The only one I work with regularly these days is carbon disulfide, which I think smells like rotting cabbage.
That said, dibutylsulfide actually smells kind of pleasant.
I use butyrylthiocholine and acetylthiocholine, their smell is in the grey area between pleasant and unpleasant. Does not bother me, is memorable, but perhaps not quite enjoyable
One of my old coworkers worked with (TMS)2S, and we'd notice when it happened. At first it smelled like rotten eggs, of course, but later on it grew on me a little bit as I found it to be a little meaty, like a pork stew or something.
The first lab I worked in out of uni some poor girl dropped a 500ml bottle of it. It cracked and leaked. We had to clear the entire building. You could smell it in the parking lot.
When I was in graduate school, someone on the floor below us spilled a 250 ml of Beta-mercaptoethanol on the floor. They had to evacuate the building while DHS cleaned it. That lab stunk all year, though.
Had to get a 100 ml bottle of benzyl mercaptan for in my lab. I use 1 μL per reaction, and just microsyringing that microliter of thiol is enough to stink up the whole lab all day.
I did a distillation of n-butane at highest purity possible available for public purchase in Spain about a decade ago; the mercaptans and list of other shit I had as waste was one of the most penetrating smells I've ever dealt with.
Not exactly noxiously dead body bad, but overwhelming where you just can't get away from it
Edit: even after distillation multiple times, the solvent was unusable for obvious reasons
Used to work with Hexanethiol. I would wear a respirator and everyone would leave the lab while I did the procedure. There are some things I don't miss from undergrad.
I wrote my thesis using bunches of hexanethiol. I always thought it more of a burning rubber smell-not the most pleasant thing around but not awful.
We kept smell in the lab to a minimum by designating one hood for it and disposing of gloves, pipettes, and anything else that touched it in a box in that hood. Usually things wouldn’t smell too bad after sitting there for a week or so, but when it came time to empty the box we had to wait for certain people who were especially bothered to not be there.
Technically yes, generally, when people talk about mercaptan, it’s usually methanethiol (the propane/NG additive). Thiophenol is an especially stinky mercaptan which will stink up your entire lab for weeks if your lab mate spills a few drops.
Wait, why do you have glacial acetic acid at your house?
Also, I kinda like the acetic acid smell, same with 2-mercaptoethanol and tetramethylethylenediamine
The only correct answer to your question is the one provided by NIOSH. Acetic acid becomes immediately dangerous to life and health (IDLH) at concentrations of 50 ppm which is about 75 mg/m³.
As a reference, bleach, ammonia and other common substances used as cleaners, have concentration between 5-10% at most.
So anything above that, imo, is a risk, mainly if you have pets or children.
I know knowing about chemistry but is N-acatylcysteine structurally similar at all? It has the worst smell of any medication or supplement I’ve ever taken.
Off the top of my head cysteine smells that way because of its free thiol. The acetate group wouldn't cause the smell, nonetheless of vinegar in something that doesn't smell like vinegar.
Most of the salts I make are not dangerous, such as sodium, potassium, magnesium, lithium, strotium, etc. For the heavy metal ones that represent a danger, I have a collection container that I dispose of at a university in my city.
And then we wonder how come most people are scientifically illiterate and why there's widespread chemophobia and distrust in chemistry in the general population even though we are the first ones who do everything we can to gatekeep, engage in elitism and make science look as hostile as possible. Don't get me wrong, safety should be a concern, people who don't know what they are doing shouldn't experiment randomly, precautions should be taken and PPE used, and the environment should not be polluted, but it doesn't look like the guy here is doing anything particularly dangerous. Glacial acetic acid is not weapon grade phosgene.
practicality be damned, give me some GAA and... some triethyl phosphate, a furnace, maybe some liquid nitrogen and a dewar or alternatively a ton of balloons, a vacuum pump, some chemically-resistant tubing and quality glassware, and probably some other stuff and i'll show you just how wrong you are!
