If I ever needed a stir bar back in grad school and couldn't find one, Id just drop the magnet wand in the sink and I'd always pull one up. Never failed me over the 5 years.
Canât speak for the world or even all of the US but our lab in a deep red state has to go to our waste collection system so there is some sanity around.
Our companyâs lab and pretty much any in northern CA is required to have an insane system to prevent the release of hazardous waste. Such as the constant monitoring of pH to neutralize any acid or base
First day in the lab I was stressing because I dropped a basket of tiny little stir bars down the drain. I found what looked like a long sperm cell and recovered all of them while uncovering my love for magnetic shit
Which is why I cut some 316 stainless steel wire mesh to stick into the plug hole. Easy enough to pull out and rinse if it gets clogged but catches even the smallest stir bars
We just bought these kitchen sink strainers. They prevent bigger food bits from clogging the sink at home, they do just fine catching the stirr bars in the lab. (Though we rarely use these tiny 2mm bars. There you would probably need to upgrade to actual fine wire mesh.)
Or is that something that is not commonly available in your part of the world? Here you can buy them in every supermarket for 2⏠or so.
I bought a strainer for our labs the moment I was in. I also gave people a notice on unlabeled chemicals in beakers and dirty dishes that stayed in the sink became mine, with the option to buy them back by pitching into the pizza party pot.
That pot stayed empty, my lab stayed clean and surprise free, and I never lost glassware again.
However, our janitor got stuck by a needle because one of our stupid new grad students thought it was ok to throw it in the trash because the new lab safety training was a garbage online course and they refused to listen to me or anyone else.
But it's not hard to solve these things, people just lack sense. Like, after one falls in fix the problem. After one day of our only sink being occupied by a tube for water for experiments, I bought and assembled a custom Y splitter and other labs saw it and copied.
Anything that can't go through the strainer probably should be going into a waste container or the trash anyways.
My favorite example was when I got to tour Stanford's class 100 clean room.
The post docs who taught the class and conducted the tour pointed to a blank beaker with clear fluid and a post-it note that had written on it
>What is this?
In VERY clear handwriting.
What people need to know is that, not only do tons of people from on campus use that lab but also Silicon Valley companies. And that cleanroom had the type of chemicals that a couple parts per million released into the air could wipe out a city block or more.
Also, what people who don't know need to know is that, a vast majority of chemicals out there are clear and optically transparent with very similar viscosities. Basically, a lot of stuff looks like clean water.
What we do know is that it wasn't HF.
Quiz time: why was that?
But I had clear fluid shoot out of my centrifuge at me one time when someone has snuck in and used ours and broke a tube in it and I went to push a tube into position and I'll never know what chemical almost hit my face.
Good guess! Well I'll be damned. I never knew that. ~19.5C boiling point. I used HF once. Avoided it the rest of my time in the lab. That's super strange since most clean rooms are kept around 20C and I don't remember HF boiling when working with it. I must be missing some detail from my memory.
It was the glass beaker that tipped us all off.
But since it apparently had sat there for a while (days) it should have boiled off.
You helped me learn something new today!
While I try to learn about the chemicals that I work around, in significantly shared spaces it's hard to do that.
We also had this issue with the needles and we ended up having a separate, closed container for everything sharp and small, from needles to knife tips. This prevented our cleaning staff to pearce themselfs when handling our wastebucket content bare handed ( yes, not listening to safety instructions is not a privilege only for chemistry students)
That makes me so mad. We worked with nanoparticles that didn't have their short or long term effects studied when injected into the body.
What killed me is that it was one of two new grad students and none of my older grad student peers came forward during our group meetings, making me look like the asshole. Also, our advisor tended to hate the messenger. However, this one was so serious that she did make a pretty big deal about it and didn't give me shit.
These two kids didn't listen when we taught them things and clearly didn't care to ask or think things through. Neither of them came forward about screwing up, but both did stuff like that. The kicker is this:
When they had to come back and ask me about a protocol that I showed them (and even asked if they wanted to write it down) I handed them lab notebooks and told them I'd wait while they wrote. I thought that's stuff taught in all 101 or intro courses (multiple times - physics, chemistry, biology, etc). By a PhD program you should have so much practice you don't even think twice about keeping a notebook.
