Somebody Burned Down Their Lab

[@robertlapointe4093]

I've seen a few cases where a screw up could easily cost a significant fraction of, or more than, someone's annual salary. In 1985 I interviewed with Texas Alkyls (a producer of aluminum alkyls for the gulf-coast petrochemicals industry) and was shown an interesting glove-box set-up where they were using an all glass spinning band distillation system to produce a kilo of electronics grade trimethylgallium, which then sold for $1000.00/gram. I doubt any of the operators were making a million per year. The closest I came was using $38,000.00 worth of 13C labeled ethylene (~ 100 grams) for a polymerization run. I think I was making about $60K/annum at the time. (The run went to plan.)

[@That_Chemist]

Dang - I haven’t ever come across trimethylgalium before - very interesting!

[@robertlapointe4093]

@@That_Chemist It is probably cheaper now, as it is used on a much larger scale (and there are more suppliers), mostly for gallium nitride (III-V) semiconductor, which is the basis for LED lighting.

[@tommihommi1]

@@robertlapointe4093 it's amazing for how many essential chemicals in the semiconductor industry there's just one, maybe two suppliers worldwide

[@angrydragonslayer]

a lot of important industries have it like this from what i've seen. i was running a $3.5 mil machine where a single screw-up could (and was for the guy 3 machines away) be fatal and cost $2.5 mil for the company i was at 30k and he was at 45k iirc.

[@MushookieMan]

Does it make sense to say the potential value of the substance is lost? It's really just the raw materials and man hours, unless you have multiple buyers for the substance lined up waiting literally every second of every day.

[@Nesisorator]

"You can still see the burn marks on the chem classroom carpet" THE WHAT??

[@That_Chemist]

Carpet in a lab F-tier

[@monad_tcp]

oh come on, you never put carpet in a kitchen ? a lab is the same

[@amberkat8147]

@@monad_tcp NO ONE sane carpets a kitchen, bathroom, or lab. Heck, at this point carpets are the bane of my existence in regards to cleaning my house because I have to spend far more time clearing out all the tubes of the vacuum than I do actually vacuuming. Down with carpets! They need to stop!

[@normalhuman9878]

I never thought I would find somewhere worse to put a carpet than a bathroom

[@ZorotheGallade]

As a cat owner I can confirm carpets are miserable to have

[@jeremyfisher8512]

being told "its too late you have to run" by a nervous chemistry student would make me shit my pants. Each video theres always something more hilariously terrifying than the last

[@Zwelious087]

I don’t know why anyone would leave boiling bromine alone to go to arby’s. Wendy’s is the obvious better choice and I’d fire him based on his restaurants choices alone.

[@That_Chemist]

Agreed - wendys is based

[@00muinamir]

The kind of person who would leave boiling bromine unattended has some significant overlap with the kind of person who would choose to eat at Arby's.

[@scrambledmandible]

Look until Wendy's makes a roast beef and cheddar I don't want to hear it

[@lechking941]

never had to much of arbys so i cant really argue to or foe

[@tsm688]

arby's has some questionable products and some quite rare and delicious ones. curly fries. horseradish sauce. that weird cheddar thing.

[@Valdagast]

I think the lesson of the ammonium salt story is that if you haven't read that something is safe, assume it's toxic.

[@That_Chemist]

Yeah but for novel salts you can’t look up toxicity data

[@That_Chemist]

In my case I was making a series of novel Rf-CF2O- quaternary ammonium salts

[@Valdagast]

@@That_Chemist Then you assume it's toxic.

[@Zappygunshot]

I'd like to add to this that if you _have_ read something is safe, assume it's _probably not_ toxic instead. If you're doing chemistry, it pays to always have a little voice in the back of your mind telling you that everything in here might just try to kill you if you give it the opportunity.

[@mnxs]

@@Zappygunshot well said.

[@adrianhenle]

Other issue with air duster: they put Bitrex in it (to keep people from huffing it). It is literally the most bitter compound known to man. You can taste it at the tiniest trace concentrations, and it is absolutely chokingly awful.

[@That_Chemist]

And I bet if you burn it, it could start forming lidocaine from decomp of the salt too

[@leothecrafter4808]

@@That_Chemist the lidocaine is probably appreciated after inhaling a lung full of HF

[@julian281198]

There is a great video of bigclive where he tastes bitrex

[@kevsonkeyboard]

Aren't Nintendo Switch game cards coated in that too?

[@julian281198]

@@kevsonkeyboard yeah but they used very little. I tasted them and its not that bad

[@rougenaxela]

11:00 I personally feel like if you're working with a negative pressure box and anything quite so spooky as liquefied chlorine, your box should have have built-in redundancy for both power and extraction fans. No one point of electrical failure should be allowed to gas the building.

[@entothechesnautknight1762]

"I was smart enough to make a fireball outside, but not smart enough to not make a fireball." Also, I think I knew how grimace lost his third and fourth arms, if we're using him as a benchmark for lab safety.

[@sighahnyde2215]

Yeah it definitely wasn't a good idea and wouldn't recommend it but to be fair it was better than most of my ideas at that age

[@00muinamir]

Incidentally, that sentence also accurately describes my ex-neighbor's adventures in making meth!

[@circeciernova1712]

Don't forget, kids: the atmosphere is nature's waste bucket! Addendum: I've heard of departments declaring war on each other, but never with CHEMICAL WEAPONS! Just wait until the Chemistry Department sees what the Mechanical Engineers make in retaliation...

[@That_Chemist]

As Tom would say “nature’s bin”

[@1brytol]

Video idea: the sussiest chemicals tier list. The ones that if you have, people will think you're making drugs, explosives etc, but they aren't drugs or explosives on their own.

[@1brytol]

@@thomasferris3750 naah, just a simple fertilizer used literally everywhere.

[@wilh3lmmusic]

@@thomasferris3750 ammonium nitrate

[@crazy_wwww]

amog us

[@jonasghafur4940]

Acetic anhydride for uh.. adding acetyl groups to things Large amounts of potassium permanganate to isolate a certain plant alcaloid that makes people talk fast and arrogant Ephedrine, P2P, MDP2P, Safrole etc pp. for synthetic phenylethylamines High concentration Hydrogen Peroxide

[@NerdlabsSci]

I o d I n e

[@rkirke1]

Damn! Mercury down an elevator shaft?! I wonder how much of the elevator needed to be replaced? Mercury on an elevator cable... NOPE NOPE NOPE

[@That_Chemist]

:((

[@AnimeSunglasses]

Yeah, just... I don't wanna be near that. Ever. How do you ensure that zero mercury residue remains in the concrete, even if you replace every piece of equipment in the elevator shaft?

