On a related note, I wonder if people around the world are familiar with electric showers. Essentially, it's a resistance similar to the one found in a toaster, placed right inside the showerhead. It heats the water as it flows through. People hearing about it for the first time are usually shocked that we don't die from electrecution.
These commenters are speaking authoritatively on subjects about which they are completely ignorant, but they are strident in doing so because they are repeating what everybody knows. They are intellectually secure in the center of a vast mob; their wisdom was received, not crafted.
This is an important takeaway for me, maybe even more than “electirc devices are washable”.
World is filled with conventional wisdom that limits us in countless directions. Knowing how things work empower us to break these “rules”.
It's not the water that's the issue generally - it's the minerals in the water.
The article author got lucky this time - when electronics die from water contact, it's usually the minerals bridging connections and creating shorts. Letting the device dry does not remove those shorts. Some places have such hard water (lots of minerals) that evaporated water leaves calcium, limestone and other deposits on the surface of everything it's touched.
Does that mean doing it once will always cause an issue? Of course not... but repeatedly doing this, and/or becoming used to washing electronics in the dishwasher is a recipe to ruin them in the long term.
I would not personally want to play games with a toaster that can be replaced for $20 at your local Walmart...
A $20 something you are about to throw away is the perfect thing to play games with.
It’s the fire risk that’s the issue not 20$.
To be fair, a toaster is always a fire risk. That's why the manual says never put them under flammable things. You should always assume your toaster will catch fire.
The toaster body itself may not be a big deal, but the cord and plug are also going to be a risk here.
What fire risk if it's in a dishwasher? :)
You only save money if you plug it in afterwards. At which point residue poses a fire risk.
Also, many dishwashers have a garbage disposal which isn’t inside the water and may fail if the cord gets into it. Not likely to happen, but enough people try it and someone may directly get an electrical fire while the dishwasher is running.
A toaster (at least a cheap toaster) is an electrical device, not an electronic one, as stated by the author in the article. Please look up the difference if you don't know what it is.
We have toasters that run linux, connect to the internet, and play doom. Explain to me how they aren't electronic devices.
Even cheap toasters (I take toaster apart for fun) have true electronics these days because it's usually cheaper to implement things like timers electronically and if the toaster has a display it certainly has some electronics. But I suspect that the absolute simplest toasters are purely mechanical and electrical.
Most toasters these days actually use a PT8A2514A (https://www.diodes.com/assets/Datasheets/PT8A2514A.pdf) microcontroller. But it is still safe to wash, for the same reason as it is usually safe to wash a keyboard.
It's not every day you see a datasheet with a "bagel" in the diagram.
I was curious so I did some searching -- this is the cheapest toaster that I'm aware of in the US, and it surprisingly does have a custom IC that handles the timing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLFG068HtgM
Would mineral deposits be sufficiently large and conductive that they would cause an actual issue between components?
They would probably represent nothing more than minor stray resistance/capacitance.
Assuming it was conductive enough, a scales bridge between higher voltage parts would just represent a path of material a few microns thick that would vaporize as soon as the toaster would be plugged in.
For other electronic devices, any component with a hole, like a microphone, barometric, humidity sensor, or mechanical (HDD), is more likely to suffer a more permanent fate. If water gets inside a relay housing, chemicals from the washing liquid may damage or gunk the contacts and reduce their life. LCD screens, glued parts and thin plastics don't fare well in dishwashers either...
>Would mineral deposits be sufficiently large and conductive that they would cause an actual issue between components?
A good proportion of water-damaged cellphones can be revived just by washing the logic board thoroughly in isopropyl alcohol. It's possible that this is due to small amounts of water trapped in crevices, but I've seen it work on boards that looked bone-dry under the microscope.
Crevices could be inside components. Alcohol will extract the water by diluting it and then evaporating
Would mineral deposits be sufficiently large and conductive that they would cause an actual issue between components?
They would probably represent nothing more than minor stray resistance/capacitance.
Spoken like someone who has never maintained any electronic devices. Skepticism should err on the side of risk management.
