due to the mass airflow sensor being dirty. When you clean the sensor, a certain cleaner has to be sprayed down the intake. My issue arose when I was really tired one day and mistakenly grabbed the non-flammable brake cleaner due to the can looking very similar to mass airflow sensor cleaner. Anyways I go to try and clean the sensor with the engine running and notice there is some mysterious white vapor coming out the exhaust. It smelled a little sweet but also burned my nose and throat. Once I caught a whiff of that I knew something wasn't right. I shut everything off and moved to fresh air. I was a little dizzy and coughed occaisionally for the rest of the day. I am fine, but I just have no idea what kind of gas was produced. I might have an idea, but am still not sure.
You more than likely made phosgene gas.. a lot of welders have been caught by cleaning the metal with brake cleaner before welding but you've done it on a much larger scale and you're very lucky your still alive
Reminds me of a minor incident in the school chemistry lab. I forget exactly what our experiment had been, but we ended up with a small flask of PCl5 at the end of it which needed to be disposed of. As we were cleaning up, I handed my lab partner the flask and asked him to dispose of it (I think the teacher had provided a large beaker or something for us to pour the PCl5 into for safe disposal). Unfortunately, my partner wasn't paying attention and flushed the PCl5 down the sink with a lot of hot water. An impressive cloud of acid vapour erupted from the sink at the side of the lab, followed by my partner emerging from the cloud coughing. He should have known exactly what was in the flask, it wasn't like we had a vast array of unlabelled flasks on our bench. He also should have known that the sink was not the correct disposal method. Unfortunately, it was the end of the day and our work was essentially over, so his mind had drifted off onto other things. The very old chemistry teacher's reaction was to just turn the extractor fans up high and call him a "silly boy".
About 6 years ago, prior to my undergrad degree, I was at a local university for a chemistry day with my college. I'm not 100% certain what the protocol was but I think it was dehydrating cyclohexanol into cyclohexene. I know it was basically a distillation. When done and passing over the (still warm) cyclohexene or whatever product to my lab partner I inhaled deeply to sigh and got a lung full. As an embarrassed teenager knowing I'd messed up, I tried to play it cool and said I needed the bathroom. Got there, tried coughing up into the sink and then just crouched against the wall with my head spinning, lungs burning whilst googling the hazard sheet for whatever I'd just inhaled. Was there a solid 10 minutes. I went home at lunch and just told my instructor I had a headache.
We used low molecular weight thiols and amines in a glove box as solvents, when I was in grad school. The glove box had a solvent trap to handle that and it hand to be regenerated periodically and the solvent vented. The problem is that our solvents could damage the flow meter used to verify it was properly flowing nitrogen to clear out the solvent trap, and wasn’t plugged. Due to the thiols there was always a slight odor when doing this so they started the regeneration on a Friday night to clear up any smell before Monday. The flow meter blew and straight-piped all those amines and thiols into the lab. The poor janitor was the first to notice when collecting trash. The whole building was evacuated, as weld stink-bombed an entire floor.
Definitely was an issue. We had to do extra long regeneration cycles with dilute hydrogen to regen the catalyst pretty regularly. Ironically similar chemistry to what we were doing (solution processed chalcogenide semiconductors, especially copper based ones) that needed the glovebox in the first place meant that catalyst go totally worked over pretty badly. Amines and thiols together make good coordination complexes of metal-thiolates that allows for water-free/oxygen free dissolution of a lot of unexpected inorganic compounds. Just smells absolutely terrible.
The closest thing to a refrigerant accident I had was having liquid butane drops landing on my hand in a very warm day, when I was trying to refill a lighter and didn't notice the lighter valve was jammed somehow. Almost all my palm instantly covered with frost and the skin looked like king Tut's for a while. Although it was not a big spill of liquid butane, it was surprisingly painful.
Was in my aprentasship years, worked with phosphoroxychloride, which i used as reagent and solvent for my reaction. Had to boil it of with rotavap on the middle benche, should have been in a hood... hindsight 20/20.. When i was placing the bottled waste destillate in the waste disposal box i accidently unscrewed the cap and 3 of my fingers got soaked with phosphoroxychloride... Rushed to the sink to wash my hand with hot water, soap and handcreame.. Lucky lost only a little top skin, no scars...
I never understood using anhydrous, UAN 28/32 are way safer to handle and a better rounded N mix, if you want slow release use dry pellets... or manure.
I wanted to make a hydroxylguanidine compound before and this required the use of calcium cyanamide. Honestly it was a pretty sketchy synth already because guanidine compounds are quite sensitive to aqueous conditions (pH and temp) already and there wasn't a lot of good information I could find on the synthesis so I was already relying on making quite a lot of extrapolations and assumptions... What I really didn't know before then was that in the synthesis of calcium cyanamide, you end up with a mixture of compounds in part because an equilibrium between calcium cyanamide and cyanide... At higher temperatures it leans towards the cyanamide and I was using those kinds of high temperatures but upon finishing the synth, I opened my tiny itty bitty little reaction vessel (made from the steel casing of a battery lol) and was instantly hit with a wave of crushed appleseed/bitter almond smell. Kinda reminded me of some intersection between the smell of chlorine and iodine... Kinda had a "fuck this" moment after that and went as overboard as I could with neutralizing all of the possibly present cyanide. Tried again in even smaller quantities cause I honestly didn't care to make very substantial quantities in the first place but yeah, no, it was always there and much stronger than I was ever gonna be comfortable with... Cyanide is terrifying n I'm glad I'm one of the folk who can smell it. Although who knows, maybe the quantities really were just minute and I could have gone on with the experiment... Wasn't keen on finding out lol. For all I knew I got some step somewhere completely wrong.
i only subscribed since zach friedman is one of your patreons, a weird reason to subscribe but i DID just watch a 17 minute video on chemistry mishaps including your patreon read....
Spilled glacial acetic on my palm, ignored it to finish what i was doing because "it's just conc vinegar". Eventually washed my hand. by the next day the outlayer of skin dried and blistered then sloughed off. I had shiny raw pink hand for a few weeks as it healed.
2:23 Aqueous chlorine can oxidize ethanol to acetic acid, then to chloroform + CO2. It could have been ethyl hypochlorite, but it also very easily could have been chloroform.
these refrigerants are thankfully fairly safe, "non-flammable propane" is a decent approximation. Cryogenic solvent asphyxiant are the primary risks left for liquid stuff.
Yeah, but getting large amounts of any liquefied gas on you is going to be potentially dangerous just due to sudden frostbite and the tendency of people to jump and freak out when suddenly burned by a cloud of expanding vapour, which leads to dropped tools, falls (possibly INTO the cloud of extremely cold heavier-than-air non-breathable gas), and general 'making things worse'. Still, it's impressive how much safer such gasses have gotten than the ammonia and such they used to use.