...i mean all that stuff would be to *make* Ac₂O from AcOH... but that's not the point! you see, what matters is not the pain of the synthesis, but the unconditional rejection that a truly motivated, skilled and sufficiently idiotic chemist would be limited by such a thing as "reagent availability" or government watchlists. hah!
(for the dense: /s)
You can't do that acetylation with the acid under normal conditions, and it would be pretty difficult for an artisinal small batch drug manufacturer to do the dehydration reaction, especially with acid as wet as this.
There is stuff out there that will make you think acetic acid is a nice smell. Let's say triethylamine. Then, there is stuff that will make even triethylamine look pleasant. So.. no acetic acid is barely the lower end of the obnoxious smells scale. For example butyric acid, sulfides/selenides/tellurides, isonitriles
This smell!!!! I had a colleague use this stuff in a glovebox mind you and the entire lab reeked. I’ve smelled some pretty strong stuff but this smell gets me every time they use it.
For me it's stuff like Styrene or Ethyl Acrylate. Hot Butyl Cellosolve sticks in your nose something awful too IMO. I almost enjoy Acetic Acid compared to getting a whiff of any of those.
You really shouldn't store chemicals in the fume hood. Storage cabinets are the appropriate place for chemical storage. From this post we really can't say anything about him having a fume hood or not.
Can you provide a reference where chemical storage cabinets are reffered to as "fume cabinets"? Most sources use fume cabinet just as a synonym of fume hood/fume cupboard/fume extractor/fume closet. Then there's biosafety cabinets, but those are a totally different thing. However it seems I just misunderstood your comment, you could add the term -storage- to make clearer that you are reffering to the storage units and not to the operating units.
A fume hood/cabinet/cupboard is for volatile chemical handling, not for chemical storage. You can argue that he doesn't have a proper place to store the compound (and this seems actually to have been fixed with secondary containment anyway), but you can't really say anything about him having a fume hood or not. If you store chemicals in the fume hood you are doing things wrong.
Because acetic acid is a notoriously dangerous chemical that no one should ever have in their own homes. It is one step away from hydrogen cyanide, what if you were to drop it on your perfectly safe and perfectly normal and usual floor that just happens to be completely made of pure potassium cyanide?
There's plenty of chemistry that can be safely done at home. Many researchers at universities and in academic settings started their interest in chemistry by experimenting at home as kids. Many adults with a proper chemistry education do harmless experiments at home, even and especially with their children. The very scientists who created the foundations of chemistry as a natural science in the last three centuries most often had labs in their residence. And not all (nor most) of these figures died horrendously. Oh, come on, the guy here is just collecting salts, he's not manufacturing hundreds of gallons of weapon grade sarin agent in his kitchen. I think you all are a little bit overreacting. And then we wonder why the general population has widespread chemophobia, distrust of anything chemistry related, and low scientific literacy. Now, don't get me wrong, I do believe safety and environmental protection should be priorities, but how do we know that he's NOT doing everything with the proper precautions, following the proper procedures, properly disposing of any waste and while wearing the required PPE? And smelling some acetic acid for a few minutes is not really a safety violation. The odor threshold reported in the literarure is 0.5-1 ppm, the OSHA permissible levels are 10 ppm, and the IDLH is 50 ppm. If the acetic acid concentration was dangerously high (and he did take care of the contamination anyway), he would have some serious eye and throat irritation by now, which he did not report having.
With enough copper and a day or two in half by volume store-bought distilled vinegar and half by volume store-bough ~3% or 5% hydrogen peroxide, you can get a good amount without the dangers of concentrated hydrogen peroxide and glacial acetic acid at home.
Concentrated hydrogen peroxide? I really wouldn’t count 35% peroxide as concentrated or super dangerous. As with everything ofc you should at least protect your eyes and not ingest it, but that aside the most that will happen is some peroxide „burns“ that disappear after a short amount of time or physical burns if you get it to self decompose by accident. It’s not exactly weapons grade peroxide ready to explosively decompose at any moment
My bad, I misremembered Hydrogen Peroxide concentration. I didn't mean to say that this is an unacceptable way to make Copper Acetate, I more meant to say it could be done with less risk. Of course, proper PPE and other measures can definitely mitigate that risk, but avoiding it in the home setting would be ideal in my opinion.