A lot of household appliances use potted relays and conformal coatings. If you pull the control board out of your clothes washer you'll see what I mean. It's particularly important because the control board is often within spitting distance of a solenoid that's holding back 60-80 psi of water.
Why not play such games? If it works, it works; if it fails, it only costs $20 to replace at your local Walmart!
Because failure modes of toasters may include fire.
A toaster is normally filled with dessicated carbohydrate particles, which are an explosive fire risk.
I would think going through dishwasher would significantly reduce the fire risk.
And once you start using it again they begin replenishing.
Except now the toaster may or may not be compromised in some way. There’s no amount of benefit here worth even a minuscule risk of a house fire.
dried calcium carbonate is not a very good conductor, and neither calcium carbonate nor calcium oxide is deliquescent
(edit: i said 'calcium chloride' which is of course both wrong and irrelevant)
i think the bigger issue with electronics is overheating their electrolytic capacitors
you do realize the reason why fires get started is because things become a BAD conductor right?
totally agree, I had an electrical device catch on fire because of this exact instance
Once electronics gets wet (like stuff you plug into a wall), it usually should be discarded for safety's sake.
edit: its not just that, the water causes the copper to oxidise and swell, touching places it shouldnt
After you take it out of the dishwasher, rinse it with distilled water, then let it dry.
I've always put my (dumb, wired) keyboards in the dishwasher and they have always come out great.
I'm a statistic of one, though. I don't know if I just got lucky.
Are they dumb? Isn't there a microprocessor in every keyboard?
Yes, sorry, I meant there's no battery.
Yes, and it is perfectly safe to wash a simple circuit board, as long as the rinse water is clean, and it gets dried reasonable quickly. Both conditions are met in a dishwasher.
Microprocessors (especially older ones) are _very_ hard to kill. They're a piece of silicon embedded in epoxy essentially, very inert. There are a lot of people who wash arcade PCBs in the dishwasher, not a practice I endorse, but it works.
Of course I've seen the opposite all the time. People who find issues with the conventional reasoning, and then apply their own _extremely faulty reasoning_ to reach their own conclusion!
Someone having incorrect reasoning doesn't mean they are wrong, just that they do not know (in the sense of knowing something for the right reasons)
Case in point: OP decided to wash the toaster in the dishwasher. Their story about walking through water assuming that their hair dryer experiment validated them walking through water with a bunch of sockets.... they are applying super hand-wavy reasoning in the same way as the critics are!
The funny thing about the whole piece is that while "an unplugged toaster through the washing machine is probably fine" is not a huge leap, so much in the PS is indicative of how I would not really trust this person much for their decision making
Spot on. This “teacher” is doing a piss-poor job of challenging “conventional wisdom” that saves lives. What are students learning from him cavalierly running a hairdryer underwater and marching into electrified water?
Yes, electricians often have plenty of experience with getting shocked. But all it takes is one dumb mistake and you quickly die a horrible death, with muscles locked up unable to self-rescue in a location where immediate bystanders will risk their own lives to rescue.
What kind of dumbass proudly tells about wading into electrified flooding in front of colleagues when there wasn’t even any urgent reason to do so? What would it have cost to simply wait and cut the power first, calling the power company if necessary if a breaker box could not be safely reached for some reason (unlikely)?
And many/most circuits outside code-compliant kitchens and baths aren’t GFCI, and GFCI doesn’t protect against all electrocutions (you can be electrocuted in a short without a ground fault). Now consider electrical fires from getting sloppy with damaged wiring and electrical devices, which are a leading cause of deaths from fire.
so much in the PS is indicative of how I would not really trust this person much for their decision making
That escalated fast.
If he is this reckless with toasters - imagine the dangers he poses to his students!
OTOH I find few people trustworthy in decision making of any kind.
I was once involved in a similar (unintentional) experiment with a multi-billion dollar defence radar. A several metres deep underground bunker, containing several 19" racks full of electrical/electronic gear, filled to ground level with a combination of mineralised surface water and mud during a storm.