I once made anhydrous perchloric acid once by mistake I was reacting sulfuric acid with calcium perchlorate but the formed calcium sulfate sucked up all the remaining water and I got a lung full of perchloric acid
You're supposed to handle pfas compounds in a glove box these days? Just last week i was walking around in a plant where there were 5 or 6 1000l pallet containers marked with fluorinated surfactant and a notice to send them to waste disposal. That's the stuff fire crews trained with and contaminated the soil with and that is now causing mayor headaches when they want to build something in that vacant plot.
i am not a chemist but i know if i mix certain things i can get acids and face melting goo or make lung burny air - one of the mixes i know i should never make is acetone and bleach as it creates cloroform and normally you must store it in a brown glass bottle that is stoppered with i guess either silicone or vulcanized rubber? because the cloroform when exposed to air for long periods of time makes phogene i think or maybe i am confusing the reaction with a chemical used to create aqua regia that makes it hazardous to create aqua regia in a kitchen using basic kitchen utensils - i think i wanted to make gold eating acid and then turn the acid back to gold powder and then melt it with a blow torch to make a little pellet of pure gold and later decide i wasn't in a mood to make a breathable acid that likes to melt lungs after making gold melting acid so i basically went i should do this then went how do i do this and then went oh i am not going to do this.
One thing to note vehicles generally use R134 or 1234yf refrigerant. I’ve never heard of R410 if anyone can let me know the differences that’d be appreciated
i used fuming nitric acid for a synthesis once. mistakenly because my lab mate "couldnt find" the lower concentration. they didnt look. yes the synthesis blew up under the fume hood. we wound out who could smell cyanide that day. organic vhemistry surely is fun...
@@That_Chemist We nitrated benzyl cyanide / Phenylacetonitrile. Its a benzene ring with cyanide attached. It got very hot before blowing up, so it may have decomposed. Luckily this experiment was under the fume hood, which was swiftly closed by a colleague. Best part is we werent even there when it blew up, as the synthesis started normally with everything seemingly working out. But 10 minutes later. it happened.. There were 12 pairs of students in the lab and sometimes we were on break. I even took the molar amount of acid into account to add the same amount of moles, but I may have forgotten to add water. Perhaps a lower solution volume caused a thermal runaway. On this day I learned to only trust myself when it comes to such things.
Once my new female lab coworker nearly sprayed me with a sulfuric acid bubble counter. We both stood infront of the cleaning hood, she poured water in the bubble counter instead of the acid into the water from the cleaning hood.... a little more to the left and i would have been face splashed.... had my lucky angel that day.
also does anyone know how to clean off the white layer of build up after dissolving lithium in water as i used a collectible glass cup and want to actually look at after my experiment as i did this quite a few years ago and the cup is filled with hard white crust as i was mainly producing hydrogen in the cup as a experiment.
I mixed bleach and ammonia on an anthill as DIY ant killer. The spot in my yard where I did that is still just a patch of dirt, well over a year later.
I was once cleaning junk in the Erlenmeyer flask. I added conc. HCl it worked but little bit was remaining i thought may be little bit of chlorine made from addition of 30 percent H2O2 will work. After some with addition of few drops didn't seems to work then i added around 5ml of H2O2 in about 15ml of conc. HCl. Slowly solution started to turn yellow. After while it start to smell chlorine after few seconds room was filled with chlorine. Luckily no one was there all windows were open and i quickly dumped everything in sink and turned the tap. After few minutes. It was fine and my PhD supervisor still don't know anything was even happened that day.
I remeber one time when i was young (i think i eas about 13 at the time), my dad got a bottle of 30% formaldehyde to kill weeds. I sprayed that stuff without a mask and breathed in a noticeable anount of it. If i get lung cancer I will definitely partly blame this
Can't forget about the time I painted the new outhouse without any mask, with a spray gun and varnish containing god knows what cancer containing hydrocarbon solvent
I remember dissections and the formaldehyde . I recall we received stern lectures and warnings , about " unsanctioned uses of the study material " . We were also told formaldehyde was toxic , but it was definitely an afterthought .
I work with this stuff, more specific, industrial grade (99.9% pure) and it's nasty. It will seriously fuck you up. He should've had a full face respirator, rubber gloves and apron
I was dealing with as pure as can be Ammonia Hydroxide literally last week. When I use a stock bottle I grab a beaker pour what I think I need into that then from there into a cylinder. What's in the beaker doesn't go back into the stock bottle. It's always very small amounts. For some reason I pulled out that beaker with less than 10ml of Ammonia OH and I pulled it across my body and got hit hard with a nose full of ammonia OH. I smelt it for HOURS. it was TERRIBLE.
Pure ammonium hydroxide is what is in my RV refrigerator that does the cooling. It boils it and the water vapor recombines with the ammonia that has been cooled and it keeps stuff frosty. Extremely sensitive to tilt though.
Refrigerants make great freeze rays. You can kill all sorts of arthropods with computer duster. Just make sure it doesn't get the liquid on your hands because it is quite cold and can cause frostbite (and indeed, this is one of the reasons it is lethal to insects).
Also don't burn it or inhale the concentrated substance. It has a bitterant but it can be a mind altering drug. The reason not to burn it is that it contains fluorine and will create some amount of HF when burned.
0 chemical experience besides interest, but the place I worked at this summer needed our propane refilled, so we took our like 4ft tall tank to the nearby place that could do it. Young employee, loose hose, so much propane in the air, one match and all woulda been over, got a bit lightheaded, me and the worker are fine tho
not sure if it has been posted here but afaik the fluorochem man does that all at home, he has a video on his channel showing a quick walkthrough of his lab which is quite impressive and a little insane that he does all of that at home (he also built his own geothermal and coal power plant)
his gloveboxes and such are all custom built with like 4 inch thick steel iirc and "the atmosphere in one is enough to render you incapacitated within seconds"
One time I was working with conc. Sulphuric acid, and I had a hot plate I accidentally left on and maxed at 500 Celsius. A small amount of 94-96% sulphuric acid on the hot plate, immediately thick white smoke billowed from the plate filling the room, I did my best to hold my breath as I ran the plate outside (burning my hand fairly badly), then going back in to open the window and bring a fan in. I have no idea how much SO2/SO3 I was exposed to, but frankly I'd rather not know. *I'll add more detail I didn't know this was going to get hearted* This was in my basement, and I was working with the h2so4 to make a sulphate salt of a compound, and I was definitely exposed to a large amount of this gas, no ppe, no fume hood. So yk, I might be fucked.
Holyshit this just reminded me that one of the kitchen's I used to work at would have me do a deck scrub of the kitchen every night with degreaser and then bleach. I'm going to go ahead and let you guess what the hell is in the degreaser. Just kidding it's freaking ammonia. I never bothered to check because I didn't think anyone would be stupid enough to have me mix those two what the hell! Then I wondered why I had burning lungs every damn night and that place gave me more food poisoning that I've ever fckng experience in my life. They'd put the floor mats through the disher🤮 Let's just say I'll never be going to that crappy Tuscany restaurant in Evergreen ever again. I can say a lot more about that place but I'm pretty sure I shouldn't.
Re offhand remarks. I think the onus is still on the chemist to confirm that their assumptions are safe and correct. If you take all of you expermental proceedure from your guess at what you saw in a video, that's on you, not the youtuber.
Not really enjoy it, though it does make pretty blue crystals the same colar as fresh zinc if you heat it in a tube with OsO4 plus metal powder. Heat the side where you want the crystals strongly then heat the rest enough to fully vaporize the OsO4 in the tube while heating the metal sponge mildly. The osmium transports to the extremely hot side similar to the halogen cycle in lightbulbs.
I'm wondering why the experiment with the concentrated HCL and the 30% peroxide wasn't nixed by the instructor. You don't need a phd in chemistry to know that's going to be ugly.