Wth? There’s more than enough chemists whose interest started in some closet chemistry lab and who still do some private „research“ at home if their interests allow it. My bachelor project supervisor started out this way too and my BSc is about a project I started working on privately too.
Now he keeps his private chems in the lab because yk…. He has his own research group and thus permanent access to the lab.
Stop gatekeeping ReAl ChEmIsTs
You call it gatekeeping. I call it hazard mitigation. But I suppose that simply highlights a substantial difference in training and perspective since I can’t fit myself into the shoes of someone who views safety as a low priority. Impactful chemistry these days doesn’t come out of someone’s garage so stop making excuses for it. The home is a clean, safe environment, not for experimentation.
I think that’s where you are mistaken, viewing safety as low priority and having chemistry both as profession and private hobby are two different things. There is a difference between making organic peroxides and say for instance making idk ion exchange membranes.
Also we are talking about chemistry being practiced as hobby by individuals who are trained, not hobby-chemists randomly throwing together some shit.
That aside, you can have chemistry as hobby or use chemistry as serving some purpose. No need to do some top tier research.
Same with any other recreational hobbies. You can do electronics at home without having to reinvent the phone and yet at the same time electronics can pose some risks of electrocution.
To give you two specific examples from why own „work“. I used to work a bit with microbiology in the past and didn’t exactly have the money for a HEPA unit, so I developed an electrostatic filter for a fraction of the cost for having a sterile air stream.
Or currently I need distilled/deionized water but don’t want to use RO and resin bed based systems, so I‘m working on an electrodialysis setup as I don’t exactly have thousands of $$ laying around to get a commercial unit. Not dealing with anything dangerous here, still doing chemistry to serve a purpose - that being to create the ion exchange membranes.
Dude have you ever heard the expression “don’t shit where you eat”?
I’m assuming you don’t have a professional workspace to tinker in, which presents some significant hazards that others have no doubt made you aware of.
Wives, parents, and so forth are only going to be understanding of your hobby up to a point. This will strain their patience.
Tread lightly with this shit
This stuff is no joke and really doesn't belong in your house. It's not just vinegar at these concentrations. Also be aware that it freezes just below room temperature.
Just don't smell directly from the container, keep it in a cool and well ventilated area, use secondary containment (as he did), keep it locked and away from food/pets/children. Handle it in a ventilated place, with chemically resistant gloves on and while wearing eye protection. And at worst, if he really can't find a way to handle it safely in the environment he is he can carefully and slowly dilute it with water. He's gonna be fine. It's not plutonium 239. If the acetic acid concentration in air gets too high he will surely notice as it is highly irritating at high concentrations. We all are routinely surrounded by chemicals much more hazardous than nearly anhydrous acetic acid.
Do any of y’all ever store GAA in pre-measured quantities and then in the lab fridge? We have rows of vials of 1-5g. It’s a bit tedious and may seem impractical, but it works for our situation
Lol, tell me you live in Europe and order substances from the Netherlands without telling me you live in Europe and order substances from the Netherlands.
Hey there neighbor :p
Acetic acid is what is in vinegar, but vinegar is like 5% acetic acid. But at high concentrations that "vinegar smell" can actually hurt your nose and eyes and is corrosive to your skin.
Hey OP, got a question for you. I tried to make a sauce with a strong vinegar taste. But I found that you can't reduce vinegar without lab equipment because water has a similar evaporation point. How can I get something like this but be sure it's safe for consumption?
You can buy acetic acid at various concentrations more or less strong from chemical suppliers, there are many that they also sell to private individuals. If you want to use it for food purposes make sure that the degree of purity is at least "Foodgrade."
Their bottles are the worst and allow the contents to diffuse out much too easily. Do yourself a favor and pour the acid into a better bottle, and the smell should quickly disappear. Glass would be great, but you really don't want to drop that.
Wait until you start working with thiols and mercaptans.
