Hi everyone. I was doing a distillation outside earlier tonight (I don't have any sort of fume extractor), but my pump wasn't working right, so I
stopped halfway through to take a break. In a moment of incredible, unbelievable, shitheaded stupidity, I got distracted and forgot to drain
my cooling system. I live in northern New Hampshire, and it was 15 degrees Fahrenheit tonight, so when I was away, the water in the cooling system
froze, expanded, and shattered my >$50 condenser to bits. That's a lot of money gone, just like that, especially for a college student like me who
rarely has the money to spend anything on hobbies. I guess that's the end of a lot of chemistry experimentation for a while. I'll edit and post some
photos in the morning when I feel more up to it.
Don't be stupid like me. Remember that water freezes.
[Edited on 10-12-2018 by CRUSTY]clearly_not_atara - 10-12-2018 at 01:48
One of the research groups in my (well, the one I got my degree in) department, way back when, had trouble making a particularly thermally-unstable
complex because they couldn't get the apparatus uniformly cold. So one of the grad students simply moved his vacuum manifold outside into the
university courtyard and did the reaction at night in the dead of an Edmonton winter.
Thus, the "polar night synthesis" was born.
Vancea, L.; Graham, W.A.G. (1977). "Stereochemically Nonrigid Six-Coordinate Metal Carbonyl Complexes". J. Organomet. Chem. 134 (2): 219.
doi:10.1016/S0022-328X(00)81421-7. mayko - 10-12-2018 at 13:26
If it makes you feel any better, you aren't the first...