HVAC Tech here, normally what we do to remove all the refrigerant from units is use a pump that puts it into a recovery bottle. The reason why that guy messed up is because we use the gauges to check the pressures and he didn't realize that the king valve was closed thinking and the lines had no pressure. Normally working with copper lines is pretty safe if you know what you're doing, though I must state it's probably not the fault of the HVAC Tech as king valves are quite rare I've only seen two or three and I've been in the business for 3 years or so
If I were decommissioning a system I'd tap a tube in the main line and draw a vacuum, just in case.
One thing I hate is that 410a is already on it's way out. I've still got a r22 system, and every time I get it serviced they try to convince me to switch to a new unit. And I'm like "and go through this again in 5-10 years when the 410a phaseout starts? No thanks!"
All the stuff i work on had a king valve, my practice is to just evac the system no matter what.
king valves are not rare, I've seen 20 or 30 this week
I also have a construction background, having been directly in it for 15 years, and am still working maintenance, so I will attest something that I have seen, and heard--that a third year apprentice is usually one of the most dangerous, as you've seen enough to feel confident in what you are doing, but not experienced enough to have seen a significant portion of the perils that can get you into a pickle--stuff like that king valve that keeps you from getting proper pressure readings unless you know to open it, but yet it feels like opening it would take the cap off and release raw refrigerant to open air., possibly also creating a projectile.
My professor just told us a story of how she accidentally evacuated the entire class when she was a student. They were worried the ventilation on the fumehoods was acting up and were working on a reaction that produces Hydrogen Sulfide, her professor said if something smells foul we are evacuating the room. Well, she just started dating her boyfriend(now husband.) He was from Ireland and so was curious about American food, so they ate taco bell bean burritos for dinner. She farted and said nothing, and her professor freaked out and had everyone run.
that is _hilarious_
I can relate cause I fart alot too and Im typing this as Im finishing up a Del Taco bean burrito.
that is fantastic! thank you for sharing 🤣
Definitely a top.10.story !
That can't be real..
"face has some solubility in THF"
your off-the-cuff deadpan humor never fails to crack a smile.
I work for a hazardous waste disposal company, so I deal with all kinds of random chemicals and substances. Most things are not that bad, especially when everyone working with it knows what it is. That being said, one of the certified chemists gave me a couple of high BTU solvent 55 gallon drums. They consisted of hexanes, acetone, gasoline, and chili oil. The "chili oil" was a solution of concentrated capcasin, so as I was pumping out the solvent to take sampes for some other drums EVERYTHING started to have light burning sensations. I was wearing full PPE, so the only skin showing was my neck and the sides of my face beyond the resperator. As the drum emptyed it got worse, and when I was done, I was washing up and nothing was working for my arms. Turned out the sleeves had been hit with so much vapor that they held on to some of the capcasin and was just transfering it to my arms. The only comment from the chemist was "I did not realize it would be that destructive" and our saftey guy just said "at least it was just vapors, I know what spilling it can do. And yes, the resperator is the reason you are not begging to go home with a gallon of milk." Needless to say, close call, but still far from the worst thing
Hot
what the hell is anyone doing that they end up with 55 gallon drums of hot sauce mixed with gasoline.
Obviously a separation but if they didn't want the capsacin why use hot peppers?
I am a volunteer fire fighter and we have a lot of agriculture here so a lot of NH3. We have training on how to deal with it, and I have a lot of the numbers memorized as well. It can get very bad and we also might have to start evacuations, but you don't always want to do a false evacuation. Wind can change as well making it difficult. I did a 7 week preplanning for things like it, and that was only the basics.
Could anhydrous ammonia be a better fuel than hydrogen despite the risks?
I mean, it’s much less flammable, it doesn’t explode all the time, you can neutralise it quickly with stuff like wet citric acid, it can be easily liquefied at low temperature with most conventional refrigerants (and decently low pressure) and even if liquid ammonia is exposed to normal room temperature and pressure it has a huge heat of vaporisation so it stays a liquid for quite a long time (enough that you can pour it into a glass flask and conduct chemical reactions in it as a solvent) and on top of all this is incredibly smelly so if there’s even a small leak everyone will know.
you can always tell some of the mishaps lab professors have experienced by the way they conduct themselves and the warnings they give in some labs .. the PTSD is palpable lol
Louis Slotin 👍🏻
Regarding the refrigerant, you'll note that he did check for pressure before cutting the tubing. The problem was that the king valve had isolated the service port, resulting in a false reading. I think the lesson is to understand the peculiarities of the system you're working on.
FWIW, tubing cutters don't generate heat. They look like a c-clamp with rollers and a sharp cutting disk instead of clamp pads. You fasten the cutter to the tubing and just rotate it around by hand, tightening the knob after each rotation.
On cars you used to be able to throw in a can of R-12 on a leaky system and hope for the best. Usually it worked. But even if you turned off the valve on the can there was still pressure in the line and you'd get a burst of refrigerant out as you disconnected the schrader valve. R134-a seems nastier and gloves and a face shield are a good idea even if you don't screw up.
Better still I leave it to the AC techs now, modern cars use a very small amount of refrigerant so it's too easy to overcharge and you can't legally vent any excess. They also don't leak like they used to so there's less need to touch it. I have a 2008 that's still on its factory R134-a charge, the older R-12 systems would leak down in a couple of years.
You can also swap r-134a for r-600a... Isobutane is flammable AF, but also, a gasoline engine car. And also, people have literal fucking natural gas pipelines hooked up to their homes lmao
@@Ariccio123 I agree with you regarding r-600a. Most of the refrigerant leaks occur under the hood anyway where the flammable refrigerant is nothing compared to the flammable fuel. There really isn't that much refrigerant in there anyway. A warning label would be a good idea but you'd do that for any refrigerant.
Well, I mean they *DO* generate heat through friction, it is just a negligible amount.
I'm a PhD student, when I got in I had to do course on lab safety, and well I've heard about some scary stuff, one of the members of the safety team said that once they were checking all gas cylinders in the institute, they found more than a few old, rusty and not labeled cylinders, turns out one of cylinders contained phosgene.
💀💀💀
I have to share a story about my school days. My science teacher was teaching us aerodynamics using paper planes, (mine came in second) but due to space restrictions, we had to do it in the lab. Oh dear. One of the paper planes snaked off to a corner of the lab and when we tried to retrieve it, it was smouldering. Ron (yes, he was our teacher, but he was a personal friend to a lot of the guys, and we only called him Mr (insert surname here) if we had pissed him off or if he was in a formal mood that day, which was very rare) told us "Don't touch it, I'll deal with it" and picked up the fuming mass with tongs and threw it into the back passage of the lab, out in the open. Unfortunately, it left an appalling chloriney smell behind it, and it eventually safely burst into flames on good old non-combustible concrete. Poor Ron was at a loss as to what had happened, because nobody was as punctilious at cleaning Lab floors than he was. He came to the conclusion that the lab floor was slightly uneven, and some chemicals had got trapped in a corner he couldn't easily get cleaned. The second half of the experiment was conducted in the gym hall instead!
My favorite lab professor actually got his PhD doing some sort of exothermic reaction that was so slow that he got sick of watching it and went to the pub for a drink. It must have been something that ramped up exponentially though because, when he came back to the lab from the pub, the fire department was putting the lab building out. Somehow he still ended up getting his PhD. He was a good teacher, though, so I'm glad he did.