[@monad_tcp]

@@AnimeSunglasses with high voltage , it will vaporize very easily

[@hailhydrazine4938]

0:57 euros? Really mate?

[@That_Chemist]

North American moment

[@internetuser8922]

Just in case anyone is wondering, that is the Pound symbol, not the Euro symbol.

[@minerscale]

@@That_Chemist Classic USA, thinking they're the whole of North America and not one of many countries on the continent. By the way, I love your videos they're extremely entertaining, and educational. If I ever end up in a lab for something I'll for sure be learning and applying extreme care with PPE. For that matter, applying extreme care with PPE for everything that requires it.

[@sebastianfischer429]

@@minerscale Well... That Chemist did say that he is Canadian

[@vallassy]

Came here for this comment

[@dejjal8683]

Chubbyemu made a great video about a chemist inhaling Arsine. Anyway, I work for a chemical distributor and as such we have a QA lab. I walked in last week only to hear one of the QA folks mix up the testing for acetone and 2-propanol, one of our brilliant supervisors said that it's ok because they're basically the same compound. This caused one of the other QA chemists to quit as she's had enough of the BS.

[@That_Chemist]

Yes he did - I talked to him about it on Twitter ;)

[@That_Chemist]

He is a viewer of the channel!

[@thesledgehammerblog]

@@That_Chemist Gotta' get material from somewhere it seems...

[@quintecence]

Fun stories from my year working as a lab tech in an underfunded British school: 1. They stored their concentrated acids in an iron/steel cupboard.. acid had eaten holes in some of the shelves and you could smell the acids before opening the cupboard. 2. Some girl in year 10 brought cider into school and the admin office wanted me to prove it was alcohol - I had to do a distillation because it was strongbow darkfruits, I could tell by the smell before I even set up the apparatus. 3. I was taking inventory of the chemicals we had and a lot of the stuff was past it's expiry date, in damaged packaging or just not needed. One of the plastic tubs I picked up disintegrated in my hand and went all over the floor. I picked up the remains of the tub to see it was mercury (i) chloride. I just printed off the MSDS and took it to HR and told her to take me to hospital in case I'd breathed any of it in. I was fine but the school had to pay £3000 for hazardous chemicals cleaners to come in. 4. Totally unnecessary chemicals for a school to have include acid chlorides, nitrotoluenes, lead powder, mercury salts, radioactive rocks when no one has radioactive substances training. That's just the tip of the iceberg. The oldest chemical I found was from the mid 70s and I worked in that school in 2019.

[@That_Chemist]

Oh my gosh!

[@Ozzianman]

A bit unrelated, but I got some stories from a decently enough funded University cutting corners on their accomodations! Broken fridge and oven within a month. We had to wait an entire month to have them replaced. No kettle. Dirty accomodations, I left it in better condition than when I came to it. Hoover in poor condition. Sewage leakage, a poor lad had his basement windows covered with sewage. Leaks So many leaks *everywhere.* One of my flatmates had a leak coming from the floor above. Within that room was a overfilled bucket with the source of the leak being above the roof lamp so it went through electrics. That bucket has possibly sat there for days, even weeks. Sketchy drug users stalking women. 25 - 30, reported rapes within the first month of the semester.

[@quintecence]

@@Ozzianman damn.. the worst uni accommodation I had to deal with was the one night maggots sprung up from the carpet in the livingroom/kitchen. There were thousands of them. Everywhere. I told my flat mates, then I left to go to the office and tell security because no one else was in. The security guy said he'd send up cleaners in the morning. About 95% of the maggots disappeared before the cleaners arrived. Yeah - disturbing but not as bad as wherever the hell you were living

[@Ozzianman]

@@quintecence Pontypridd. If anyone reading this want to study Computer Security, consider University of South Wales as you last option. The professors I had did not care at all for any of us and was near impossible to contact. 4 months in and I had only had 3 meetings with my supervisor regarding my bachelor project still not having it set in stone. The course material is garbage. All joy I had in studies (I was doing a top up year) were obliterated there, so I dropped out. Still got a professional degree so my last two years are not wasted. The locals did say the professors in year 1 and 2 are better, but the course is still shit. Maggot infestation would make me move out asap. If that is infesting the building, then I would not want to stay and find out what else is infesting the building.

[@solahifuefos8081]

I used to do a bunch of pyro chemistry as a teen, one of my favorites was rocket candy. Being simple and cheap to make, just mix sugar and KNO3 and heat in a pan until a sort of peanut butter consistancy. I'd done this a few times and decided to make a fairly big batch all at once, foolishly I decided not to use a face shield while stirring a pan of fuel and oxidiser on a hotplate at chest height. It got a bit too hot, and decided to all go up in flames at once, luckily this was done outside and didnt burn my house down, but it did set the tree above the pan on fire. As it went off I ducked and turned, saving my face, but did end up getting burn scars on the side of my scalp. I stopped making it after this.

[@That_Chemist]

Terrifying!

[@alexphillips4325]

My “incident” happened in high school. I forget what exactly we were doing, but it involved melting and then slowly oxidizing about 25 g of magnesium. To make a very long story short, one of the class clowns in my chemistry class somehow managed to drop a crucible full of molten magnesium. This went about exactly as you would expect and I heard the ceramic shatter, had just enough time to look over wondering what the heck was going on, and then got completely arc blinded by 25 g of magnesium going poof all at once. One of the other somewhat frightening stories I have involves doing a distillation and azeotropic chloroform and acetone, despite having an active stir bar and several boiling chips in the bottom of my flask, it managed to bump so hard That it blew my clip together distillation apparatus apart and shot boiling chloroform and acetone all over the place. Here’s the kicker: at that moment I was lifting the fume hood sash and reaching in in order to lower the heating mantle, Mainly because I was afraid of it bumping and I knew it should’ve been boiling at that point. I didn’t end up getting injured, but I was splashed with an embarrassing amount of boiling chloroform and acetone and ended up having to retire that lab coat because it Was very very stained with my(thankfully non-toxic) product.

[@kevsonkeyboard]

FLASHBANG

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

"Oh, lets reduce the heat to reduce the risk of it exploding all over the room" *bumps it and it explodes all over the room

[@Ozzianman]

​@@HappyBeezerStudios Almost makes you wonder if it is some kind of divine retribution for sins caused in a previous life.