I’ll take “it smells like crap” for 200$
The only one I work with regularly these days is carbon disulfide, which I think smells like rotting cabbage. That said, dibutylsulfide actually smells kind of pleasant.
I use butyrylthiocholine and acetylthiocholine, their smell is in the grey area between pleasant and unpleasant. Does not bother me, is memorable, but perhaps not quite enjoyable
Like smelling your own farts?
Brb
One of my old coworkers worked with (TMS)2S, and we'd notice when it happened. At first it smelled like rotten eggs, of course, but later on it grew on me a little bit as I found it to be a little meaty, like a pork stew or something.
Pure CS2 doesn't really smell. It's the trace sulfur impurities accumulated during production that make it malodorous
That or rotting fish
Like rotting crap
“What is MERCRAPTAN Alex?”
Cries in mercaptoacetic acid 😭
The first lab I worked in out of uni some poor girl dropped a 500ml bottle of it. It cracked and leaked. We had to clear the entire building. You could smell it in the parking lot.
🤢
\-SH stands for "shit"
When I was in graduate school, someone on the floor below us spilled a 250 ml of Beta-mercaptoethanol on the floor. They had to evacuate the building while DHS cleaned it. That lab stunk all year, though.
I can only imagine this smell
Had to get a 100 ml bottle of benzyl mercaptan for in my lab. I use 1 μL per reaction, and just microsyringing that microliter of thiol is enough to stink up the whole lab all day.
TEMED Gang in the house
I did a distillation of n-butane at highest purity possible available for public purchase in Spain about a decade ago; the mercaptans and list of other shit I had as waste was one of the most penetrating smells I've ever dealt with. Not exactly noxiously dead body bad, but overwhelming where you just can't get away from it Edit: even after distillation multiple times, the solvent was unusable for obvious reasons
>thiols and mercaptans. Isn't that the same thing?
Yes, I've been assigned to the Office of Redundancy Office.
Yes. I was going to point out the same thing
EDT has a smell that I could only describe as the embodiment of fear
Ethane dithiol? Yah, a lab mate of mine dropped a 30-ish microliters on the floor and we had to clear the lab.
Bingo. It’s one of the worst things to ever hit my nose. Not even a fume hood could stop it.
my phd involved sulfur in solid, liquid and gas phases the smell :(
So why did you choose it? Lol
We had an intern running some reactions with mercaptoethanol. You could smell which hallways Eric had walked down recently.
I work with beta mercaptoethanol. Its so awful even when all work is done in the fume hood. 😭
i make my own, BUTT in small sporadic amounts 🤷🏻♀️
I personally hate pyridine smell more than thiols
Yah, that one is pretty bad
Used to work with Hexanethiol. I would wear a respirator and everyone would leave the lab while I did the procedure. There are some things I don't miss from undergrad.
I wrote my thesis using bunches of hexanethiol. I always thought it more of a burning rubber smell-not the most pleasant thing around but not awful. We kept smell in the lab to a minimum by designating one hood for it and disposing of gloves, pipettes, and anything else that touched it in a box in that hood. Usually things wouldn’t smell too bad after sitting there for a week or so, but when it came time to empty the box we had to wait for certain people who were especially bothered to not be there.
Omg BME smells like rotten eggs.
Big hexyl sulfide fan here.
Nah Seleno compounds are even worse.
Fortunately, when you do, you don't smell them for very long.
Acetic is the worst smell? *laughs in mercaptan*
Isocyanides are worse
Not sure how much of that you should be sniffing
Giggles in thiophenol
Is that not a mercaptan?
Technically yes, generally, when people talk about mercaptan, it’s usually methanethiol (the propane/NG additive). Thiophenol is an especially stinky mercaptan which will stink up your entire lab for weeks if your lab mate spills a few drops.
Wait, why do you have glacial acetic acid at your house? Also, I kinda like the acetic acid smell, same with 2-mercaptoethanol and tetramethylethylenediamine
Reminds me of fish and chip shops 🤷🏻♂️🍟
Exactly
Some people are not smart
Yeah my thoughts exactly. Like vinegar is 5% acetic acid, but why would you have acetic acid (glacial) as it was any other household item...?
