Sciencemadness Discussion Board

flameable gas in room?

scrubs2009 - 18-12-2014 at 12:01

Hey guys, a few days ago I was using a bunsen burner and bent over to pick up my tongs which I dropped, when I bent over while holding the burner (its portable) I noticed the flame turned red and grew while near the floor, I found several spots around my bedroom in which this happoned. Is my room filled with flameable gas? If so is there any method of getting rid of it besides crawling around with my bunsen burner trying to burn it all off?

aga - 18-12-2014 at 12:07

Ventilation ?

scrubs2009 - 18-12-2014 at 12:08

whatever the gas is it appears to not want to move, Ive opened all of my doors and windows and blasted the fan but its still there.

Bert - 18-12-2014 at 12:10

More likely liquid some fuel entered the feed to the burner as you moved it around. Then the burner has too much fuel for the air mix to burn efficiently for a bit.

BTW? You're doing chemistry and heat processes in your bedroom?!

scrubs2009 - 18-12-2014 at 12:17

I dont do anything that could make gas in my bedroom, I was Fiddling with color changing CoCl2 at the moment

Bert - 18-12-2014 at 12:22

What powers your burner.

scrubs2009 - 18-12-2014 at 12:23

Im not sure, I will be home in an hour and then Ill let you know

subsecret - 18-12-2014 at 13:57

If it's portable, it's probably not a Bunsen burner. Those have a hose barb for a natural gas or propane hose. Yours is probably butane fueled.

Little_Ghost_again - 18-12-2014 at 14:24

Dont lay a lino floor with evo stick in your lab then use a bunsen ;), my map gas burner sometimes burns red when i wiggle it about

Bert - 18-12-2014 at 15:12

Cheap burners and torches that are designed to run on the gas above the pressurized liquid fuel, and only in an upright attitude often "burp" some liquid fuel into the flame when shaken around or inverted, the inefficiently burned carbon in the over rich flame will glow yellow or reddish.

Ventilating the room won't do you much good if the torch tank itself is the source of the extra gas!

diddi - 18-12-2014 at 18:17

bedrooms are not chem labs. they are generally poorly lit, poorly ventilated and if you spill something or even just open the bottles on many reagents, you have to sleep with the residual fumes. if you don't believe, try storing your acid in your shed near steel tools. even without opening the bottles, you will soon find that you have a mysterious rust problem occurring. find somewhere else to work before you end up with long term toxin exposure.

Bert - 18-12-2014 at 18:33

Quote:
bedrooms are not chem labs.


Exactly. Learned my lesson on that the hard way, from a bed full of broken Pyrex shards and Iodine vapors plated out on my bedroom walls.

Work OUTSIDE if you don't have a proper lab space. Your chemicals DO NOT belong under your bed...

My parents never forbade me to do chemistry, or even to work on explosives & pyrotechnics. They DID forbid doing any of this inside the house.

Amos - 18-12-2014 at 19:23

Quote: Originally posted by diddi  
bedrooms are not chem labs. they are generally poorly lit, poorly ventilated and if you spill something or even just open the bottles on many reagents, you have to sleep with the residual fumes. if you don't believe, try storing your acid in your shed near steel tools. even without opening the bottles, you will soon find that you have a mysterious rust problem occurring. find somewhere else to work before you end up with long term toxin exposure.


This might be a tiny bit overstated. I do all my chemistry in a laundry room, with aluminum ductwork overhead, brass handles on the window just over the lab, uncoated metal rods on my burette stands, copper pipes, steel furnace; etc. I frequently have open beakers full of solutions containing fairly concentrated HCl or ammonia, and nothing in the room is has shown any signs of oxidation in 10 months.

IrC - 18-12-2014 at 19:46

Quote: Originally posted by Bert  
Learned my lesson on that the hard way, from a bed full of broken Pyrex shards and Iodine vapors plated out on my bedroom walls.


All doubt is removed as to the nature of the experiment.

I once cleared a lab bench in school of all glassware doing the identical reaction which I had scaled up 5 times above the procedure I gave to my teacher for approval. Was my first learning experience on the concept of size matters in chemistry. Next hour in study hall teachers were getting annoyed at the endless popping and crackling coming from my clothes.

http://www.sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=3905#p...