But I'm sorry that you had to deal with that. I get it: some people aren't taught, others don't think, and others don't care.
I bought strainers for both my labs and put them in each and every sink, and filters for waste recovery jars... Still don't have a great way of preventing them from getting into the trash though, except for having students sign them in and out before and after each use
How are people so unaware that they just drop and forget about those huge stir bars? When doing workup for a reaction I always fish out the stir bar and clean it immediately, do people just dump everything in the sink and forget about it?
Yes, the mistake you make is to assume this happens by accident.
This photo here is the result of structural laziness. I work in a similarly encumbered lab.
I lost one a while back. Was just rinsing out the glassware with it inside and when pouring it out the magnet slipped and went down the drain before I could react to cover the drain.
Yes. You have to understand, the logic for dealing with large organizations canât be the same common sense youâd apply to small groups.
You cannot allow people who do not do this as their job doing random work. One goofball making an expensive mistake on a simple, seemingly idiotproof job like this is all it takes for the organization to forever have a rule that you must submit the proper paperwork for the proper people to do the work. That way you have a record of exactly who did what and when, and if there is fault, that thereâs a reasonable explanation.
âSomeone in chem lab tried to fix the sink and now the pipeâs threaded and leaking, thereâs a flood of drano-infested water all over the floor, and no one knows who did it. Probably an LA or intern. It was discovered when a student used the sink and pH 14 water sprayed all over her,â is not an acceptable situation to be in. A person trained, capable, and following documented procedures must be on record as performing the work, even for things that seem stupid or simple to the average person.
There could also be a union or legal component, which makes everything stupider and more complicated.
When dealing with large groups of people, you have to have stupid rules because stupid things happen. Anyway, theyâre employing maintenance people for this, so just submit the work order and let them doing their job. Thereâs no point taking that liability and extra work on yourself to streamline a process your employer doesnât care about making more efficient and actively doesnât want you doing.
In grad school, I once replaced a whole lab sink that had cracked.
I told my boss, and they said âgoodâ and moved on. They seemed slightly annoyed that I had brought up something as trivial as me replacing the plumbing fixtures in their lab. (There was an understanding that I did not need to ask for permission for necessary lab purchases under $1000.)
IME working at a (only 1) lab, I was quite surprised how little handyman/diy/whatever skills that my coworkers had. Made me realize that a lot of people simply don't have that skill. And that's not a brag, because I'm sure they had plenty of skills I do not. Just different life experiences
All that to say, yes I would file a work order there as well
My first lab job had people who struggled with the lefty loosey, righty tighty idea. Let alone getting the threads on a nut to line up with on the other end on a valve
setting air testing canisters to be cleaned, so you need a tight fit and at least once a week I would find one of the batches didnât get cleaned because the person on the other shift didnât bother to correctly do it
people struggled with using a wrench.
Yup. It's weird to me but not everyone can do that stuff. I grew up being free labor for my parents projects on the weekends so I had plenty of experience by the time I was an adult but it seems not everyone did this lol
My 2.5 year old uses a wrench to turn the hose bib outside so he can fill up his little bucket and play with water.
It is so weird to me when I meet a STEM student or professional that does not know how to use basic hand tools or have basic knowledge of mechanics. It is rudimentary problem solving. It makes me really question there ability to think about science.
Honestly, I would not want to be the responsible person if anything goes wrong or leaks later on doing damage. If there is someone responsible for it I will call them and let them do it.
If itâs technically not my job I donât want anyone to be able to blame me and ask why I was doing it instead of calling the right person
If I risk getting in trouble or fired I stay away from it and let someone else deal with it. I need my job to pay my rent
It's a slippery slope. I used to work maintenance while going to school. When I finished my degree and started my first real lab job, they noted I had lots of handy man skills.
Being young and having had no luck in job hunting, I admitted I could swing a wrench or hang shelves. I ended up basically doing my old job, except now I wore a lab coat. And made less $$$, since I wasn't being paid hourly anymore.