[@xaqt1]

When I was a kid, I realised that my dad had in his garage one of those reach grabber tools, asked him if I could use it and play with it and he said yes. One thing that made me awe was that the tip of the tool was magnetized, and I just dragged the thing on the ground and i kept scooping up dirty iron dirt dust, because i have heard that mixing iron in bleach creates iron(III) chloride, which I was interested in making. I also knew beforehand that it created flammable H2 gas, but I guess I just somehow forgot about it at some point. So I go back home with my ziploc bag, and when my parents weren't home I poured bleach in some plastic container, and dumped all of my crude iron in it. Because I was really stupid, I decided to lit the hydrogen with one of those long-necked BBQ lighters, and needless to say, I have learnt the lesson to be fully aware of what you are doing, and to work with dangerous gases in a fumehood or outside. For some reason, while I ignited the whole thing I have put my face closer to get a closer look, and then... *_FOOMF!_* A decently sided ball of fire appeared just in front of my face, and I literally could feel the heat wave of the fire install itself on my forehead. I guess I'm lucky that I didn't get any burns, but now I quickly learnt to never mess with household products lol, and ESPECIALLY never inside, because I could have easily burnt the whole house down, which mostly had wood, but I did it in the kitchen, which had granite tiles and stuff

[@alienworm1999]

Not a chemist, but I work in our university's fabrication lab with a ton of substances you do not want inside or outside of you. We have several Formlabs Form 2 resin printers, which requires you to wash printed parts in 99.4% IPA and then cure it in a UV chamber before it can be considered safe to handle. It's normally pretty obvious what parts have and have not been washed, since they'll be covered (sometimes dripping) with toxic uncured resin. One time a trainee went to complete the post-processing for a customer order on the Form 2. In the worst breach of safety and general awareness I've ever heard of, she raw dogged the parts with ungloved hands and then threw them into the plastic pickup bag for an unwitting student to recieve. No curing, no washing, and hands that looked like she just dipped her fist into a jar of honey. She was promptly fired.

[@That_Chemist]

Wtf that is awful

[@alienworm1999]

@@That_Chemist A slightly shorter, more fun story: the fabrication lab I work at is in UMD's BioE building with 5 floors of research spaces above it. A BioE PhD student came downstairs looking for ways to 3D print knee implants. A big part of my job is knowing what materials and manufacturing methods to suggest for different use cases (impact strength, heat deflection temp, solvent resistances, etc), so naturally my first question was on biocompatibility. He said that wouldn't matter at all- they were going into cadavers later that week, it's not like they would notice!

[@grant3570]

Despite my years in a lab, the worst thing that happened to me was at home. I was going to add some chlorine pucks to the backyard pool and the container had been sitting outside in the sun for a long time. When I opened the bucket I was greeted by a nice yellow cloud of chlorine gas that sent me into a coughing and spitting fit for about 10 mins. Store chemicals properly!

[@That_Chemist]

:(

[@cn8229]

I have implicit faith in Grimace's mad chemistry skills, but mortals should probably take more care around hydrazoic acid.

[@spacehitchhiker4264]

9:19- Oh, you'd be surprised about that. One place that I worked out sent out 3 truckloads full of defective parts. When you get into manufacturing scale, they put out product so quickly, or in such large batches that downtime, or the loss of a batch can be astronomically expensive.

[@That_Chemist]

QA should have caught it!

[@dangerousbutterknife7988]

In my high school chem class there would always be a putrid rotten and sickly sweet smell coming from somewhere unknown. It was only in that room and I constantly complained about it because it made me gag every time I entered the room. In the last month of the semester the school had a hazmat team come in and clean up whatever it was. I don't think I want to know what it was.

[@Amanda-C.]

I mean, I would want to know. Future health implications.

[@Photon205]

So this accident happened at my school one or two years ago. That morning I came into school and the whole schoolyard was full of fire trucks. When I got to the place my class usually meets up I saw my teacher explaining to the rest of my class that some poison gas was detected in our school and that the whole school had to evacuate to the gymnasium immediately. In the gymnasium our principal explained, that we could phone our parents to pick us up and we had the next day off. She didn't say a word about what was actually causing the emergency. At the beginning of this year I found out what was actually going on. (Some context: our school has three buildings all connected through hallways) It turns out that our janitor was cleaning the toilets in one of the buildings and mixed multiple cleaners together. I don't know how much of the cleaning mix he actually used, but it was enough to fill the ENTIRE building with hydrogen sulfide gas. Fortunately no one was injured, but the janitor was fired very soon after the incident

[@Photon205]

I apologize for any spelling mistakes.

[@jeconiahjoelmichaelsiregar7917]

What kind of cleaning products could even remotely make hydrogen sulfide when mixed?! That is mad horrifying

[@joshm9750]

@@jeconiahjoelmichaelsiregar7917 probably something with drain cleaners

[@Photon205]

@@joshm9750 Most probably, I also don't know what exactly he mixed together, but at that time some of the students at my school thought that it was a funny idea to deliberately clogg the toilets in that building, so it would have made sense for the janitor to use some mixture of drain cleaners.

[@jeconiahjoelmichaelsiregar7917]

@@joshm9750 but like the only sulfur-containing compound in drain cleaners is sulfuric acid, how would you even begin to convert that into hydrogen sulfide

[@benruniko]

That blue monopoly money quip made me laugh way harder than it should have :)

[@That_Chemist]

:)

[@upupina90]

that's not euros :S

[@benruniko]

@@upupina90 yeah he knows. I thought it was part of that joke at first tho

[@ehfik]

thats british pound btw, not euros :) well nvm.

[@drrocketman7794]

The tetramethylammonium hydroxide is scary. It sounds like the G-series nerve agents (tabun, sarin, cyclosarin, soman).

[@SuperAngelofglory]

Don't think it reaches that level of toxicity, but still a worrisome chemical

[@circeciernova1712]

Learning my alphabet! GA, GB, GC, GD...

[@lechking941]

@@circeciernova1712 XD

[@keterpatrol7527]

@@lechking941 no, that's not next. Relearn your alphabet

[@lechking941]

@@keterpatrol7527 do i need to clown attack ya.

[@stevelknievel4183]

The biggest issue I saw with the hydrazoic acid story was that he poured it down the drain. When I was doing my undergraduate dissertation I had to handle it using a plastic spatula as metal azides have a tendency to go bang and the postgrad student my supervisor had me sharing a fume hood with didn't want the sodium to exchange with the iron in a steel spatula.