I once got sprayed with refrigerant spray bottle, meant for checking cold welds in electronics.
An intern had been playing with the bottle, delighted to see the frost on stuff he sprayed it on.
Relatively harmless and common stuff and chalked up to natural losses in the budget.
Then the idiot kid decided that spraying some person would be equally funny.
Froze an inch-wide patch of skin and underlying tissues solid.
I still have a small scar there.
Can't imagine how painful freezing a larger patch could be.
I've always been pretty cautious with matters of chemistry, so I don't have any good stories of my own. (My dad has great stories from working at the world's sketchiest biotech startup.)
My worst was when I was trying to take some stubborn crud off a sink with hydrogen peroxide and decided to add some vinegar to help it out. As soon as I poured it, my brain decided to belatedly contribute "Hey, that's probably going to combine into something."
One quick search later and I learned about peracetic acid. It probably wasn't that scary in the amount I'd just made, but I carefully washed it all down the drain and suffered no ill-effects.
I just started a new job in demolition in Denmark and our first job is an old chemical lab from the 1920s, its painted with paris green on the outside (arsenic) and some lead paint on the inside, basement storage is ankle deep water at best and solid shoulder deep at worst with all kinds of scarey chemical bottles floating there, on the shelf's and in the fridges. 3 of us wore 3 different kinds of gloves, so if one of us grabbed something and they started smoking we got someone else to try and grab it with different gloves. My amateur chemistry knowledge comes in handy a lot, as we would be dead on the first day by removing the oil from a container with solid 20kg of potassium to make it easier to carry through waist deep water. There is probably some radioactive stuff there too and building is made in like 50% from asbestos. I dont mind working there as its a nice challenge to figure out how to not get killed instantly and i dont care about long term effects as im terminally ill anyway.
Always confirm the refrigerant is evacuated before you cut the line. If you close a valve and it’s magically 0 psi at your gauge, you just turned off the valve to the GAUGE. Refrigerant burns are dangerous, glad that guy is okay
As a farmer myself, I never use anhydrous ammonia for this exact reason. I work with plenty of chemicals (for spraying weeds) but none of them are horribly harsh. But anhydrous can quickly go from safe to you’re dead if a mistake is made
Third hand story here, but...
My brother worked in a Plastic Metal Injection Molding plant as a metallurgical quality control tech. Process boils down to 1,)mix metal powder and plastic resin, 2) injection mold the mixture into final shape, 3) In a heated chamber debind the part using fuming nitric acid, 4) sinter the parts in an oven, 5) complete any heat treating or machining processes.
Now, you probably caught that part about debinding the resin from the metal powder, yes? They used multiple large barrels of fuming nitric acid on a daily basis. One day, one of the process techs was getting ready to switch the barrels of acid and pulled one that had been sitting around for longer than usual, fully sealed. He noted that the top of the barrel was bulging a bit, but proceeded to unscrew the clamp holding the lid on. Needless to say, he took a few gallons of fuming nitric to the face, and despite wearing safety glasses and a face shield, he lost vision permanently in one eye, significant impairment in the other, and had deep acid burns of his face, upper body, and arms. Luckily the chemical shower was working, he was guided to that and sat under it while waiting for the ambulance. I believe he got a rather large settlement out of it, but he was back to working for the company after a few months.
So, turns out that fuming nitric oxidizes face just as well as it oxidizes plastic.
Thank you for making these public! I love these videos so much, even if I don't know much about chemistry, it's so fun to learn about the dangers of it
Glad you like them!
8:00 It sounds like the HVAC tech mostly followed the protocol, but the king valve threw a curve ball. If you're going to work on HVAC equipment, you have to watch out for those things. Part of the procedure for working on those things includes hooking your gauges up ~~and then opening the king valve up.~~
Can you do a video breaking down the chemical differences of different types of refrigerants?
I think the discussion of refrigerants is a topic we would be interested in covering - I will mention it to the team :)
I'd enjoy this as well!
Damn this got me confused for a moment because in my first language "refrigerants" is almost word for word the word for soda.
That could also be a video, breaking down the chemical differences between different sodas. What makes a lemon soda a lemon soda, what do we know in coca cola that makes it specifically coca cola? What do they change in the diet variants, how does the body take the changes?
There's a LOT of fascinating physics as well as chemical history involved with refrigerants. The first time I saw someone use propane as a replacement for R-12 in a classic car...
You could do a video just on the Einstein-Szilard Refrigerator alone .
BTW , H2S has also seen use as a refrigerant , although it isn't used today for obvious reasons .
The refrigerant story reminded me of when we were getting rid of a fridge at work, and the guy who came to scrap it just took an axe to it to get it all in his truck. I figured he'd just cut the door off and stuff but he chopped right into the meat of the thing, including the refrigerant lines. Just rawdogging it with no ppe out in the alley. I'm sure it was technically fine because it was outside, but I still noped out of there, and I can't imagine the cumulative effects of doing that all the time are very good.
That refrigerator probably used CFC’s, not ammonia. Non-toxic, but not good for the environment.
I've always questioned the safety of farmers storing ammonia as anhydrous ammonia. Never seemed smart to me.
I'm mostly surprised that the soil tolerates it and actually absorbs it properly
It doesn’t really :/ what’s not absorbed by plants (or other organic matter) has the potential to leach through the soil and into streams/lakes, etc.
Although thats not as much of a problem compared to something like phosphorus or road salt
@@calvinwilliams9547Toxic runoff from agriculture is a major environmental damage factor here(Denmark) but the government doesnt care because one of the dominant parties mainly getting votes from farmers looking for easy ways out and special treatment/exemptions from environmental regulations.. Meanwhile government makes state media only focus on water treatment plants and their rare dumping of overflowing organics. And then all the green voters wonder why all the fish are dying in the Kattegat while eating their industrial produce falsely advertised as organic.
@@calvinwilliams9547 I don't know. When large quantities of fertiliser get into a waterway it causes algae to bloom, which takes all the oxygen from the water and kills all the fish.
In my first year of undergrad, I joined the rocketry team at my school. Now, our school is pretty large, and we had a fairly large rocketry team as well. I was a member of the propulsion subteam, and one of the tasks we were responsible for was casting the fuel grains for our hybrid rocket engine. As a part of this process, we had to machine down these casings cast from phenolic resin. Well, one day when I was prepping a casing for a grain cast, I noticed that the form we used to prep the casing for the HTPB was slightly oversized and wouldn't fit inside the casing. I decided it would be a good idea to try to sand down the inside of the casing by hand, with no safety glasses or respirator. To this day, I still have a persistent cough that occasionally flares up due to the phenolic dust I inhaled. Moral of the story: Don't work with phenolics if you are creating fine particulate matter.
And I felt like an idiot when I accidentally snorted chlorine!
This channel makes me realize how lucky I was. Chronic sniffles is PEANUTS compared to this.
I work in hvac, and just about everybody knows at least one oldtimer who has a story of a close call or a coworker who passed away due to ammonia accidents.
we use recovery machines to recover the refrigerants into tanks for proper disposal or recycling. and phosgene exposure is relatively common lmao.
_why the phosgene_
I just wanted to thank you for the notes. I don’t do science, but I love these videos
14:50 Can happen in a simple chemistry class experiment when, say, hydrochloric acid is added to a rock and the rock contains sulfide minerals making some hydrogen sulfide. This happened when I was in high school, and the whole school smelled of rotten eggs.