What we wanted to do was cut the power, pump the water out of the bunker ASAP and immediately clean the whole lot with pure water.
What the (arse-covering) site manager did was nothing, not even cut the power, until a "risk-assessment" had been done. For the first few days we were able to peer into the bunker's hatch and watch der blinkenlights happily operating in the gloom underwater. That stopped after a few days. About a week later the risk had been assessed and a path of action determined: the power was turned off, the water was pumped out and everything was washed with pure water. By then electrolysis had dissolved just about every conductor in the system.
Electrical systems will happily cope with water in the short term, but the longer the exposure the less likely they are to survive. Time is part of the risk.
It's quite impressive it kept working for that long, and even more amazing someone was capable of saying "no, let's not cut the power, there might be a problem if we do"
Honestly, that doesn’t surprise me at all. This seems perfectly in line with “I don’t care what it is, or how well I perform it, as long as I have a job.”
Few things in my career have granted me more power faster than taking ownership of decisions.
Some people are so terrified of having to say "I was wrong" that they either will do nothing, or just happily follow decisions that someone else makes. It's one thing when that's a line employee behaving that way, but there are managers so terrified of making a mistake that all they really are is scribes, tracking who said what and who decided what. These weasels don't lead. They don't contribute anything. They just have a quick answer when someone above them asks how this fuckup happened. Well that was Jameson. He decided to do X so clearly it's his fault things broke.
I was in a room once with a guy who was so caught up in the idea of catching me in a gotcha that he had no idea what to do when I said, "yep, that's wrong, and this is how we fix it." His face went through the same roller coaster of emotions that happens when you drop your ice cream cone. I got to say most of what I needed to say before he even recovered. I think I was proudest of keeping a straight face during the entire conversation.
Where has intellectual honesty gone that just being transparent verges on a superpower? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
Taking ownership of decisions in this way breeds another problem: people love to police when they perceive other people taking authority that's not rightfully theirs.
I had your view until 7 years at Google. Showing this to 80% of people there would garner tsktsking and quips about delusions of grandeur and seeming unbalanced. In performance reviews, you could count on this person saying you collaborate poorly and don't take others concerns into account, because they felt humiliated and retconned a reason why it's your fault. (To be fair, given your vivid understanding of their face at the time, it sounds like you understand they wouldn't feel well after you did this)
In the higher rooms, I saw at least a couple times everyone living this worldview and it ending up in bickering and extreme insistence the other person was missing fundamentals while nothing got done for months: which in the more Machiavellian parlance, is still good if you're good, because most people won't do the work, just argue over the 20% of the problem they understand, and someone has to win eventually
I keep editing this comment because I get the vibe it disagrees with you, but it doesn't, at all. If anything, your framing helps sharpen why it felt like an odd place, in a bad way, to me from day 30.
Interestingly, I was at Google during I think the very end of its golden years (2011-2016). I loved it and when I heard about how sclerotic it had gotten was pretty surprised.
Looking back, IMO the seeds of its downfall had already been planted by the time I was there, including the culture of blameless postmortems.
There was this idea that any problem—any outage or whatever —reflected not stupidity on the part of the perpetrator (Google hires the smartest people after all) but a process failure. Blameless postmortems avoided blame by ending with a process recommendation.
I’ve worked at startups since, and I do think that creating an environment where people are comfortable taking risks is just a fundamentally hard culture problem, and you don’t even have to be big to have it (though it doesn’t help). I’ve seen 15-person startups where engineers wouldn’t fix something because “I’m just an engineer and this is really a product decision” while the PM says “we need to get the engineers together in a meeting and come to a consensus on this.”
IMO Google’s hack of giving people space to take risks by letting them pass off failure as a process problem did sort of work, to their credit, until they got to where it sounds like they are now, where you can’t do anything without being accused of bypassing “good process,” which means going to endless lengths to get everyone’s opinions and placating everyone who disagrees with you.