[@That_Chemist]

That is legit - that is a thing I was taught everywhere as well

[@word6344]

Are there azides that don't go bang

[@xero2715]

Oh boy, that Iodine story reminds me of a story my HS chemistry teacher told me. A friend of his was teaching some yr 11 students about qualitative organic tests (iodoform, etc), and decided to demonstrate the use of bromine and cyclohexene, as the brown colour of the bromine would disappear, she told the students. Bear in mind that this is a science lab in an underfunded high school. There was a fume hood, but it didn't work properly. After the experiment the bromine was left in the fume hood with the lid off, and the lesson continued with theory. After a while, some students started coughing. The coughing got worse, and more students were complaining. The teacher looks over and bromine vapour was making its way into the classroom. The room was evacuated and as far as my teacher knew, no-one suffered from permanent damage. Suffice to say, that reaction is no longer performed in that high school.

[@EvanZalys]

TMAH is also present in developers for photoresists in cleanroom. People are generally not made aware of its toxicity.

[@That_Chemist]

good to know!

[@thesledgehammerblog]

You can make some pretty expensive screw-ups in chemistry, but my brother used to work for a company that produced aerospace parts, and talked about a "Million dollar hole" that was the final step in producing a certain machined part with high six-figure material and production costs and very tight tolerances, where an error on that step would result in the part being scrapped.

[@wasauchimmer4229]

The asbestos thing is pretty normal for geoscience. In my intro mineralogy class we were given some to identify and were told afterwards that it was chrysotile (asbestos). Same with Galena. We were just instructed not to inhale/ lick it

[@Sk0lzky]

These stories make all the regrets regarding not pursuing chemistry go away. Not even specific incidents, just the thought of the people I currently work and study with in context of hazardous vapours spilling over the room because someone forgot what they were supposed to do is terrifying

[@HiwasseeRiver]

My thoughts on your funny money: I was working in Alaska when the US started circulating the State quarters. Canadian coins were/are common in change in Alaska. One day a stoner chick waitress gave me a Canadian quarter in my change - I asked her what state is this from...she replied "Canaaaadia" I do like the 5 cent coins, nice beaver!

[@voidlesslove3123]

Alaska is the best state. Glad you could glean some enjoymemt ou kf that experience though

[@voidlesslove3123]

Sadly KZbin won't let me correct the typos, truly a sad state of affairs

[@LlamasAtMidnight]

@Milan Velky I can do it on mobile but not on an ipad for some reason

[@himalayo]

0:55 my man be dissin the pound LMFAO

[@ankaarne]

Historical fun-fact about Bromine, bromine toxic syndrome used to be so common it not only has it own name "Bromism" it also accounted for 5-10% of all psychiatric hospital admissions, as it was a common part of many old sedatives. In addition to the whole host of neurological and psychiatric symptoms it caused (irritability, ataxia, confusion, hallucinations, psychosis, stupor and coma) and gastrointestinal and mucous membrane damages it also gave you rashes, named Bromoderma, that looks more like bleeding plague pustules than what the word "rashes" most commonly conjures up. Modern day fun-fact! Bromism still happened to extreme soda drinkers as it is used in the compound "Brominated vegetable oil" in the states, it is still allowed in the USA and Canada but the big soda companies have dropped it for most their domestically produced sodas(they already had to use different compound overseas as it has been banned for a long time in the whole of EU for example) after public pressure campaigns in 2014, Mountain Dew was the last to drop it (in 2020) thought they still have it in their "Throwback Dew" that's made with real sugar instead of hfcs, guess you've got to balance the healthier sugar with the toxic halogen-compound. The FDA still thinks it's an a-okay additive in small amounts.

[@voidlesslove3123]

I feel educated

[@00muinamir]

That stuff was in Gatorade for a really long time, I stopped drinking it when I found out about that.

[@ankaarne]

@@00muinamir Funnily enough Gatorade was actually the thing that kickstarted the public campaign that got PepsiCo and CocaCola to stop using it in the states, a young woman wanted the makers to stop using BVO domestically as they already had stopped using it in foreign markets where the additive had been banned for long time for health concerns.

[@GeneralPurposeVehicl]

15:30 pouring azide down the drain was part of a plot of a hospital lab explosion in a TV show from the 70's!

[@leo_warren]

On the topic of highschool and Bromine. We had 3 ampoules of Bromine stored vertically in a polystyrene shell. Our teacher lifted the top of the shell off but one of the ampoules was slightly stuck as they moved to put the top of the shell on their desk. The ampoule 'decided' gravity would now apply as it fell onto the floor and shattered, leading to a prompt evacuation of the entire department.

[@sodiumcyanide615]

Just pouring hydrazoic acid or azide salts down the drain can lead to heavier metal azides forming in the plumbing and subsequently blowing up said plumbing

[@Tekdruid]

15:59 One thing I learned to my surprise as a kid is you can actually get a wood fire hot enough that it causes aluminum beer cans to burn.

[@That_Chemist]

True!

[@tommihommi1]

My chemistry teacher in HS was fun. He had some scars on his face that he got from hitting red phosphorus+potassium chlorate with a hammer, but didn't use a face shield and used too much, and thus got splattered with burning pieces of red phosphorus which dug into his skin. He also enjoyed scaring us by lighting small firecrackers on his desk occasionally when the class started but we didn't pay attention. He also once shocked us by taking a large plastic jar with a bunch warning labels on it he had taken from the collection for whatever reaction we were going to do that day, opening it, shaking some white crystals from it onto his hand, *and eating them*. Of course, it was just Ammonium Chloride, which is delicious, but you absolutely shouldn't eat analysis grade chemicals😅

[@SuperAngelofglory]

I heard stories of stolen pieces of sodium before, but never about potassium. Hats off for that janitor!

[@fixyourlag701]

You mentioned not being able to loose more than what you make in a month but I have a product that can cost 200 usd per mg, it's a medication and I use about 400 µg a day, it's kinda crazy, I pay substantially less than that as it is for its medical use but If you were to get it through a chem supplier the price above would be considered affordable (for anyone curious, it's a gnrh agonist)

[@00muinamir]

Ahahaha, was not expecting to show up in a video! (Sorry for the swears, I'll hold back on them next time I have a good story to tell.) To explain, I worked for a biotech company that made a whole range of products, so there were some consumables that were quite expensive because of the really involved labor in manufacturing and testing them. But I was underpaid and it was a dysfunctional place to work, you're not wrong about that.

[@That_Chemist]

some of the comments will be from a while back - I have a catalogue of like 350 stories still!