Yup actually did this to make hydrogen sulfide to create sodium sulfide and sodium hydrosulfide. Used iron pyrite pulverized to oblivion as the metal sulfide source. Likely had selenium and other impurities but was good enough for my uses.
I live in a fairly big city, 70,000 population, 4900km^2. We have an abattoir about 10km out which used anhydrous ammonia for refrigeration. I'm fairly used to the smell, having installed the ammonia detection throughout the plant, as well as upgrades directly on the pumps, cooling towers, compressors, and condensers. I will never forget that on the first day, they told us if anything were to happen to the main ammonia tank (i.e. leak, explosion, etc), they would have to evacuate the whole city. That sentence repeats in my head every time I work in or around that place.
That is very memorable indeed
I went through a conductor training program, and they beat hazmat safety into you there, because you sometimes have to pull a string of 20,000gal+ tank cars of scary chemicals around. One they really focused on was anhydrous NH3, since it's rather common. To hammer the point home, they showed a dashcam video of a crashed nurse tank (as used by farmers). The cop pulls up, goes to check on the guy laying in the middle of the road in the middle of a vapor cloud, and is himself on the ground within 15 seconds. We got the point...
I have a few train friends - I gotta know where all that molten sulfur is going
@@That_Chemist I see it a lot in northern MN heading south. That's all I know.
Also, I keep a pdf copy of the Emergency Response Guidebook. It helps identify weird hazmat loads both for curiosity's sake, but also on the off chance you need it (I haven't yet, and hope to keep it that way)
I used to use anhydrous ammonia pretty regularly as part of a modified Birch reduction. I had a specialised piece of glassware like a chunky cold finger that was shaped more like a coffee mug so it was easy to fill with dry ice/acetone that would allow me to effectively condense the ammonia back into my flask. I'd use a 2 litre multi neck flask that was about half full of ammonia and THF. I always loved the blue swirling that would quickly disappear as I dropped pieces of lithium into the top (that was also a fun demo for undergrad project students in the lab). My ammonia source was an upturned cylinder mounted on a sloping carriage that we nicknamed "the sex trolley" for reasons lost to time. Due to the position of the pickup tube inside the tank you could roll the cylinder over one way to dispense ammonia gas or liquid but the valve and plastic tubing which terminated in a cut-off plastic syringe was extremely sketchy, especially when it filled with ammonia. I was always very careful, but due to the size and unwieldy nature of the whole thing it was impossible to keep as much of the tubing inside the fumehood as I would have liked. I made a lot of mustards in my phd on the way to various macrocycles, but the sex trolley was always one of the more fun days in the lab. Perhaps second only to finding out that one of the other new postdocs in the lab had been stockpiling organic linkers for his metal organic framework work as perchlorate salts because "that's what he'd always used in his old lab" and no one ever questioned him!
Not a chemist but a computer technician, I was swapping out computers and under a monitor stand which was on top of a computer, I found a huge dried puddle of coffee residue. My boss tasked me with cleaning it so I sprayed this panel with a load of Dettol surface cleanser. I don't know what chemistry happened but whatever gas it made immediately irritated my nose and throat to the point where I ran to the washroom and nearly vomited. After that, no matter what I ate or drank, I couldn't get the taste out of my mouth for a week (like liquid antibiotics if you have had the pleasure). Just goes to show how everyone deals with chemicals eventually and they are not to be underestimated.
Possibly the dettol itself did it. It's not entirely harmless.
I have very little smell. So bad I picked up. Beaker of cleaning ammonia and as my science teacher said honey no! Thinking I would drink it I touched it to my septum and inhaled deeply through my nose.
As I went blind and felt like I was passing out I said whoa and fell back into my chair after putting the beaker down
ammonia *smacks the crap* out of you, especially when unexpected!
Bro got punched in the olfactory bulb 💀
The HVAC tech not understanding how a king valve works is scary as hell. That’s like on every refrigeration system and a large number of AC systems.
I smelled aqueous ammonia straight from the bottle in the lab but it didn’t seem that strong. I guess it’s because COVID hit me a year ago.
I've taken a whiff of ammonia salts (the kind you're supposed to smell to kick your ass), and yeah that's probably the covid. I had it too close to my nose instead of wafting it, and I was struggling hard for a few minutes afterwards.
I was assembling PVC conduit in a trench on a hot windless day, the PVC cement we were using was mainly Tetrahydofuran, the THF fumes built up in the trench until I started falling over.
Luckily my co-worker figured out was going on and pulled me out of the trench, no lasting effects but it was a bit scary
Ammonia is somewhat overlooked when it comes to lab safety and hazards. There are many stories about people getting a lungufull of chlorine or HCl gas, but inhaling NH3 gas is just as nasty.
I'm actually going into the HVAC field thank you for the story 8:17
I was a temporary employee for a Fiberglas pipe manufacturer for the coal mining industry. The epoxy resin is nasty enough stuff and it ruins your clothes. Additionally, the "bunny suits" they had were to fit Big Joe, the 6 foot 8 dude that worked there. So if you put one of those on and you're average size, like me, it's awkward, you get resin stuck all over you, you're hot, and you get snagged on everything. So I didn't wear it. Then Big Joe got burned by cleaning solvent for the resin... it was nitric acid. Looking back at it, I would never go back to work there. They only told me bot to get the cleaner on me, and I only heard later what it was. It was my dad that told me that nitric acid is worse than sulfuric acid that is in car batteries.
That is spooky
Tubing cutters tend to be manual apparatus. Nothing that can get hot. But I hear you on the phosgene. Scary gasses be scary.
You should do a collab tier list with Labcoats and rank the stinkiest molecules! Collectively, I'm sure you both have a fair bit of experience on the subject!
I used to work with fuming nitric acid in electronics. I always double-gloved when having to refill equipment bottles. Nitrile under Trionic gloves. Because if you got a drop or a small spill, the Trionics would get hot and you'd want to get out of them quick.
I posted the first of my experiences with the mysteries of alchemy on a video a while ago, but my other good one deserves posting as well.
I work at a small business that deals in firearms, somewhere between a "gun shop" and a bigger organization like Royal Tiger or Atlantic Firearms. Anyway, sometimes we will get in big collections of unsorted *stuff*, usually from estates. I was pretty new but quite knowledgeable with my collectibles and such, so I would be tasked having the first look and sorting the wheat from the chaff, as it were.
One time, we got in a few big wooden trunks of *stuff* that we basically paid nothing for. I have a decently unpleasant mold allergy, so I always wear nitrile gloves when going through other people's half-forgotten things. This was also at the start of Covid, so I was wearing a store-provided N95. This will be important later. Suitably protected(ish), I start to delve into the treasures that await. Most of it is just ammunition from the 80's (perfectly safe) and some handguns, but in the last trunk I start to run into some much older ammo - WW2 and WW1 surplus and 19-teens commercial stuff. That can be a little scary, but if it's copper jacketed ammo and it didn't get wet it's generally safe to handle, both in a toxic sense and in an explosive sense. But at the very bottom is a water-damaged cardboard box, about the size of a cellphone box, that says "Henry." Now, commercial production of .44 Henry Rimfire stopped by about the 20s, but this box was clearly older - much older, like 1870s older. That kind of stuff can be worth a pretty good amount just on its own historical value, so I reach into the trunk and lift it into the air - and, stupidly, do not do so *by the bottom.*
.44 Rimfire ammo, especially the cheap stuff, was an unjacketed, unwaxed bare lead projectile. That was fine(ish) back in the day, but that means that, given time and/or contact with water, the lead will oxidize. Again, that's fine if they're left alone and the oxide is still in place, but for whatever reason this box had been jostled quite a lot, apparently, in its life. Just my luck.