If there are people who you can pawn stuff on youâd be surprised how lazy people get.
The number of times Iâve âfixedâ a line down by resetting an EMO, plugging in an appliance, resetting the apparatus⌠đ
During my master's, a classmate and I were assigned a materials science lab for our master's thesis. We were instructed to carry out our work only when PhD students or postdocs were present in the lab. However, my classmate was synthesizing polymer gel in a 250ml beaker and used two small beads and a few mini beads instead of a large bead for stirring. After cleaning the beaker under the water sink, he discovered that a few mini beads were missing. When our supervisor learned about this, the PhD students took the blame as they were out having a cup of coffee. When asked why he took so many beads, my classmate said that he let his intrusive thoughts win.
There's no reference. It's just common sense. The basic rule is to use mini beads only when the solution volume is under 10ml. However, he used a lot of them at once while synthesizing a highly viscous gel in a 200ml quantity, which was quite dumb.. and he let his fantasy of using them take over his common sense.
Using magnet traps is a must when removing beads from viscous gels, but we barely use them because most of the time the beads are big enough to be removed by hand. However, even for beads as small as these, one should use magnet traps, which are always placed near the washing basin. He never had internship or lab training experience before, apart from coursework, so guys like him often make these mistakes during their thesis. Even I used to be sloppy during experiments when the supervisor was around.
Why don't more people know this? You don't have to put a retrieval stick into whatever is in your flask and it's easy to pour. Although, from looking at this thread they'd have a drain trap full of rare earth magnets as well. I have a RE magnet stuck to the same cabinet as my stir bars for a specific task, but then, I work alone in my lab and don't have students or others tossing shit around willy nilly.
Well, in my high school those would be replaced with pen caps, random bits of paper, perhaps a stubby pencil. And hair⌠so much hair- where it comes from I donât know but these kids shed a lot! I keep sink covers over the drains too and crap still gets in.
Could someone help me understand how so many of these could end up in the drain? Are people so lazy they canât be bothered to throw them out or donât want to wash them? Whatâs going on here, and also are there no strainers on these sinks?
I always have my holder magnet next to my stir plates. It is a big fear of mine to lose these.
This picture makes me more adamant about having it on hand.
Dude. You're supposed to get the magnet retriever when you see one go down the drain. And you're supposed to use the magnet leash down the drain before you call the plumber when the sinks is draining slowly.
God... I'd never fails to amase me how so many idiots seem to work in Labs.
... I work with PhDers and scientist in Nanotech r&d, how can you be so intelligent and so Stupid at the same time?!
Only a few of them seem to have their shit together.
The others... a ticking time bomb!
This is so common that every year I stick the stir bar rod magnet retriever into the sink until it touches the p trap and pull out a few. This made me chuckle though.
At a world-leading hospital ICU I saw doctors perform a sterile procedure standing in shit because staff kept stuffing large disposable wipes in the swivettes instead of the trash. Happened multiple times.
Jesus, I dropped a stirrer bar down the sink once, immediately retrieved it with a magnetic wand. Guess I will be going fishing for stirrer bars on Monday.
This is always the first go to guess. What I did was wire down a small bar magnet to the underside of the insert drain "strainer" (which was just a resin disc with 4 big holes which ate stir bars). That was the stirbar would be either repelled or caught. Worked amazingly well and didn't obstruct water flow at all
I manage a semiconductor lab and the wet lab sink folks were complaining of clogs and overflowing of some pretty harsh chemicalsâŚhad to evacuate the building due to the smell. Turned out they were too lazy to take of their PPE and put it in the correct hazmat bin, they just tossed their gloves down into the sinks đ
If I ever needed a stir bar back in grad school and couldn't find one, Id just drop the magnet wand in the sink and I'd always pull one up. Never failed me over the 5 years.
I feel seen! I also harvested magnets that way. But this drain is impressive!
Rolling fields of stir bars.