[@science_and_anonymous]

A fantastic story that still scares me to think about today. I worked for a university that was foregoing terrible monetary stress, quite literally falling apart at the seams. During my time working in the labs there helping to essentially put all the millions of dollars of equipment together, do private research, and other odd jobs, one of the lab supervisors had tasked me and a student of the university to aid in "taking inventory" of some of the old chemical samples they had from when the school used the labs we were working on. We both went down to this closet, which was completely unlabeled I might add, and opened the door. Immediately the smell hit me. It was potent, vile, absolutely chemical, and carcinogenic. The door (over the past 60 years) was tinted from chemical vapors. As we went through the labeled chemicals (as many weren't) I began to both become in a state of pure chemist galore, and fear for my own life. The closest was a chemist's wet dream and an EPA agent's worst nightmare. There were many 10liter bottles, full to the brim, of carbon tet, multigram levels of uranium salts, a kilogram or more per bottle of mercury salts, scheduled drugs, nitrobenzenes, kilograms of sodium, and so much more. The room was no more larger than a small walk-in closet, and it had a single light that emitted a faint sodium yellow glow. All wood, floors, door, and ceiling. I sadly had to leave before the full inventory was done (the student and I had logged a few hundred chemicals, but from what I hear there were thousands counting the unlabeled samples going back 60 years plus). Working there was like looking back in back in time. Nearly everything in the labs was antiques, pure and beautiful. I think even some of the glass was hand blown. I must admit, seeing those chemicals was a highlight of my life as I may never see them again. Not too many people have been able to view chemicals made forbidden for some 30 years now. It was a great pleasure I wish all chemists could enjoy (maybe in a museum behind glass, however). A chemical museum is needed.

[@ZijnShayatanica]

Christ, that is beautiful but horrifying.

[@damanifesto]

The bromine story cracked me up. I did an acid catalyzed oxidation of sodium bromide in my garage with HCL and 35% H2O2. Copious amounts of bromine vapor filled my garage fast enough to scare the crap out of me. I too ended up with a cough for a few days. BTW, I had four years of chemistry in pharmacy school and still love chem to this day. Your KZbin channel rocks!

[@camj4631]

The way that diffusion pumps work is so fascinating

[@pfadiva]

Turbo, scroll, and ion sublimation pumps are way cool too.

[@MudakTheMultiplier]

Not chemistry related but it's definitely possible to mess up for a value more than your salary in the factory I work in. We got some custom parts in that get labeled differently than normal. The guy that's supposed to sort it and make sure it's set up for the line can't find what units they're for, so he tells the forklift they don't need them, and to throw them away. It was about a day's work split across three lines, all useless now. The value of just the material was around $40k and then you add in that the lines won't be able to work the day after, all of those units are going to be late, as well as the fact that our supplier is already super behind, and the intangible cost is probably at least $80k and they probably make closer to $55k...

[@KnightmarePhoenix_official]

I'm a simple woman. I see an unexpected Steamed Hams reference in the thumbnail, I click.

[@alfhildsaemunddottir9684]

Hearing about your enconters with Woollin's Reagent reminded me of my own encounters with some of his other selenium creations. I was doing my dissertation in the solid-state NMR department when Derek Woollins sent down a batch of new and interesting selenium compounds for characterisation. These arrived as a pile of sample vials, wrapped in parafilm, inside a large glass jar that also had a good wrapping of parafilm. We unwrapped the film, opened the lid of the big glass jar . . . and slammed the lid back on PDQ. I cannot begin to describe the smell emanating from those (SEALED!) vials. It took a week for it to clear out of our lab, and the incident became known as 'the day Derek tried to kill us all'. Good times!

[@KaiserZERO]

I remember one time someone in my high school science lab burned the curtains with something. Nobody was harmed, but we got to learn how to use a fire extinguisher. And I remember messing around with steel wool and electricity.

[@That_Chemist]

That is a really fun demo to be fair

[@word6344]

Why does your lab even have curtains

[@KaiserZERO]

@@word6344 Blocking light I guess. It was years ago so I don't remember all the details

[@PGflips]

Years ago I did a similar thing with drain unblocker. I was working as a handyman for a bit and got sent to a student house with a badly blocked shower (don't want to think what with). I poured an acid based drain cleaner down the plug hole, it fizzed like crazy and I was met with a foul gas that made my throat close up instantly. They had obviously been pouring bleach down it before and I didn't realise. Luckily I got out only inhaling a tiny amount and was able to shut the door and let the extractor fan deal with it.

[@jeffbuckley4354]

Okay so here’s a fun story from my grad school days. Normally, liquid nitrogen tanks are fitted with pressure relief fittings but this tank (which the lab had since 1980) had both fittings fail at some point in the past. Instead of getting a new tank, the holes were fitted with metal plugs and welded off. Why it didn’t blow before was a real stumper but presumably people were taking nitrogen out of it quick enough to keep it together. At around 3am, when no one was in the lab, the internal tank expanded to press against the external tank so the only place for further expansion was the ends. Well, the bottom of the tank ruptured around a 1200 psi load. I saved a copy of the report from the engineer and have attached it here. This is where things get scary: The cylinder had been standing on the end of a 20’x40’ laboratory on the second floor of the chemistry building. It was on a tile covered 4-6” concrete floor, directly over a reinforced concrete beam. The explosion blew all the tile off the floor in a 5’ radius of the tank, turning the tile into quarter-sized bits of shrapnel that embedded in the walls of the lab. The blast cracked the floor, but due to the presence of the supporting beam, which shattered, the floor held. Since the floor held, the force of the explosion was directed upwards and propelled the cylinder, sans bottom, through the concrete ceiling of the lab and into the maintenance room above. It struck two 3” water mains and drove them and the electrical wiring above into the roof of the building, cracking it. The cylinder came to rest on the third floor of the building, leaving a 20” diameter hole in its wake. The entrance door and wall of the lab were blown out into the hallway. All the remaining walls were 4-8” off their foundations. All the windows, save one that had been left open, were blown out into the courtyard.

[@tsm688]

That's a pretty famous lab accident. It's told around the world as a 'dear god no don't fuck with the safety plugs why would you even do that' fairy tale.

[@robertlapointe4093]

Sounds like the MythBuster's water heater explosion: kzbin.info/www/bejne/b5O4Xnxoj86AgpI .

[@GuardianEnigma]

I saw this story in one of Derek Lowe's "How Not to Do It" blogs. He's done some funny chemistry articles that would probably fit right in here.