As soon as the box hits about four feet in the air, the bottom falls out, and an avalanche of half-present lead bullets, now empty casings, decomposed black powder, mercuric primer, and, most terrifying of all, a mushroom cloud of now-airborne lead oxides balloons into the air. I can see specs of brain damage flying around in the sun rays of a warehouse window like a ticker tape parade of cancer.
And then my fan blows it all over my sweaty self, from face to feet. I'm sure glad I had that mask so it didn't end up in my lungs, but there is so much lead powder that I can see it on my clothes.
Luckily, we sold a lot of things, including D-Lead, a heavy metal removal wipe. I quite quickly requisitioned a bottle of D-Lead shampoo and a package of wipes, took off my shirt as carefully as I could before tossing it into the dumpster, and went to a nearby friend's apartment to use an entire bottle of D-Lead on my, well, everything. I got tested for Lead a little while later and it came back within acceptable ranges, but it's still ... probably not the best for my health. Oh well.
One time I saw a rat chew his way into a spray bottle of Lucas degreaser, get a full face and mouthful of now released *really* nasty solvent, and die in a minute or two. So not the worst chemical exposure that ever happened to someone in that place.
☠️☠️☠️
@@That_Chemist Yeah, that's what the rat said too. They managed to chew their way into most of the lubricant/solvent containers at least once. We'd come in Monday morning to find a dead rat surrounded by a puddle of Hoppes No.9 with alarming regularity.
I used winded, a starch enzym spray & anti bacterial (alcohol) spray on my cloth coated indoor bench, will that hurt my lungs or sinuses? I already feel sick & yet am going to use hand soap & water on it too…
A comment regarding the story at about 9:42 regarding wearing a respirator around NO2: Most filters do not (at least officially) protect against NOx. You need the ones with a blue stripe, and I believe that these are only one-time usable. I have one that I seal up again after each use. No idea if the NOx part it still actually works, but at least it offers psychological protection: -)
One anecdote about gas mask filters: A relative of mine told a story about how when he was in the military, someone thought it was a good idea to "clean" his filter using paint thinner. They later found him passed out outdoors.
OMG, anhydrous ammonia almost killed Kenny!
Was attempting to make 100% nitiric acid and aniline rockets in my fume hood. I had synthesised both reagents previously and they were both sitting in my fridge before i took them out to attempt the experiemnt.
I added small amounts of the aniline into a test tube with the fumehood running on full blast, before adding the fuming nitric acid into it. theorising it would look better in the dark, i had turned off all the lights, and added the solution with only a miniscule amount of moonlight permeating through a frosted window adjacent to the fumehood. It was quite mesmerising to watch the flame that formed untill i felt a stabbing sensation on my arm, before i ran to turn on the lights and saw a patch on my arm slowly turning into a brownish-black colour with a searing sensation similar to if you had put your finger onto a barbeque grill and left it there while it was hot.
My arm was clearly burned by fuming nitric acid. Tracing back the event i assume what had happened was that the jerking motion of my arm as i flinched from the flame produced by the reaction threw small droplets of the acid in my direction, landing on the hood bench where i rested my arm. Yes i was wearning gloves (i guess they werent long enough), yes i was wearing a labcoat (somehow permeated through it).
For the first 1-2 weeks, it seemed fine, a brown golden patch the size of 2 coins had formed, untill that layer slowly came off, underneath was like a scene from a horror move with small bloodvessels visible as well as hair folicles. Even now it bleeds alot and has not fully healed (this was a recent accident.)
All i am saying is BE VERY CAREFULL WORKING WITH FUMING NITRIC ACID, THIS STUFF WANTS TO KILL YOU AT EVERY WAKING MOMENT.
Cant believe that happened to Internet Historian
He should have enabled NordVPN lol
Still get the phosgene gas even after purging the lines with nitrogen, the refrigerant oil holds refrigerant and slowly boils off over time, if im brazing on a system i just hold my breath, i always evac the system.
We recently had an anhydrous ammonia leak west of town where I'm at. Thankfully it was away from residential areas but the smell carried far and as to be expected smelled terrible.
Typically the evacuation distance is only 0.5 miles depending on weather and size, but it can still get bad.
That is scary
@@andrewbounds yeah I was coming back into town and got somewhere close. I don't exactly know where the leak occurred but I definitely smelled it and found out later what happened. We have tons of farming land around us here.
Here is my story.
I am not a chemist, But I might have accidentally made some sort of toxic gas by burning a cleaner that wasn't meant to be burned.
I had an engine that was running poorly due to the mass airflow sensor being dirty. When you clean the sensor, a certain cleaner has to be sprayed down the intake. My issue arose when I was really tired one day and mistakenly grabbed the non-flammable brake cleaner due to the can looking very similar to mass airflow sensor cleaner.
Anyways I go to try and clean the sensor with the engine running and notice there is some mysterious white vapor coming out the exhaust. It smelled a little sweet but also burned my nose and throat. Once I caught a whiff of that I knew something wasn't right. I shut everything off and moved to fresh air. I was a little dizzy and coughed occaisionally for the rest of the day. I am fine, but I just have no idea what kind of gas was produced. I might have an idea, but am still not sure.
You more than likely made phosgene gas.. a lot of welders have been caught by cleaning the metal with brake cleaner before welding but you've done it on a much larger scale and you're very lucky your still alive
@@markshort9098 Jesus. This was at home, so at least I know that no one else was hurt.
Reminds me of a minor incident in the school chemistry lab. I forget exactly what our experiment had been, but we ended up with a small flask of PCl5 at the end of it which needed to be disposed of. As we were cleaning up, I handed my lab partner the flask and asked him to dispose of it (I think the teacher had provided a large beaker or something for us to pour the PCl5 into for safe disposal). Unfortunately, my partner wasn't paying attention and flushed the PCl5 down the sink with a lot of hot water. An impressive cloud of acid vapour erupted from the sink at the side of the lab, followed by my partner emerging from the cloud coughing.
He should have known exactly what was in the flask, it wasn't like we had a vast array of unlabelled flasks on our bench. He also should have known that the sink was not the correct disposal method. Unfortunately, it was the end of the day and our work was essentially over, so his mind had drifted off onto other things.
The very old chemistry teacher's reaction was to just turn the extractor fans up high and call him a "silly boy".
About 6 years ago, prior to my undergrad degree, I was at a local university for a chemistry day with my college. I'm not 100% certain what the protocol was but I think it was dehydrating cyclohexanol into cyclohexene. I know it was basically a distillation. When done and passing over the (still warm) cyclohexene or whatever product to my lab partner I inhaled deeply to sigh and got a lung full. As an embarrassed teenager knowing I'd messed up, I tried to play it cool and said I needed the bathroom. Got there, tried coughing up into the sink and then just crouched against the wall with my head spinning, lungs burning whilst googling the hazard sheet for whatever I'd just inhaled. Was there a solid 10 minutes. I went home at lunch and just told my instructor I had a headache.