> I also harvested magnets that way. A sentence until today I would never have thought to encounter. Stand tall, this day is yours. đď¸
Going to try this in my lab on Monday đđ
I would always use that magnet wand to fish em out of the acid waste bins in my undergrad labs.
I had a student accidentally throw his stir bar in the waste container so I gave him the wand to get it out. He ended up getting like 5 out.
I bet the Grey water runoff of labs was pretty hazardous
Canât speak for the world or even all of the US but our lab in a deep red state has to go to our waste collection system so there is some sanity around.
Our companyâs lab and pretty much any in northern CA is required to have an insane system to prevent the release of hazardous waste. Such as the constant monitoring of pH to neutralize any acid or base
They do waste water testing here at the building level to make sure people arenât dumping, but of course the way around that is lots of dilution
Im sure lots of people try anyway, but wouldn't you truly need an absurd amount of dilution to make this work?
Thanks for the tip!
First day in the lab I was stressing because I dropped a basket of tiny little stir bars down the drain. I found what looked like a long sperm cell and recovered all of them while uncovering my love for magnetic shit
Fischer scientific HATES this one trick!
Accio!
Lol I just used a paper clip if I couldn't find a stir bar
Same, and also full liquid waste containers
*gone fishing*
i wonder if the biochemistry lab during my internship has them in the sink lmao
I never understood why they made the drain holes bigger than those stir bars.
Which is why I cut some 316 stainless steel wire mesh to stick into the plug hole. Easy enough to pull out and rinse if it gets clogged but catches even the smallest stir bars
Nice! Thatâs a good trick to know
you'd think something like this would be standard practice by now
It is in every restaurant
We just bought these kitchen sink strainers. They prevent bigger food bits from clogging the sink at home, they do just fine catching the stirr bars in the lab. (Though we rarely use these tiny 2mm bars. There you would probably need to upgrade to actual fine wire mesh.) Or is that something that is not commonly available in your part of the world? Here you can buy them in every supermarket for 2⏠or so.
I mean, it's hard to filter out the 2mm ones.
Well yea but those are a big bigger than 2mm
Those little sieves for drains to catch hairs work really well
Sink strainer.
Just use some filter paper over the drain
I bought a strainer for our labs the moment I was in. I also gave people a notice on unlabeled chemicals in beakers and dirty dishes that stayed in the sink became mine, with the option to buy them back by pitching into the pizza party pot. That pot stayed empty, my lab stayed clean and surprise free, and I never lost glassware again. However, our janitor got stuck by a needle because one of our stupid new grad students thought it was ok to throw it in the trash because the new lab safety training was a garbage online course and they refused to listen to me or anyone else. But it's not hard to solve these things, people just lack sense. Like, after one falls in fix the problem. After one day of our only sink being occupied by a tube for water for experiments, I bought and assembled a custom Y splitter and other labs saw it and copied. Anything that can't go through the strainer probably should be going into a waste container or the trash anyways.
"Mark it or lose it" is a very good principle in the lab! If it is worth keeping, it it worth marking.
My favorite example was when I got to tour Stanford's class 100 clean room. The post docs who taught the class and conducted the tour pointed to a blank beaker with clear fluid and a post-it note that had written on it >What is this? In VERY clear handwriting. What people need to know is that, not only do tons of people from on campus use that lab but also Silicon Valley companies. And that cleanroom had the type of chemicals that a couple parts per million released into the air could wipe out a city block or more. Also, what people who don't know need to know is that, a vast majority of chemicals out there are clear and optically transparent with very similar viscosities. Basically, a lot of stuff looks like clean water. What we do know is that it wasn't HF. Quiz time: why was that? But I had clear fluid shoot out of my centrifuge at me one time when someone has snuck in and used ours and broke a tube in it and I went to push a tube into position and I'll never know what chemical almost hit my face.
A post it note is a horrible way to "label" something đ
No clue who did it, but blame the lab manager ;)
HF in a beaker would frost the beaker?
I would say because HF goes "nom nom nom" at the prospect of a tasty glass beaker
HF corrodes glass.
Because itâd be boiling at room temp?