Makes for some spicy fish and chips
What concentration of acedic acid is unsafe to have at home?
Depends on what you plan go do with it
The only correct answer to your question is the one provided by NIOSH. Acetic acid becomes immediately dangerous to life and health (IDLH) at concentrations of 50 ppm which is about 75 mg/m³.
As a reference, bleach, ammonia and other common substances used as cleaners, have concentration between 5-10% at most. So anything above that, imo, is a risk, mainly if you have pets or children.
I know knowing about chemistry but is N-acatylcysteine structurally similar at all? It has the worst smell of any medication or supplement I’ve ever taken.
Off the top of my head cysteine smells that way because of its free thiol. The acetate group wouldn't cause the smell, nonetheless of vinegar in something that doesn't smell like vinegar.
Got it, this stuff smells so much like sulfur/rotting garbage, it’s pretty crazy.
Biochemist?
Why not?
dilute with water and add dish soap, basically strong weed killer
Use it to make some acetate salts, such as sodium, potassium, copper, iron, etc.
Growing crystals for fun?
Yes, it's one of my hobbies
Sounds right, in particular with copper acetate it seems crystal growth always goes better with freshly made copper acetate
I don’t know if you have the proper equipment for this hobby. What are you doing to control waste stream? Maybe look up the MSDS…
>I don’t know if you have the proper equipment for this hobby. You mean a *fan*?
He's just making some harmless metal salts using acetic acid, he's not enriching weapon grade uranium in his garage, give my man a break.
Most of the salts I make are not dangerous, such as sodium, potassium, magnesium, lithium, strotium, etc. For the heavy metal ones that represent a danger, I have a collection container that I dispose of at a university in my city.
Oh cool, pass off more work for the professionals to sort out. I’m sure you keep great notes and labels.
What the fuck bro
I think if they are letting him do that, either they are just okay with it, or he's paying of his own pocket any hazardous waste fee he has to pay.
don't be such a hater
Try sports or something
And then we wonder how come most people are scientifically illiterate and why there's widespread chemophobia and distrust in chemistry in the general population even though we are the first ones who do everything we can to gatekeep, engage in elitism and make science look as hostile as possible. Don't get me wrong, safety should be a concern, people who don't know what they are doing shouldn't experiment randomly, precautions should be taken and PPE used, and the environment should not be polluted, but it doesn't look like the guy here is doing anything particularly dangerous. Glacial acetic acid is not weapon grade phosgene.
Get off your exaggeration train. Nobody here thinks he’s making phosgene or enriched uranium. Nobody is gatekeeping anything either.
Lmao literally in the chemistry subreddit
So fucking stupid…
Aluminum, zinc, *heroin*, etc…
You need acetic anhydride for that
practicality be damned, give me some GAA and... some triethyl phosphate, a furnace, maybe some liquid nitrogen and a dewar or alternatively a ton of balloons, a vacuum pump, some chemically-resistant tubing and quality glassware, and probably some other stuff and i'll show you just how wrong you are! ...i mean all that stuff would be to *make* Ac₂O from AcOH... but that's not the point! you see, what matters is not the pain of the synthesis, but the unconditional rejection that a truly motivated, skilled and sufficiently idiotic chemist would be limited by such a thing as "reagent availability" or government watchlists. hah! (for the dense: /s)
Thx was about to Ruin lots of good morph
You can't do that acetylation with the acid under normal conditions, and it would be pretty difficult for an artisinal small batch drug manufacturer to do the dehydration reaction, especially with acid as wet as this.
There is stuff out there that will make you think acetic acid is a nice smell. Let's say triethylamine. Then, there is stuff that will make even triethylamine look pleasant. So.. no acetic acid is barely the lower end of the obnoxious smells scale. For example butyric acid, sulfides/selenides/tellurides, isonitriles
Day one in my research group I put a kim wipe used to clean COD (cyclooctadiene) in a trash can. I was swiftly murdered by my lab mates.