We used low molecular weight thiols and amines in a glove box as solvents, when I was in grad school. The glove box had a solvent trap to handle that and it hand to be regenerated periodically and the solvent vented.
The problem is that our solvents could damage the flow meter used to verify it was properly flowing nitrogen to clear out the solvent trap, and wasn’t plugged.
Due to the thiols there was always a slight odor when doing this so they started the regeneration on a Friday night to clear up any smell before Monday. The flow meter blew and straight-piped all those amines and thiols into the lab. The poor janitor was the first to notice when collecting trash. The whole building was evacuated, as weld stink-bombed an entire floor.
The dritrain catalyst would also get poisoned by all the thiols 😭
Definitely was an issue. We had to do extra long regeneration cycles with dilute hydrogen to regen the catalyst pretty regularly.
Ironically similar chemistry to what we were doing (solution processed chalcogenide semiconductors, especially copper based ones) that needed the glovebox in the first place meant that catalyst go totally worked over pretty badly.
Amines and thiols together make good coordination complexes of metal-thiolates that allows for water-free/oxygen free dissolution of a lot of unexpected inorganic compounds. Just smells absolutely terrible.
My work uses anhydrous ammonia for cooling the building via refrigeration units
The closest thing to a refrigerant accident I had was having liquid butane drops landing on my hand in a very warm day, when I was trying to refill a lighter and didn't notice the lighter valve was jammed somehow. Almost all my palm instantly covered with frost and the skin looked like king Tut's for a while. Although it was not a big spill of liquid butane, it was surprisingly painful.
Was in my aprentasship years, worked with phosphoroxychloride, which i used as reagent and solvent for my reaction.
Had to boil it of with rotavap on the middle benche, should have been in a hood... hindsight 20/20..
When i was placing the bottled waste destillate in the waste disposal box i accidently unscrewed the cap and 3 of my fingers got soaked with phosphoroxychloride...
Rushed to the sink to wash my hand with hot water, soap and handcreame..
Lucky lost only a little top skin, no scars...
the title on this one killed me immediately
I never understood using anhydrous, UAN 28/32 are way safer to handle and a better rounded N mix, if you want slow release use dry pellets... or manure.
'Ammonia mishap' sounds like a euphemism for someone screwing up so bad that they kill someone with their own urine
I wanted to make a hydroxylguanidine compound before and this required the use of calcium cyanamide. Honestly it was a pretty sketchy synth already because guanidine compounds are quite sensitive to aqueous conditions (pH and temp) already and there wasn't a lot of good information I could find on the synthesis so I was already relying on making quite a lot of extrapolations and assumptions... What I really didn't know before then was that in the synthesis of calcium cyanamide, you end up with a mixture of compounds in part because an equilibrium between calcium cyanamide and cyanide... At higher temperatures it leans towards the cyanamide and I was using those kinds of high temperatures but upon finishing the synth, I opened my tiny itty bitty little reaction vessel (made from the steel casing of a battery lol) and was instantly hit with a wave of crushed appleseed/bitter almond smell. Kinda reminded me of some intersection between the smell of chlorine and iodine... Kinda had a "fuck this" moment after that and went as overboard as I could with neutralizing all of the possibly present cyanide. Tried again in even smaller quantities cause I honestly didn't care to make very substantial quantities in the first place but yeah, no, it was always there and much stronger than I was ever gonna be comfortable with... Cyanide is terrifying n I'm glad I'm one of the folk who can smell it. Although who knows, maybe the quantities really were just minute and I could have gone on with the experiment... Wasn't keen on finding out lol. For all I knew I got some step somewhere completely wrong.
i only subscribed since zach friedman is one of your patreons, a weird reason to subscribe but i DID just watch a 17 minute video on chemistry mishaps including your patreon read....
If you check out the recent vlog, you can get some lore into my recent trip where I helped Zach with his booth at open sauce :)
Chemistry RUclipsrs & Top Conferences: Vidcon, Open Sauce and Linus Tech Expo
ruclips.net/video/WewaID1zefM/видео.html
"Face has solubility in THF" XD
Not me having a giggle at the pronunciation of the Greek last name Γιαλορακις (best I can do for spelling of Giallourakis on the top of my head).
Spilled glacial acetic on my palm, ignored it to finish what i was doing because "it's just conc vinegar". Eventually washed my hand. by the next day the outlayer of skin dried and blistered then sloughed off. I had shiny raw pink hand for a few weeks as it healed.
God I love this channel.
2:23 Aqueous chlorine can oxidize ethanol to acetic acid, then to chloroform + CO2. It could have been ethyl hypochlorite, but it also very easily could have been chloroform.
these refrigerants are thankfully fairly safe, "non-flammable propane" is a decent approximation. Cryogenic solvent asphyxiant are the primary risks left for liquid stuff.
Yeah, but getting large amounts of any liquefied gas on you is going to be potentially dangerous just due to sudden frostbite and the tendency of people to jump and freak out when suddenly burned by a cloud of expanding vapour, which leads to dropped tools, falls (possibly INTO the cloud of extremely cold heavier-than-air non-breathable gas), and general 'making things worse'.
Still, it's impressive how much safer such gasses have gotten than the ammonia and such they used to use.
I once made anhydrous perchloric acid once by mistake I was reacting sulfuric acid with calcium perchlorate but the formed calcium sulfate sucked up all the remaining water and I got a lung full of perchloric acid
💀💀💀
@@That_Chemistthat was my lungs basically at that point
I worked for a company that made the quick connectors for these, and ive made a few faulty ones. I still think about that
You're supposed to handle pfas compounds in a glove box these days? Just last week i was walking around in a plant where there were 5 or 6 1000l pallet containers marked with fluorinated surfactant and a notice to send them to waste disposal. That's the stuff fire crews trained with and contaminated the soil with and that is now causing mayor headaches when they want to build something in that vacant plot.
More of a farming question I guess, but why would you use anhydrous ammonia as a fertiliser instead of more inert ammonium nitrate?
As far as I know, the main reason is because it's cheaper. (but I'm not a farmer)
@@05Matz Anhydrous Ammonia is 82% N. Ammonium Nitrate is 34% N. Ammonium Nitrate is also an oxidizing agent ie an explosive.
i am not a chemist but i know if i mix certain things i can get acids and face melting goo or make lung burny air - one of the mixes i know i should never make is acetone and bleach as it creates cloroform and normally you must store it in a brown glass bottle that is stoppered with i guess either silicone or vulcanized rubber? because the cloroform when exposed to air for long periods of time makes phogene
i think or maybe i am confusing the reaction with a chemical used to create aqua regia that makes it hazardous to create aqua regia in a kitchen using basic kitchen utensils - i think i wanted to make gold eating acid and then turn the acid back to gold powder and then melt it with a blow torch to make a little pellet of pure gold and later decide i wasn't in a mood to make a breathable acid that likes to melt lungs after making gold melting acid so i basically went i should do this then went how do i do this and then went oh i am not going to do this.
A tubing cutter works by mechanical means, like little to no heat produced.
One thing to note vehicles generally use R134 or 1234yf refrigerant. I’ve never heard of R410 if anyone can let me know the differences that’d be appreciated
i used fuming nitric acid for a synthesis once. mistakenly because my lab mate "couldnt find" the lower concentration. they didnt look. yes the synthesis blew up under the fume hood. we wound out who could smell cyanide that day. organic vhemistry surely is fun...
how did it generate cyanide?