[Edited on 12-19-2014 by IrC]

Bert - 18-12-2014 at 20:12

*Sigh*


If it will keep just ONE of you from repeating your elder's mistakes-
Quote:

I don't know if there is ANY "good first synthesis" if you're completely new to it and on your own. But nitrogen triiodide certainly is NOT a good first lab. I swiped a few grams of Iodine from the high school chemistry lab at age 16. Did the obvious thing with it, of course. Performed the reaction with my mom's "clear ammonia" between getting home from school and going off to my part time job at a local restaurant. The batch was left drying on the filter paper, sitting on my desk- In my bedroom. Indoors. About 5' from my bed. With all my prized lab glass sitting next to it. Bad planning, that. When I got home, my lab glass was in tiny pieces all over the room. A LOT of it was in my bed... My dad was waiting up for me, drinking a beer and when he talked to me he was rather surprisingly calm and non-judgemental... All he said was: Don't make anything explosive in the house. Don't bring anything explosive you make INTO the house. Good night. The next day, my younger brother who had the bedroom next to mine told me that he had been horsing around with a friend, and banged into the wall separating our rooms. There was a large explosion on my side of the wall... He opened the door of his room just in time to see my father finish his sprint to my bedroom door. Dad opened the door and looked inside at the cloud of purple iodine vapor hanging over the ruins of my desk and said to himself out loud: "Oh. He knows how to make that now?" Dad then closed my door and went back to the kitchen table, cracked a beer and continued sketching electronics circuits for his next day's work. Don't know how many more he downed before I got home that night- It took me hours to clean up all that broken glass. If it had not gone off until I had come home and entered the room, I'd have probably suffered injuries from flying glass, possibly hearing damage and maybe lost an eye or eyes. I was as lucky as such a fool can be. At Dad's funeral, his older brother told me the story about Dad getting arrested at age 13 for a fireworks experiment that broke a neighbor's window back before WWII. Guess it runs in the family.

scrubs2009 - 19-12-2014 at 07:17

ok. I just checked and my burner is butane not propane. In regards to me doing my chemistry in my bedroom: I dont like it either but I have no where else to store them. I dont leave them out in the open though. I keep everything in a cabinet.

Little_Ghost_again - 19-12-2014 at 08:13

My dad a biologist used to collect and grow fungi when he a kid, he used to make all his own agar etc and used the cupboard with the hot water tank in it as his incubator.
Apparently when he was around 11 he grew a round slightly grey blue fungus on a plate, it was almost a perfect circle so he put it back in the cupboard.
He tells me he forgot about it for a couple of weeks and when he did find it again the fungus had lifted the sealed agar plate lid off. The fungus had really strange stalks on so he spent the weekend looking at it under his old scope (he still has that), he still has over 100 slides he made of it and has shown me many times.
around 11 days after this weekend my dad ended up in hospital with double pneumonia that almost killed him! my dad had found and grown a very very nasty aspergillis fungi and breathed in the spores. I forget the name now but will post it later when I find the slide, he also gave himself really nasty salmonella poisoning in 1982 from trying to isolate it on a agar plate from his pet iguana lol.
He says making the same mistake as someone else when you know of it, is a good indication of a hefty amount of the stupid gene in your DNA, making it twice is proof of suicicdle tendencies!

Bert - 19-12-2014 at 08:55
Quote:

"There are three kinds of men: the ones that learn by readin', the few who learn by observation; the rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves." - Will Rogers

aga - 19-12-2014 at 09:42

Is there a Uniform 'lab smell' ?

Just that mine now has a faint smell that reminds me of the school lab all those decades ago.

[Edited on 19-12-2014 by aga]

Praxichys - 19-12-2014 at 10:16

I think there is. Mine didn't have it until I made Ac2O using S2Cl2. Something with the sulfur, I presume. Also, the stink coming from that infernal bottle of cyanuric trichloride on the shelf and the leaky bottles of high vapor-pressure stuff like diethyl ether, iodine, ammonia, and HCl. Acetone and toluene from wash bottles adds to the mix, with the ever-pervasive reek of vinyl tubing that has been attacked by various corrosive gases. Combine that with the warm partially-burned thiol-SO2 exhaust from a natural gas burner and some burnt plywood from the glasswork area, and you have yourself a serious-smelling lab.

But anyway... not in the bedroom!

Or maybe it's Alconox?