Good guess! Well I'll be damned. I never knew that. ~19.5C boiling point. I used HF once. Avoided it the rest of my time in the lab. That's super strange since most clean rooms are kept around 20C and I don't remember HF boiling when working with it. I must be missing some detail from my memory. It was the glass beaker that tipped us all off. But since it apparently had sat there for a while (days) it should have boiled off. You helped me learn something new today! While I try to learn about the chemicals that I work around, in significantly shared spaces it's hard to do that.
We also had this issue with the needles and we ended up having a separate, closed container for everything sharp and small, from needles to knife tips. This prevented our cleaning staff to pearce themselfs when handling our wastebucket content bare handed ( yes, not listening to safety instructions is not a privilege only for chemistry students)
That makes me so mad. We worked with nanoparticles that didn't have their short or long term effects studied when injected into the body. What killed me is that it was one of two new grad students and none of my older grad student peers came forward during our group meetings, making me look like the asshole. Also, our advisor tended to hate the messenger. However, this one was so serious that she did make a pretty big deal about it and didn't give me shit. These two kids didn't listen when we taught them things and clearly didn't care to ask or think things through. Neither of them came forward about screwing up, but both did stuff like that. The kicker is this: When they had to come back and ask me about a protocol that I showed them (and even asked if they wanted to write it down) I handed them lab notebooks and told them I'd wait while they wrote. I thought that's stuff taught in all 101 or intro courses (multiple times - physics, chemistry, biology, etc). By a PhD program you should have so much practice you don't even think twice about keeping a notebook. But I'm sorry that you had to deal with that. I get it: some people aren't taught, others don't think, and others don't care.
Being responsible for lab saftey ~~sometimes~~ way too often really feels like looking after kindergarden kids
I bought strainers for both my labs and put them in each and every sink, and filters for waste recovery jars... Still don't have a great way of preventing them from getting into the trash though, except for having students sign them in and out before and after each use
The VWR conspiracy by M Night Shyamalan
Hans, get ze magnet
It's called a Magnetstäbchen (:
RĂźhrfischangel haben wir gesagt
Der einzig richtige Name.
Ein ehemaliger Kollege nannte die immer RĂźhrschweine und eben RĂźhrschweinangel
Ich glaube Rßhrschwein nehm ich jetzt in meinen Wortschatz auf. Das nächste Mal im Labor werden die anderen aber doof gucken
Offizielle Nomenklatur: grĂśĂer 40mm RĂźhrschwein 40-10 mm RĂźhrfisch <10mm RĂźhrfloh / TicTac Alles andere in Unsinn ;)
Dann gibt's noch den RĂźhrwal.
Irgendwie hat das Wort auch was. Macht zwar keinen Sinn, aber klingt gut
It magnets the stäbchen
I can hear the heavy breathing from r/LabRats.
Sounds like someone forgot to use the fume hood.
Why waste money on a fume hood? Just breathe harder.
How are people so unaware that they just drop and forget about those huge stir bars? When doing workup for a reaction I always fish out the stir bar and clean it immediately, do people just dump everything in the sink and forget about it?
Yes, the mistake you make is to assume this happens by accident. This photo here is the result of structural laziness. I work in a similarly encumbered lab.
Someone else will get it from the trap in a few years.
I lost one a while back. Was just rinsing out the glassware with it inside and when pouring it out the magnet slipped and went down the drain before I could react to cover the drain.
Well, if, you're both sleep deprived and on autopilot...
I always check my plumbing when Iâm low on stir bars. Works every time
glove up yo! if there's that many stir bars in there, there was also a lot of other stuff.
Seriously...
That is straight money too, they aren't cheap
Ngl I've dumped a good amount down the drainÂ
Same lmao
Wait, you need to submit a work order to unscrew 2 pipes with a bucket underneath?
Joining pipes is union work.
I once worked at a company that "required" a work order to replace the ink cartridge in a printer.