@@That_Chemist We nitrated benzyl cyanide / Phenylacetonitrile. Its a benzene ring with cyanide attached. It got very hot before blowing up, so it may have decomposed. Luckily this experiment was under the fume hood, which was swiftly closed by a colleague.
Best part is we werent even there when it blew up, as the synthesis started normally with everything seemingly working out. But 10 minutes later. it happened.. There were 12 pairs of students in the lab and sometimes we were on break.
I even took the molar amount of acid into account to add the same amount of moles, but I may have forgotten to add water. Perhaps a lower solution volume caused a thermal runaway.
On this day I learned to only trust myself when it comes to such things.
Once my new female lab coworker nearly sprayed me with a sulfuric acid bubble counter.
We both stood infront of the cleaning hood, she poured water in the bubble counter instead of the acid into the water from the cleaning hood.... a little more to the left and i would have been face splashed.... had my lucky angel that day.
also does anyone know how to clean off the white layer of build up after dissolving lithium in water as i used a collectible glass cup and want to actually look at after my experiment as i did this quite a few years ago and the cup is filled with hard white crust as i was mainly producing hydrogen in the cup as a experiment.
I mixed bleach and ammonia on an anthill as DIY ant killer. The spot in my yard where I did that is still just a patch of dirt, well over a year later.
I was once cleaning junk in the Erlenmeyer flask. I added conc. HCl it worked but little bit was remaining i thought may be little bit of chlorine made from addition of 30 percent H2O2 will work. After some with addition of few drops didn't seems to work then i added around 5ml of H2O2 in about 15ml of conc. HCl. Slowly solution started to turn yellow. After while it start to smell chlorine after few seconds room was filled with chlorine. Luckily no one was there all windows were open and i quickly dumped everything in sink and turned the tap. After few minutes. It was fine and my PhD supervisor still don't know anything was even happened that day.
I remeber one time when i was young (i think i eas about 13 at the time), my dad got a bottle of 30% formaldehyde to kill weeds. I sprayed that stuff without a mask and breathed in a noticeable anount of it. If i get lung cancer I will definitely partly blame this
Can't forget about the time I painted the new outhouse without any mask, with a spray gun and varnish containing god knows what cancer containing hydrocarbon solvent
I remember we were dissecting pig fetuses in our highschool and we were definitely smelling formaldehyde in an enclosed space for several hours
I remember dissections and the formaldehyde .
I recall we received stern lectures and warnings , about " unsanctioned uses of the study material " .
We were also told formaldehyde was toxic , but it was definitely an afterthought .
@@That_Chemistsame, but my old high school used rats
Anhydrous ammonia 😬
South Park Farms: OMG! We killed Kenny!
Why are all of the pnictogen hydrides so horrible?
I work with this stuff, more specific, industrial grade (99.9% pure) and it's nasty. It will seriously fuck you up. He should've had a full face respirator, rubber gloves and apron
Its really neat to see a chemist on youtube who does no chemistry
They almost killed Kenny!!!
I was dealing with as pure as can be Ammonia Hydroxide literally last week. When I use a stock bottle I grab a beaker pour what I think I need into that then from there into a cylinder. What's in the beaker doesn't go back into the stock bottle. It's always very small amounts. For some reason I pulled out that beaker with less than 10ml of Ammonia OH and I pulled it across my body and got hit hard with a nose full of ammonia OH. I smelt it for HOURS. it was TERRIBLE.
it is very potent indeed
Pure ammonium hydroxide is what is in my RV refrigerator that does the cooling. It boils it and the water vapor recombines with the ammonia that has been cooled and it keeps stuff frosty. Extremely sensitive to tilt though.
My brain registered that safety diamond as UN1002, thanks dyslexia. This is why I should never work around anything dangerous.
Refrigerants make great freeze rays. You can kill all sorts of arthropods with computer duster. Just make sure it doesn't get the liquid on your hands because it is quite cold and can cause frostbite (and indeed, this is one of the reasons it is lethal to insects).
Also don't burn it or inhale the concentrated substance. It has a bitterant but it can be a mind altering drug. The reason not to burn it is that it contains fluorine and will create some amount of HF when burned.
Be careful to check where that particular container has any leaks as well.
Ammonia is a strong alkaline, right?
0 chemical experience besides interest, but the place I worked at this summer needed our propane refilled, so we took our like 4ft tall tank to the nearby place that could do it. Young employee, loose hose, so much propane in the air, one match and all woulda been over, got a bit lightheaded, me and the worker are fine tho
not sure if it has been posted here but afaik the fluorochem man does that all at home, he has a video on his channel showing a quick walkthrough of his lab which is quite impressive and a little insane that he does all of that at home (he also built his own geothermal and coal power plant)
his gloveboxes and such are all custom built with like 4 inch thick steel iirc and "the atmosphere in one is enough to render you incapacitated within seconds"
HVAC stuff you can pump into a recovery container and send it to be recycled.
One time I was working with conc. Sulphuric acid, and I had a hot plate I accidentally left on and maxed at 500 Celsius. A small amount of 94-96% sulphuric acid on the hot plate, immediately thick white smoke billowed from the plate filling the room, I did my best to hold my breath as I ran the plate outside (burning my hand fairly badly), then going back in to open the window and bring a fan in.
I have no idea how much SO2/SO3 I was exposed to, but frankly I'd rather not know.
*I'll add more detail I didn't know this was going to get hearted*
This was in my basement, and I was working with the h2so4 to make a sulphate salt of a compound, and I was definitely exposed to a large amount of this gas, no ppe, no fume hood. So yk, I might be fucked.
Did you just say face is soluble? Never heard that phrase before.
Holyshit this just reminded me that one of the kitchen's I used to work at would have me do a deck scrub of the kitchen every night with degreaser and then bleach. I'm going to go ahead and let you guess what the hell is in the degreaser. Just kidding it's freaking ammonia. I never bothered to check because I didn't think anyone would be stupid enough to have me mix those two what the hell! Then I wondered why I had burning lungs every damn night and that place gave me more food poisoning that I've ever fckng experience in my life. They'd put the floor mats through the disher🤮 Let's just say I'll never be going to that crappy Tuscany restaurant in Evergreen ever again.
I can say a lot more about that place but I'm pretty sure I shouldn't.
some of these remind me of orthocarbonic acid, a (hypothetical) compound that's also called " _[angry moustache man]_ 's acid"
Re offhand remarks. I think the onus is still on the chemist to confirm that their assumptions are safe and correct. If you take all of you expermental proceedure from your guess at what you saw in a video, that's on you, not the youtuber.
Any fellow osmium enjoyers here?
Not really enjoy it, though it does make pretty blue crystals the same colar as fresh zinc if you heat it in a tube with OsO4 plus metal powder. Heat the side where you want the crystals strongly then heat the rest enough to fully vaporize the OsO4 in the tube while heating the metal sponge mildly. The osmium transports to the extremely hot side similar to the halogen cycle in lightbulbs.
I work in food service and holy shit DO NOT MIX CHEMICALS!!
I'm wondering why the experiment with the concentrated HCL and the 30% peroxide wasn't nixed by the instructor. You don't need a phd in chemistry to know that's going to be ugly.
I think they did it at home
@@That_Chemist But he says he did it in a classroom in video, and it made the whole school smell like chlorine.