[@tsm688]

@@MrKotBonifacy sometimes called a "career move"... One that requires you to move careers..

[@Ithirahad]

@@tsm688 ...Because they caused a gas bottle to move - one might even say sent it *careering* - into the 3rd floor.

[@gmcenroe]

My boss created a reasonably large mercury fountain at one company we worked at. We used HF in a Perflon low vacuum line to transfer HF which has a low vapor pressure from the storage chamber to 2 reaction vessels where it liberated a peptide from solid support and it's protecting groups. We used a 3.5 lb. HF tank which occasionally was depleted. Unbeknownst to the chemist he did not realize that often old HF tanks contain some hydrogen turning a low pressure tank into a much higher pressure tank. So when he hooked up the tank to the vacuum line, the positive pressure from the tank blew about 200ml of mercury straight out of the manometer. Glad I didn't have to clean that up, but learned to vent the tank in the hood prior to hookup!

[@rapidsynthetics]

My story takes place in our local university, when I was a secondary school student and as a research project I chose "One pot alkyl selenides, diselenides and selenols synthesis". Once, I've decided to prepare n-butyl selenol from n-butyl bromide and NaHSe (formed in situ from NaBH4 and Se). Everything was going good, until I started reflux reaction mixture, it took a moment to fill our entire university building with a stinky smell of n-butyl selenol. After a while, my project supervisor came and told me to stop my synthesis, because everybody was panicking about the terrible smell. So, I decided, that treating my reaction mixture with hydrogen peroxide would be a great idea. 30%. Hydrogen. Peroxide. I added all hydrogen peroxide at once and nothing happened (reaction mixture was only a little bit warm, but nothing more), so I left it and continued watching funny videos on KZbin. Until one moment. With the edge of my eye I noticed, that reaction started to bubble a little. Then more. And finally, it just started to boil, covering all fume hood with a mixture of elemental selenium, dibutyl diselenide, hydrogen peroxide and other oxidation products. Some drops got into contact with my textbook and even nowadays I can smell this characteristic garlic-rotten cabbage smell on it (I'm storing it as a reminder of this story).

[@zinobi]

Oh, I have had so many low level jobs where you can easily break things worth several times your salary. Just look at that janitor who spilled mercury, even if he just kicked a normal bucket over and left it could cause damages that would cost more than his salary to fix. Never mind when you work at a bank and ... Say to an erroneous transaction to say... France, just in theory, and say some one enters the account number as amount and skips the warnings about the amount being "suspicious". In this hypotetical case most of the money would probably be recoverable but it would require quite a lot of work ... In theory...

[@That_Chemist]

Valid

[@johannesgutsmiedl366]

and if, like the person in the story, you do quality control you don't even have to make some mistake in order to accomplish this, ordering an entire batch of whatever super expensive product your company makes to be thrown away may well just be you doing your job properly.

[@LunaNicoleTheFox]

Not a chemist, but when I worked with Ethylene-Tetraflouroethylene(ETFE) in injection moulding, trace amounts of moisture got into the cylinder and produced trace amounts of HF. I had an itchy nose, I sneezed and there suddenly was a lot of blood coming out of my nose, like unholy amounts of it.

[@LunaNicoleTheFox]

Oh and at a different company I once had to discard about 60k worth of PEI, which was about 25kg of that specific type because someone mixed it together with a different high performance plastic PEEK during drying. You don't mix plastics, especially not high performance plastics where a kg can cost you somewhere between 100$ and your firstborn child.

[@robertb6889]

I work in semiconductor manufacturing, and screw-ups in my job can cost millions of dollars, to the point of several causes by others have cost more than that engineers total lifetime earnings. When you have silicon wafers with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of chips on each, a small error can build up really fast, especially if it goes undetected for a day or two.

[@atomic.madness452]

“As long as you haven’t been doing anything else that could make your eyes red.” **ah yes, crying**

[@foc2241]

I’m working in R&D but also did some solvent testing and nearly every third batch was not in spec (UHPLC-MS Quality) and one of the batch costs about half a million… and one day they decided to ask why is that and we knew why. The white glass bottles are pre washed from factory with steam and when they get to us we wash the caps ans bottles again with the solvent we fill (that is now). So before that they sometimes did that (spec ok) and sometimes not (spec not ok) so that was a very expensive mistake for the guys that were not properly told how to rinse the bottles before filling…

[@RamiSlicer]

I posted this on another comment already but since you mentioned the compressed air stuff: I tried once to repair a broken hard drive by opening it up, putting the head back where it's supposed to be, then giving it a really good blast of compressed air to get the dust off. It worked once but I missed a spot... I turned it sideways so it pointed at the platters and FOOSH a bunch of white stuff shot out of the nozzle, ruining my cleaning job and spraying insanely bitter air into my mouth. My whole tongue felt really bitter for a solid 15 minutes.

[@steam-powereddolphin5449]

Arby's: We have the--AAAAHH! FIRE!!!

[@rustymustard7798]

In 6th grade my science teacher tried a potassium permanganate and glycerin demo, moved a desk outside, put quite a bit of it in a pie tin and poured a bunch of glycerin over it. Demo worked, and soon we were all standing there watching the entire top of the desk burn and the smoldering lump in the center start falling through, while she just fidgeted, panicked and cursed while not having a clue of what to do or enough sense to grab a fire extinguisher from inside, good times.

[@Azullia]

There was a story in one of the previous Chempolation videos about someone in high school accidentally flooding a lab with H2S. I do remember having a similar story like that when doing the practical that demos the redox reactions of various halides with concentrated sulphuric acid. Though, there was a time when we accidentally flooded one of the chemistry labs in our high school with chlorine gas instead. We were doing a practical to demo of an esterification reaction, and one of our two main reagents was benzoyl chloride. That, according to my chemistry teacher at the time, has a tendency to "lose" its chlorine and form chlorine gas if left unattended. There were 4 fume hoods that we were working in groups of three at, and everything seemed to be going alright, except none of the results expected (iirc either a precipitate or an organic layer was expected to form) was happening for any of the groups. We weren't sure what was wrong because everyone pretty much followed all the instructions correctly, but we did notice something wrong when the lab started smelling strongly of chlorine (I guess despite the open windows and the fume hoods, there was just that much of it), and our eyes were watering and lightly stinging through our safety goggles. When our teacher looked at the stock bottles the lab technicians gave us, it turned out that the benzoyl chloride was well past its use-by date (it was like, 11 years old at that point), so not only was the stock bottles just leaking copious amounts of chlorine gas when opened, but the reaction *also* had chlorine as a byproduct (whatever was left of the good benzoyl chloride reacted with our other reagent), so I guess it overwhelmed those poor fume hoods. We had to end off the lesson period in another chemistry lab to let that other lab vent out all of the chlorine gas.

