but it's so pretty... (922 hits)
Category: NoneRating: 1.16 on 14 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by Targa (View user info) at 2005-12-17 20:55:44 EST
There is mercury in the thermostat.
Under any normal circumstance, I would have never discovered this. However, having just moved into a new apartment, I'm slowing realizing all of its short-comings. When I first got here, most of the windows were painted shut, there wasn't an outlet for the electric stove, and the bathroom sink leaked all over the floor.
Over the past fortnight, I've been making phone calls to various "handymen" all over the city, and they've slowly been coming by to fix things. Despite never being on time, and often not showing up on the correct day, things have been getting much better. They ran wiring for the stove, re-soldered the sink, and pried the windows open, all using their professional tools. (In this last case, the guy actually just punched the window tracks until the paint cracked.) Method aside, this place is shaping up.
When the people below us moved out, two days later, our place was freezing. (I'm not kidding either -- there was ice forming on all the windows.) I turned the heat up. It didn't get any warmer. I turned the heat up again. Nothing. What happened when I put it at its maximum for three days straight? Again, nothing. The ice on the windows just glinted in the sunshine and I walked around wearing my bedspread as a cape to keep warm. Like I said, handymen don't show up when they say they will, so I resigned myself to drinking alot of hot tea and living like I was winter-camping. "Broken furnace" got added to the list of shit that needed to be fixed.
Finally, I decided that the thermostat must have been broken, because I could certainly hear that the furnace was on. Prying apart the thermostat seemed like the natural thing to do, a conclusion that I came to because not only do I have no idea how it works, but I also don't know what's inside of it. Maybe I could fix it.
Growing up, I remember hearing my parents' stories of their elementary-school science classes, where they were allowed to play with mercury to discover the anomalies of the properties of matter. "Mercury is so neat", they would say. "It'd roll around on the table, and when you hit it, it'd fly into a bunch of little pieces, which you could then smash back together." Something about causing horrible disfiguring diseases caused them not to let us play with mercury by the time I was in school. I was always a little dissappointed by this, since it seemed like such a great toy.
You can imagine my surprise when I opened this thermostat to find, to my great thrill, a ball of mercury encased in a small glass tube. As I quickly discovered, a thermostat is a very simple thing. A thin metal coil senses the temperature of the room, and as the temperature increases, the metal expands. When the room is at the user-set temperature, the metal coils tilts the glass tube to one side, causing the mercury to drop to the end. Since mercury is a conductor, the circuit is broken, and the furnace turns off. It's pretty simple. All this was discovered by playing with a hairdryer and a few ice cubes. Probably not the smartest thing in the world, but it was in the interest of science. Well, sort of:
I didn't care how the furnace worked. I didn't care how the thermostat worked. I was busy trying to figure out if I could get the mercury OUT of the glass tube without actually putting myself in danger or breaking the tube. I'd dropped my blanket; it was freezing in the house, but it was still detrimental to my cause. No dice. That little glinting ball of mercury is in there pretty well. Not one to be daunted, I took to winging the temperature dial back and forth, causing the mercury to be slammed from side-to-side in its little tube. Cool.
Two days later, it's still cold in here. I don't think I did the furnance any favours by turning it on and off so many times in such a short time period. The man is coming to fix it tomorrow, apparently. In the meantime, I've still got the cover off of the thermostat.
User Reviews
Submitted by Lisa (user info) at 2006-01-22 21:05:17 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Coyote, are you serious? Don't fucking play with a ball of mercury, for God's sake.
Submitted by Lisa (user info) at 2006-01-22 21:03:58 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
You're going to get the diabetes in six months.
Submitted by Coyote (user info) at 2005-12-18 12:43:40 EST (#)
Ranking: 1
Pure metallic mercury isn't all that bad for you, it's the mercury salts that are deadly toxic. You'd be pretty safe just pushing the blob around on a tabletop with your fingertip, as long as you didn't, you know, eat any.
Submitted by FlakMonkey (user info) at 2005-12-18 10:03:44 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
I think the best thing about mercury is that it poisons people with short attention spans!
Okay, I'm kidding, but I loved this post. Reminds me of myself when I first got kicked out of the nest.
Submitted by Bryanhoop (user info) at 2005-12-18 05:36:03 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
She did a lot of acid. You gardenhead! Amazing I say! And to Louisiana we shall go!
Submitted by blujnbbyqn (user info) at 2005-12-18 00:26:58 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
What you have is land-lord's disease. Much pain and misery are yours to endure whilst you reside there.
Michelle
Submitted by blujnbbyqn (user info) at 2005-12-18 00:18:47 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Hate to put a damper on your "What If" party but you have most likely ingested more mercury just by eating fish in your short life than you would have absorbed even if the thermostat glass broke while you were holding it over your mouth.
Michelle
Submitted by MandaPanda (user info) at 2005-12-18 00:09:51 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
I thought I was the only one.
Submitted by precision (user info) at 2005-12-17 23:25:55 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
Just remember...Mercury tastes just like chicken...really
Submitted by AlexorGM (user info) at 2005-12-17 22:10:53 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
i got kind of sad when it left you hanging, but it was interesting.
Submitted by MrSparkle847 (user info) at 2005-12-17 21:45:56 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
I believe light switches used to work in this manner. The idea with the thermostat is that by turning that little mercury capsule it will form pools of variable sizes to control conductivity.
Submitted by HighVoltage900 (user info) at 2005-12-17 21:36:13 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
I was going to give this a +1, but then I thought it over. The almost child-like wonder of mercury. The hardship of how cold your place is. The memories of a better time when you COULD touch deadly metals as a small child without any sense of worry. It touched some part of me, some little part that had been put away never to be opened again. And yet, that part expanded, filling my senses and making me remember that at heart, we are all just curious children trying to get the mercury.
But needs rape.
Cunt.
Submitted by The_Yellow_Dart (user info) at 2005-12-17 21:07:02 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
I have a large set of "Rare earth magnets", which are meant for holding up ventilation ducts, but I just have them to play with. On the container they came in it clearly states "not a toy, can cause blood clots". And How! But I love them, they're so hard to pry apart and snap back shut so quickly it's scary. But I can put them on opposite sides of my arm and watch the top one magically move around as I drag the bottom one around. I heart magnets.
Submitted by Dante_Alighieri (user info) at 2005-12-17 21:05:31 EST (#)
Ranking: 1
Needed more broken thermometers and disfiguring disease.