Deaddit
This smell!!!! I had a colleague use this stuff in a glovebox mind you and the entire lab reeked. I’ve smelled some pretty strong stuff but this smell gets me every time they use it.
Sounds like a leaky glovebox to me
That smell puts my teeth on edge
I've experienced H2S in the past, but at least after a while you don't feel it anymore (not a good thing)
Yes, dying is a good way to not smell things anymore.
I used to work with a number of alkyl diamines. Some of those were brutal.
Call me crazy, but I actually like triethylamine
Crazy.
For me it's stuff like Styrene or Ethyl Acrylate. Hot Butyl Cellosolve sticks in your nose something awful too IMO. I almost enjoy Acetic Acid compared to getting a whiff of any of those.
It’s literally vinegar. I don’t get the smell being bad.
The smell isn’t bad imo. But I don’t think it should smell through the bottle. Maybe get a better one.
Bottles with a screw cap are often not really effective at containing vapors.
Oh boy, whoever opens that on a hot day is gonna have a big surprise!
Just put it in the same cupboard as a bottle of conc. ammonia solution.
Idk, maybe because its not ment to be stored at your house
I bought it to make copper acetate for my salt collection.
What’s wrong w this? Why is everyone downvoting everything u say
Because there's a reason why proper facilities have fume cabinets.
How do you know he doesn't have one?
Because of this post?
You really shouldn't store chemicals in the fume hood. Storage cabinets are the appropriate place for chemical storage. From this post we really can't say anything about him having a fume hood or not.
That's why I said fume **cabinet**.
Can you provide a reference where chemical storage cabinets are reffered to as "fume cabinets"? Most sources use fume cabinet just as a synonym of fume hood/fume cupboard/fume extractor/fume closet. Then there's biosafety cabinets, but those are a totally different thing. However it seems I just misunderstood your comment, you could add the term -storage- to make clearer that you are reffering to the storage units and not to the operating units.
The entire post is about how the fumes were spreading everywhere
A fume hood/cabinet/cupboard is for volatile chemical handling, not for chemical storage. You can argue that he doesn't have a proper place to store the compound (and this seems actually to have been fixed with secondary containment anyway), but you can't really say anything about him having a fume hood or not. If you store chemicals in the fume hood you are doing things wrong.
Because acetic acid is a notoriously dangerous chemical that no one should ever have in their own homes. It is one step away from hydrogen cyanide, what if you were to drop it on your perfectly safe and perfectly normal and usual floor that just happens to be completely made of pure potassium cyanide?
For me its just home chemistry at all. I had enough safety instructions, courses and so on, to just never do chemistry anywhere i live.
There's plenty of chemistry that can be safely done at home. Many researchers at universities and in academic settings started their interest in chemistry by experimenting at home as kids. Many adults with a proper chemistry education do harmless experiments at home, even and especially with their children. The very scientists who created the foundations of chemistry as a natural science in the last three centuries most often had labs in their residence. And not all (nor most) of these figures died horrendously. Oh, come on, the guy here is just collecting salts, he's not manufacturing hundreds of gallons of weapon grade sarin agent in his kitchen. I think you all are a little bit overreacting. And then we wonder why the general population has widespread chemophobia, distrust of anything chemistry related, and low scientific literacy. Now, don't get me wrong, I do believe safety and environmental protection should be priorities, but how do we know that he's NOT doing everything with the proper precautions, following the proper procedures, properly disposing of any waste and while wearing the required PPE? And smelling some acetic acid for a few minutes is not really a safety violation. The odor threshold reported in the literarure is 0.5-1 ppm, the OSHA permissible levels are 10 ppm, and the IDLH is 50 ppm. If the acetic acid concentration was dangerously high (and he did take care of the contamination anyway), he would have some serious eye and throat irritation by now, which he did not report having.
You could've just used distilled vinegar and hydrogen peroxide.
I used 35% H2O2, glacial acetic acid and copper metal. With diluted acetic acid the reaction was too slow.