[@seneca983]

0:55 "5 euros" A nice way to troll the British! :D

[@Hadeles]

Not really a story, but my grade 4 teacher was super freaking dumb and put me in the bottom math group in my class. The reason behind it wasn't my intelligence, which was meant to be the one thing deciding your math group, but instead it was the fact that I am not neurotypical and I asked her for worksheets that had: 1. Less questions. 2. Harder questions. 3. Less "show your working" stuff. 4. Less "do it in your head" stuff. She gave me more, and, in a parent-teacher conference, she completely ignored us. She also said that "Meat has a lot of Sodium in it, so don't eat much meat" and "oh, don't worry, you'll be fine". the "you'll be fine" thing was where I was trying to figure out what she meant when she told me something extremely vague and I tried to ask her.

[@yukisuter]

In year 9 (In the UK, so 8th Grade in NA), we were learning the changes of state. So in order to demonstrate what sublimation was, our chemistry teacher made us heat Ammonium Chloride over a bunsen burner. We just did this on the bench, as described by our teacher. It's pertinent to the story to add that on this day, we were in a brand new building which was undergoing safety inspections, and a visit by OFSTED (UK Schools inspector). I'm not sure what our teacher expected to happen... but so it goes, that the ammonium chloride we were all (20 in a room, so 10 samples) heating, was decomposing and forming HCL and NH3.... Which triggerred the alarms. Rather embarrasingly for the school, it seemed they hadnt tested the alarm system properly, and could not silence the alarm, so the entire building was out of use for the rest of the day.

[@pseudolullus]

During my PhD at a certain northern Japanese university, the chemistry department took fire not twice, but thrice... And, sadly, a student died of asphyxiation after pouring liquid nitrogen inside a closed 4C room in summer, probably thinking that it would help fight back the hot weather.

[@wsketchy]

4°C? In summer?

[@pseudolullus]

@@wsketchy I mean the cold room, we called it ４度部屋, which is basically "4 degree room"

[@wsketchy]

@@pseudolullus ohh I get it now thanks

[@theexchipmunk]

9:10 I have to disagree. Its actually very easy to do so in a lot of Professions. As a cutting machine operator and programmer I worked on machines that had single components that cost more than my yearly salary. And it is scarily easy to destroy those parts. It also happened, and nothing really happened to the operators in question as it is expected to happen from time to time and generally is (or should be if you are not braindead) insured.

[@tazzyhyena6369]

The one about Hydrogen Cyanide gas is horrifying.

[@PwdrdTstMn]

So speaking of making a screw up that's worth more than your yearly salary, I work pediatric O.R., some of the implants we use just cost nutty amounts of money. We have a laser catheter we use for laser ablation of brain tumors that cost well of 50k each, to the point where we don't stitch them in place because of the fear of damaging them. We have battery packs for nerve stimulators that cost about 45k as well, and you would be shocked at how often we have to waste them due to somebody breaking sterility with them.

[@voidlesslove3123]

Today's episode was brought to you by the element Bromine

[@mrslinkydragon9910]

One of the labs in my uni got blown out because a person failed to realise that the waste bottle had acetone in it and dumped a load of conc nitric acid into it then tightened the bottle. The bottle explodes, blows out the fume hood and part of the lab, costs the uni £60,000+ for a refit! No one was hurt but the staff member got the sack! If the bottle wasnt tightened it would would have popped the lid and maybe coated the interior of the hood not blow up!

[@That_Chemist]

That is crazy

[@mrslinkydragon9910]

@@That_Chemist thats what happens when you overwork staff, they make mistakes, luckily no one was hurt!

[@Xnoob545]

I looked it up Nitric oxide expands your blood vessels Which makes certain areas of your body appear larger, especially those that are soft And with the dilated blood vessels, a ton more blood can rush in, making said area feel hard and not soft anymore and can also significantly increase said area in size

[@tylern6420]

are you implying something

[@heavenbot]

Had a new experience recently to share! Changing out "clean and flushed" R12 (CCl2F2) refrigerant lines at a grocery store, myself and another guy got sent to disconnect the unit outside. We checked the pressure which showed a mild vacuum, which was consistent with our normal procedures for flushing with N2. Coworker decided to heat the solder joint to disconnect the unit from the copper line, and we immediately smell a disgusting, suffocating, pure essence of abandoned barn. Upon asking the senior supervisor on-site what the hell it was, he told me "R12 turns to phosgene with a fire, you get that sometimes." Even less than atmospheric pressure still has some gas to it. Of course, the guy who "flushed" the lines got fired for DUI 2 days before we went over there, so there really was nowhere to place blame but on us for not checking what gas was in there. We're both breathing okay, and that's what matters!

[@MySuperhappyfuntime]

At an old job (tech, retail) I was told that if things stopped working the company would lose my entire teams salary PER MINUTE.

[@That_Chemist]

Time to ask for a raise and strike lol

[@happy24mr]

that janitor was making a hefty $10 profit from their mercury stealing heists

[@robertlapointe4093]

Not sure what the current cost of mercury is (internet "prices" are all over the place), but when I was in grad school setting up an organometallics lab (mercury diffusion pumps, Toepler pumps, McCleod gauges, etc.) we bought two 76 pound "flasks" (iron cylinders) of mercury for $3000.00, or about $20/lb. Using the bucket trick, you could easily swipe 10 pounds per trip. Do that every night for a month and you could (then) buy a new car.

[@flaming_gauntlet6345]

I had a friend who was cleaning his shoes with a mix of bleach and some kind of cleaner which was ammonia based, and he said that he had passed out after cleaning his shoes

[@andyying1770]

Not a disaster per se, but one time I did redox titrations in high school with permanganate and hydrogen peroxide. On our 2nd or 3rd titration, I accidentally pipetted too much H2O2 so I got rid of the excess by putting it into the same beaker containing all the waste products from the titration. I was wearing proper PPE but I was scared af when the beaker started bubbling like crazy; luckily, nothing spilled out. I doubt anything serious would have happened if it did, but the moral of the story is, don't mix random chemicals when you have no clue what they're gonna do.

[@cpt_nordbart]

Ralph Wiggum agrees! Paste tastes awesome!