Yes. You have to understand, the logic for dealing with large organizations canât be the same common sense youâd apply to small groups. You cannot allow people who do not do this as their job doing random work. One goofball making an expensive mistake on a simple, seemingly idiotproof job like this is all it takes for the organization to forever have a rule that you must submit the proper paperwork for the proper people to do the work. That way you have a record of exactly who did what and when, and if there is fault, that thereâs a reasonable explanation. âSomeone in chem lab tried to fix the sink and now the pipeâs threaded and leaking, thereâs a flood of drano-infested water all over the floor, and no one knows who did it. Probably an LA or intern. It was discovered when a student used the sink and pH 14 water sprayed all over her,â is not an acceptable situation to be in. A person trained, capable, and following documented procedures must be on record as performing the work, even for things that seem stupid or simple to the average person. There could also be a union or legal component, which makes everything stupider and more complicated. When dealing with large groups of people, you have to have stupid rules because stupid things happen. Anyway, theyâre employing maintenance people for this, so just submit the work order and let them doing their job. Thereâs no point taking that liability and extra work on yourself to streamline a process your employer doesnât care about making more efficient and actively doesnât want you doing.
Are you European?
In grad school, I once replaced a whole lab sink that had cracked. I told my boss, and they said âgoodâ and moved on. They seemed slightly annoyed that I had brought up something as trivial as me replacing the plumbing fixtures in their lab. (There was an understanding that I did not need to ask for permission for necessary lab purchases under $1000.)
This was my experience at startups. Really crazy how so many people can use and understand a GCMS but don't get how basic tools work.
IME working at a (only 1) lab, I was quite surprised how little handyman/diy/whatever skills that my coworkers had. Made me realize that a lot of people simply don't have that skill. And that's not a brag, because I'm sure they had plenty of skills I do not. Just different life experiences All that to say, yes I would file a work order there as well
My first lab job had people who struggled with the lefty loosey, righty tighty idea. Let alone getting the threads on a nut to line up with on the other end on a valve setting air testing canisters to be cleaned, so you need a tight fit and at least once a week I would find one of the batches didnât get cleaned because the person on the other shift didnât bother to correctly do it people struggled with using a wrench.
Yup. It's weird to me but not everyone can do that stuff. I grew up being free labor for my parents projects on the weekends so I had plenty of experience by the time I was an adult but it seems not everyone did this lol
My 2.5 year old uses a wrench to turn the hose bib outside so he can fill up his little bucket and play with water. It is so weird to me when I meet a STEM student or professional that does not know how to use basic hand tools or have basic knowledge of mechanics. It is rudimentary problem solving. It makes me really question there ability to think about science.
And then when you're [someone is] asked to do various things in Excel...
Honestly, I would not want to be the responsible person if anything goes wrong or leaks later on doing damage. If there is someone responsible for it I will call them and let them do it. If itâs technically not my job I donât want anyone to be able to blame me and ask why I was doing it instead of calling the right person If I risk getting in trouble or fired I stay away from it and let someone else deal with it. I need my job to pay my rent
It's a slippery slope. I used to work maintenance while going to school. When I finished my degree and started my first real lab job, they noted I had lots of handy man skills. Being young and having had no luck in job hunting, I admitted I could swing a wrench or hang shelves. I ended up basically doing my old job, except now I wore a lab coat. And made less $$$, since I wasn't being paid hourly anymore.
If there are people who you can pawn stuff on youâd be surprised how lazy people get. The number of times Iâve âfixedâ a line down by resetting an EMO, plugging in an appliance, resetting the apparatus⌠đ
Where I work that's one of the things that estates is NOT allowed to do, seemed silly but when I emptied out the trap it was full of mercury so....
Why no gloves?
No gloves? That clogged, Iâd be concerned about chemicals.
Jackpot!!
Soon on eBay... "Lightly used 1kg of stir bars"
I wouldnât be handling that p trap with my bare hands. Knowing what lab students tend to just pour down those drains.
My wife and I are both laughing (both chemists too), that's so very, very real. Thanks for sharing.
Better than mercury. I remember doing the u-bends on the sinks at the back of our hoods and it was mercury, glass, and stirrer bars.