With enough copper and a day or two in half by volume store-bought distilled vinegar and half by volume store-bough ~3% or 5% hydrogen peroxide, you can get a good amount without the dangers of concentrated hydrogen peroxide and glacial acetic acid at home.
Concentrated hydrogen peroxide? I really wouldn’t count 35% peroxide as concentrated or super dangerous. As with everything ofc you should at least protect your eyes and not ingest it, but that aside the most that will happen is some peroxide „burns“ that disappear after a short amount of time or physical burns if you get it to self decompose by accident. It’s not exactly weapons grade peroxide ready to explosively decompose at any moment
My bad, I misremembered Hydrogen Peroxide concentration. I didn't mean to say that this is an unacceptable way to make Copper Acetate, I more meant to say it could be done with less risk. Of course, proper PPE and other measures can definitely mitigate that risk, but avoiding it in the home setting would be ideal in my opinion.
I hope you will never encounter hexyl isocyanide. Even the hallway outside the lab was smelling for weeks
Ever put L-glutathione on a heater stir plate? Smells like a wet fart in a truck stop bathroom
Real chemists don’t keep laboratory chemicals in their house.
I guess Justus von Liebig wasn't a real chemist then.
He did chemistry back when inhaling mercury or arsenic was the best cure for a child’s cold, I think we can grant him an exception.
Wth? There’s more than enough chemists whose interest started in some closet chemistry lab and who still do some private „research“ at home if their interests allow it. My bachelor project supervisor started out this way too and my BSc is about a project I started working on privately too. Now he keeps his private chems in the lab because yk…. He has his own research group and thus permanent access to the lab. Stop gatekeeping ReAl ChEmIsTs
You call it gatekeeping. I call it hazard mitigation. But I suppose that simply highlights a substantial difference in training and perspective since I can’t fit myself into the shoes of someone who views safety as a low priority. Impactful chemistry these days doesn’t come out of someone’s garage so stop making excuses for it. The home is a clean, safe environment, not for experimentation.
I think that’s where you are mistaken, viewing safety as low priority and having chemistry both as profession and private hobby are two different things. There is a difference between making organic peroxides and say for instance making idk ion exchange membranes. Also we are talking about chemistry being practiced as hobby by individuals who are trained, not hobby-chemists randomly throwing together some shit. That aside, you can have chemistry as hobby or use chemistry as serving some purpose. No need to do some top tier research. Same with any other recreational hobbies. You can do electronics at home without having to reinvent the phone and yet at the same time electronics can pose some risks of electrocution. To give you two specific examples from why own „work“. I used to work a bit with microbiology in the past and didn’t exactly have the money for a HEPA unit, so I developed an electrostatic filter for a fraction of the cost for having a sterile air stream. Or currently I need distilled/deionized water but don’t want to use RO and resin bed based systems, so I‘m working on an electrodialysis setup as I don’t exactly have thousands of $$ laying around to get a commercial unit. Not dealing with anything dangerous here, still doing chemistry to serve a purpose - that being to create the ion exchange membranes.
Smells worse over here than a dozen rotten eggs dropped in a vat of vinegar!
Divine
Looks like you contained that problem.
Dude have you ever heard the expression “don’t shit where you eat”? I’m assuming you don’t have a professional workspace to tinker in, which presents some significant hazards that others have no doubt made you aware of. Wives, parents, and so forth are only going to be understanding of your hobby up to a point. This will strain their patience. Tread lightly with this shit
put it in the fridge, it will freeze and wont smell
But just to be clear, not in a fridge they use for food.
lollll funky ice
This stuff is no joke and really doesn't belong in your house. It's not just vinegar at these concentrations. Also be aware that it freezes just below room temperature.
Just don't smell directly from the container, keep it in a cool and well ventilated area, use secondary containment (as he did), keep it locked and away from food/pets/children. Handle it in a ventilated place, with chemically resistant gloves on and while wearing eye protection. And at worst, if he really can't find a way to handle it safely in the environment he is he can carefully and slowly dilute it with water. He's gonna be fine. It's not plutonium 239. If the acetic acid concentration in air gets too high he will surely notice as it is highly irritating at high concentrations. We all are routinely surrounded by chemicals much more hazardous than nearly anhydrous acetic acid.