[@SeekingTheLoveThatGodMeans7648]

"Don't leave iodine sitting out in the open." I suppose it could have been premeasured into a vial and promptly capped.

[@That_Chemist]

or stoppered in a flask

[@SonOfNone]

9:11 I was touring WaferTech (a computer/electronics semi-conductor and boards manufacturer) for a photolithography job I was interested in, and during the tour they had these "pods" that contained the processor dies of some Intel processors they just finished. The pods get put onto what looks like bread racks to be transported, and each rack can contain over $1,000,000 in processors. Just dropping one of the pods (which were about the size of a small loaf of bread) would irreparably damage them all, and was worth between tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands [and according to the tour guide, it has happened before, multiple times].

[@That_Chemist]

That’s wild

[@DT170x]

People who take shortcuts for not wearing any PPE takes the long road to recovery.

[@The_KingDoge]

they created an Aurora Borealis

[@sebastianfischer429]

0:57 Please don't associate Europe with the UK. Sincerely, every EU Citizen. (Just Joking of course, we like each other but make fun of stupid politics all the time)

[@CAMSLAYER13]

Im just as upset as you are - from, the uk

[@TinySpongey]

So that person has a picture of "The Master" from Dr Who and his name is... oh dear.

[@michaelimbesi2314]

On the subject of expensive screw ups; I used to work as a planner at a shipyard. We would get our pipe and outfitting assemblies shipped in from Korea. Sometimes, the guys in the yard would lose one. I don’t know how, these things were fairly large (think, 8m long steel ladder or 6 square meters of deck grating). I’d often try to find it, but if I couldn’t, we’d have to reorder another one from the manufacturer and get it air freighted from Korea to Philadelphia. Air freight is not cheap, and neither were those assemblies. For fun, I used to calculate those reorders in terms of how many Lamborghinis a year we could have set on fire and dumped in the river for the same amount of wasted money. It was several Lambos a year.

[@NoLongerBreathedIn]

6:26 The other option for mustards is allyl isothiocyanate, which is substantially less poisonous but equally lachrymatory.

[@NautsuJJR]

Aka the literal definition of the term "mustard" instead of the chemical term

[@ripcactusify]

You should do a video about what many organic chemicals look like irl. For the most part I'm so used to seeing the skeletal structure that I forget what I'm looking at or what they're even used for. Stuff like decane, pentane, benzene, isobutane, heptane, heptene, heptyne, etc. (Ignore me if you think this is a dumb idea. I'm shy 👉👈)

[@TheRolemodel1337]

1:00 pounds* :D handling asbestos isnt that bad as long as you dont grind it or do it on a regular basis the voltri massif in italy contains a lot of exposed asbestos yet the villages there got some of the highest life expectancies in italy

[@calyodelphi124]

When I worked an unpaid internship (it was required for course credit in uni) for the network operations department at my university, I was once given a stack of five Extreme Networking brand 48-port switches and told to install them in the new campus apartments across the main road. I asked my boss how much the switches cost, because I was curious, and the way he phrased his answer made me balk a bit: If I dropped and ruined any one of them, my dad would have had to sell his house to pay for it. That was a harrowing vote of confidence in my competence to leave five of them in my unsupervised hands to install that day. 😳💦

[@1brytol]

Generally old and prestigeous highschools are just great (heavy irony) in terms of labs. One girl I know, goes to one of the best highschools in the whole of Poland, and deffo the best one in my city. One day, she sent me pics of the chemical storage. Oh my god. They had some old, dogdy solutions right near the students. I freaked out when I saw bromine and potassium dichtomate solution in crusty bottles from the previous century, closed not even with screw on caps, but with non-greased glass stoppers ;-;

[@5Revive]

when i was 13 i made chloroform in a airtight glass ampule with acetone and sodium hyperchlorite needless to say it exploded i luckily wrapped it in bubble wrap (in case it exploded) and the bubble wrap melted in my hand

[@That_Chemist]

:(

[@da_chief1492]

Me: high af watching chem vids "Or other reasons your eyes might be red" Me: almost literally does the Leo meme pointing at the screen saying aloud to no one else, "he's talking about weed"

[@That_Chemist]

I’m glad it landed with a portion of my viewers ;)

[@Davvg]

Think of how many sketchy labs have been saved by grub hub, postmates, etc

[@bigjay875]

I'm not a chemist but iv played around with some rather dangerous compound's and chlorine is one of the few things that is just not worth the risk at least in liquid form. Damn!

[@whoever6458]

I think another lesson about that chemical company involving the burnt down lab is that people who claim to be "self-made" and brag about how good they are at business are usually narcissistic enough to think they are much, much smarter than they are, which always results in something dangerous occurring from steps skipped and safety traded to save money. These people are absolutely nowhere near as smart as they think and say they are. Do not trust.

[@KarolOfGutovo]

8:50 I'd imagine it was for sentimental value

[@kevinknutson4596]

Grimace is a good boy and wouldn't be caught handling or being turned into explosives. :V

[@bazooka93]

Who didn't almost burn the lab at least once? I've had carbon/sulphur analyser autoloader dropped a white glowing hot crucible on the floor and nobody batted an eye.

[@Kumquat_Lord]

6:05 was nigel available for comment, being the expert piss chemist?

[@That_Chemist]

I have not had a chance to talk to Nigel yet - the closest I have got is ChubbyEmu

[@andrewkelley9405]

I’m so glad I never worked with chem students in college. I would have probably died lol

[@That_Chemist]

Haha

[@doublenikesocks]

Want a huge money lost story? The process I work at involves pH adjustment in a large 20k liter tank. 20kg of product is processed at a time worth $60MM each batch. The pH probe is calibrated, and then it is inserted into the tank. Then the automation automatically adds NaOH or HCl until the pH is at the setpoint. One time, the batch had less liquids than normal and the pH probe was above the liquid level in the tank. It reads about pH 16 when in air. So the automation logic kept dosing acid until the automation spit out an error that too much acid had been added. They didn’t even look into the tank to verify the pH probe was submerged! The pH was wayyy below the setpoint and then the batch was too dilute as a result of adding excess acid, then excess base to bring it up to setpoint, so the batch had to be rejected. $60MM down the drain because no one bothered to look into the sight glass next to the pH probe.

[@tsm688]

60 megamillion!?

[@doublenikesocks]

@@tsm688 M = thousand MM = million

[@tsm688]

@@doublenikesocks Interesting, must be an old french convention or something (m = mille?)

[@doublenikesocks]

@@tsm688 probably. It’s standard convention in the US re: capital spending though