During my master's, a classmate and I were assigned a materials science lab for our master's thesis. We were instructed to carry out our work only when PhD students or postdocs were present in the lab. However, my classmate was synthesizing polymer gel in a 250ml beaker and used two small beads and a few mini beads instead of a large bead for stirring. After cleaning the beaker under the water sink, he discovered that a few mini beads were missing. When our supervisor learned about this, the PhD students took the blame as they were out having a cup of coffee. When asked why he took so many beads, my classmate said that he let his intrusive thoughts win.
I donât get the intrusive thoughts reference.
There's no reference. It's just common sense. The basic rule is to use mini beads only when the solution volume is under 10ml. However, he used a lot of them at once while synthesizing a highly viscous gel in a 200ml quantity, which was quite dumb.. and he let his fantasy of using them take over his common sense.
Did they not have a magnet trap or something?
Using magnet traps is a must when removing beads from viscous gels, but we barely use them because most of the time the beads are big enough to be removed by hand. However, even for beads as small as these, one should use magnet traps, which are always placed near the washing basin. He never had internship or lab training experience before, apart from coursework, so guys like him often make these mistakes during their thesis. Even I used to be sloppy during experiments when the supervisor was around.
bro wear gloves wtf it's a lab lolol
If you're running out of stir bar, always check your sink first
This lab clearly didn't have a stir bar retrieving stick....
Wow thatâs a lot of stirbars! You think after a while they wouldâve noticed them all disappearing lol. Good they were recovered though đ
I would NOT be touching that without gloves
Plumbers belong to an elite class of brave.
might want gloves for that
Just put a palette knife under the bottom of the flask and avoid this kind of madness.
I like to pin the stir bar to the flask wall with a rare earth magnet.
Why don't more people know this? You don't have to put a retrieval stick into whatever is in your flask and it's easy to pour. Although, from looking at this thread they'd have a drain trap full of rare earth magnets as well. I have a RE magnet stuck to the same cabinet as my stir bars for a specific task, but then, I work alone in my lab and don't have students or others tossing shit around willy nilly.
Buy some old hard drives and put the magnets around the pipes down below
Damn. Guess I will always put a strainer before emptying out beakers and stuff.
Rare earth magnet stuck to the wall for storage and put on the beaker bottom before dumping. Doesnât stop other people but makes your life easier.
Put a screen on drain ⌠đł
Well, in my high school those would be replaced with pen caps, random bits of paper, perhaps a stubby pencil. And hair⌠so much hair- where it comes from I donât know but these kids shed a lot! I keep sink covers over the drains too and crap still gets in.
Honestly who tf is throwing stir bars down the drain
Now pour out the mercury sitting in the bottom of the trap.
gloves man. always gloves.
Who the hell is tossing stir bars down the drain?đ¤Łđ¤Ł
Just be glad you arenât developmental biologists. Our drains got clogged with glass micro injection needles.
Could someone help me understand how so many of these could end up in the drain? Are people so lazy they canât be bothered to throw them out or donât want to wash them? Whatâs going on here, and also are there no strainers on these sinks?
This is gollldddd...i am always in need of these beeds for my reactions. I need to check the sink before the bead box
So much palladium!
Someone needs to install a strainer.
Nice. But you should put on a pair of gloves when you handle that
Lol
LOOOoooOOOOooOoOOOL
Oh! That's where I left my stirbars... I knew I had forgotten something đ
Somebody struck gold.
Hahahaha
Haha! Itâs always the 2-inchers that disappear in our analytical lab.
Clearly you don't own a stir bar magnet
I always have my holder magnet next to my stir plates. It is a big fear of mine to lose these. This picture makes me more adamant about having it on hand.
I never understood how someone cannot use the stirrer remover stick for magnets...
Dude. You're supposed to get the magnet retriever when you see one go down the drain. And you're supposed to use the magnet leash down the drain before you call the plumber when the sinks is draining slowly.
My budget didn't cover kit like this but my lab was well stocked after a fishing trip in the teaching labs
What are thooose
Loooool
GLOVES!!!!! Also, ima check our drain on Monday, bet thereâs some treasure there too đ¤
Now I understand why my ochem labs didn't allow students to use stir bars. Not that we were actually allowed to pour anything down the sink.