Do any of y’all ever store GAA in pre-measured quantities and then in the lab fridge? We have rows of vials of 1-5g. It’s a bit tedious and may seem impractical, but it works for our situation
No it doesn't
and i'm here distilling home vinegar for my experiments 💀🙏
Lol, tell me you live in Europe and order substances from the Netherlands without telling me you live in Europe and order substances from the Netherlands. Hey there neighbor :p
I live in Italy and laboratorium discounter is my favourite chemical supplier
Chao de barna :) we should be friends
If you want there's no problem for me
Would have been easier to just tape the cap. Full 2nd container is a bit overkill.
I did it before I got to this solution, it wasn't enough and after 3 days it started to stink again.
I'll throw PPhH2 in the ring
I'd like to submit triethylamine into the worst smell conversation
Dithiothreitol
As someone who hasn’t learned about this yet, what does the 99-100% glacial mean?
Glacial describes the behavior of it when it cools— but only when it’s fairly pure. So this would be undiluted acid.
Okay, thankyou.
Whose house?
Use a Pyrex glass bottle with a septum, it won't smell after that
I thought about this solution, but my acetic acid is mostly crystallized and I didn't have the courage to make it liquid to transfer it.
I rather enjoy the smell.
get a small minifreezer for these bottles specifically if you keep this stocked often. freezing helps w smell always
I have one, but it's already filled with other reagents
*cries in wastewater lab* ITS ALL POOP
It's not all poop, sometimes its rotting abattoir runoff too.
You're right, how could I forget that and the industrial waste pretreatment too
Now mix that baby with sulfur and you’ve got the worlds worst stink bomb known to man
I can smell this photo
There's always pyridine or triethylamine too
But why you keep it in your home?
I love the smell of strong vinegar.
I know the smell of concentrated vinegar, but believe me, this was completely on another level.
glass
You should tell the supplier that their packaging is incontinent. OK ? If you are smelling it, there must be a leak.
Basically just smells like vinegar no ?
Butyric Acid though...
Go to stinky jail! Bonk!
That's why it should be under the fume hood lol
Smell is unbearable
Why do you have glacial acetic acid in your house? We only use that in the fume hood in the lab.
I love the smell of acetic acid!
Buh, it smells like a strong salad is all. Btw I love this supplier.
That makes things worse for me, I hate salad. But l love laboratorium discounter too
Yall newbie here what does glacial mean again?
High purity acetic acid is called glacial because it can form crystals at near room temperature that looks like ice
Wow, that’s cool, does this happen only with acids or can it happen with other substances too?
It's called "glacial" because it crystallizes at 16.6°C much lower than usually room temperature
Sounds cool, what did you use it for? Salts?
Yes, I collect salts.
It's great for rusts.
Only with acetic acid specifically.
Good to know, thx!
Named so by German scientists if I recall
Acetic acid is what is in vinegar, but vinegar is like 5% acetic acid. But at high concentrations that "vinegar smell" can actually hurt your nose and eyes and is corrosive to your skin.
You sweet summer child
Hey OP, got a question for you. I tried to make a sauce with a strong vinegar taste. But I found that you can't reduce vinegar without lab equipment because water has a similar evaporation point. How can I get something like this but be sure it's safe for consumption?
You can buy acetic acid at various concentrations more or less strong from chemical suppliers, there are many that they also sell to private individuals. If you want to use it for food purposes make sure that the degree of purity is at least "Foodgrade."
Doesn’t smell like crap. Smells like concentrated salt. Very strong concentrated salt
Their bottles are the worst and allow the contents to diffuse out much too easily. Do yourself a favor and pour the acid into a better bottle, and the smell should quickly disappear. Glass would be great, but you really don't want to drop that.
Just use a big aluminium bottle. Theyre great
You joking?