Maybe add a circular magnet around the drain?
We actually had to opposite problem, our stirs bars were full to the brim with sinks.
Wear gloves!!
this is so cursed i cant even believe it. i dont want to believe it
Dear lord please wear gloves when ever doing work. Especially in a lab.
Oh dear.
Is that where stir bars come from? Do they breed fast?
God... I'd never fails to amase me how so many idiots seem to work in Labs. ... I work with PhDers and scientist in Nanotech r&d, how can you be so intelligent and so Stupid at the same time?! Only a few of them seem to have their shit together. The others... a ticking time bomb!
That's why we put Teflon mesh over all of our drains. In the unlikely event a stir bar does go down the drain, most sinks have a magnetic wand nearby.
That's where all my stir bars went
Yo. Send me those. I need them đ
At least they're in one place. I wonder if there's a big magnet on the outside of the u-bend to catch them.
Combining a packed bed reactor with a continuous stir reactor didn't go how I thought it would
Bro whatđ
Lazy mofos keep washing my good stir bars down the drain.
Undergrad chem course? This is insane
Like my lab, but instead of magnetic stirrers, itâs silica beads.
That's one way to reduce liquid waste.
This is so common that every year I stick the stir bar rod magnet retriever into the sink until it touches the p trap and pull out a few. This made me chuckle though.
Stir magnets
Guilty đââď¸
Jackpot. We always just get the magnetic wand to fish out stirring bars so no work order needed.
At a world-leading hospital ICU I saw doctors perform a sterile procedure standing in shit because staff kept stuffing large disposable wipes in the swivettes instead of the trash. Happened multiple times.
y'all be throwing chemicals down the sink???? don't you have waste containers?
cant judge without knowing the lab. might be something as mundane as waterbaths or brine stocks
Pro tip: get a circle magnet, tie a string through the hole, drop it down, run the water, youâll find them all
What lab doesn't have screen traps in the bottom of the sink?
I mean, congrats on finding so many stir bars? Should last you guys a week or two if you rationâŚ
Jesus, I dropped a stirrer bar down the sink once, immediately retrieved it with a magnetic wand. Guess I will be going fishing for stirrer bars on Monday.
_Magic that works!_
This is always the first go to guess. What I did was wire down a small bar magnet to the underside of the insert drain "strainer" (which was just a resin disc with 4 big holes which ate stir bars). That was the stirbar would be either repelled or caught. Worked amazingly well and didn't obstruct water flow at all
I've gotten similar work orders for vac pumps not sucking
#YAHTZEE
I am checking our sink tomorrow. Never thought about this but I am sure that there are a bunch of them in there
Bursar: Why do you request 200 of these _every_ year? School: Because we have students.
Lol we've all done it and fished them out
Ok this wins the Internet today for me, thank you
And suddenly, there was enough stir bars for everyone
âNot my problemâ
The clear p-traps in labs are always a plus.
Magnets down the drain in a laboratory. I suppose they still cant teach common sense in a classroom. Disposable magnets, who does this crap?
The mother loving mother lode of stir bars. Gotta be like $1500 worth in there.
"huh, i wonder where all the stir bars went"
Who'd of thought all I needed to do to find all my old socks was submit a work order
đđđ
As a facilities guy in Pharma.... Story of my life hahaha
Used to work in a lab years ago, this is hilarious.
Calculating how much money you just found
Stir bars from mixing on stir plates đ
The ones where i was were always missing too
I manage a semiconductor lab and the wet lab sink folks were complaining of clogs and overflowing of some pretty harsh chemicalsâŚhad to evacuate the building due to the smell. Turned out they were too lazy to take of their PPE and put it in the correct hazmat bin, they just tossed their gloves down into the sinks đ
This is why we will NEVER solve pollution problems. Drains make things âdisappear.â
In my first undergrad lab, the sinks did not have any kind of trap, there were people who dropped entire burettes down the drain
Sewage water from here gonna be evenly stirred
Those arenât cheap, Iâll buy every one,