It seems like at Meta they solved the problem by regarding failure as good and just. At my current company, to do something risky, you have to write a design doc and have a comment period, and then you’re free to do whatever the doc proposes. Idk what other approaches there are—I’d pay to read a book about it, though.
It seems this is a common problem with larger organizations, that everything turns (corrupts) into a process. I've even seen processes for following processes.
To make the problem worse, nobody dares to remove from a process as that would mean they would be accountable for the consequences of the "missing steps", and at the same time adding to a process is almost always safe - another step in a process to clarify or verify can't really fail and having contributed to the process work in a process driven organization looks fantastic on your yearly review. So we get more and more processes that are perpetually growing in scope.
The long term damage that heavy processes do, what I've seen first hand, is extreme stagnation. Even simple and straight forward improvements are avoided if it means that you need to produce ridiculous documentation that nobody will ever need, or seek approval from a (very busy) group of people who contribute nothing other than checking that you followed the processes.
When I remove steps I brag about it. I don’t know or recall if I ever consciously reasoned that as trying to normalize that activity, but that is certainly what I’m doing.
Shorter processes in clock time matter more than step count, but it’s hard to do one without the other.
For what it’s worth, in most cases, an organization that overly focuses on process is superior to one with a naive individualism that throws employees under the bus by default.
I think I’m pretty good at Five Whys, for two reasons. One, I have enough of a chess player’s mind where I can see at about the third Why that someone is steering us toward a toothless solution and steer us toward a better one.
But the other one is that blameless doesn’t mean we don’t talk about the person who fucked up. The entire point of the NTSB’s version of the process is to get pilots and ground crew to be vulnerable. To explain how they pushed the wrong button or signed off on a maintenance deferment or whatever. I was tired, I got asked tangential questions during a critical moment. I misinterpreted the text, etc.
I’m neurodivergent. I spend way too much of my day analyzing my errors. But the way my brain works on a Tuesday is the way everyone else’s works in the middle of a high stress situation. For me it still feels like a bad Tuesday. The tools and steps I build for keeping me from looking stupid also work for the team, once they give them a chance. And during Five Why’s I just have to say the quiet parts out loud, and I can speculate rather well on whether other people had similar experiences.
I regularly take authority and you’re right about how people can feel, but that’s where your social skills come to play.
Your average person doesn’t even take authority.
The next “level” per se (not that you have to take authority — only if you want to) is the person taking authority.
Then the next level above that is the person that takes authority but understands how it looks to other people, so they sure everyone else understands that they are taking authority to make things move along, not because they are entitled to it. They attack the problem head on.
My goal is to get good engineering done while also making sure everyone feels included and good about being at work.
If you’re about good engineering and respect for other people, you can get things done however you want.
I’ve worked at too many places that only promote you once you’re doing 99% of the job title. It’s a joke at some places. “I thought you already were <new title>”
If you don’t act like a lead dev you’re not going to get much practice at being one. And I’m not talking about the bossing people around part, but the fostering teamwork and taking care of people parts.
One of the things that impressed me at my time at Google (2011-2015) was the culture of blameless post-mortems, and of general transparency of many (not all) things.
Sadly, this culture must have deteriorated; my friends who are still at Google say that it's become literally the stuff of Dilbert comic strips :-(
Hah, somewhat perversely, I'm glad to hear that: it's exactly how I sum things up in a sentence in my head, then I think I'm being overdramatic / personalizing it, because I kinda grew up learning about tech via Dilbert, I was a big fan of Dogbert at 7 years old.
But I'm not.
I did Aug 2016-2023. Of course it's a complicated story, and you've heard a lot already I'm sure, but when you mention blameless postmortems, it remind me of my pet peeve: promo committees done within teams (basically 2 levels up, i.e. skip is doling out promo, with no recourse or real outside input) was a horrible, wretched idea.
There was this odd obsession with saving time on perf, but they kinda just needed to tell people to chill and recognize that it really is important for management. With all promos being judged by people next to you, what we might call "being agreeable" became a necessity.
I distinctly remember in 2018 being told if things were how they had been, that I should just do a blameless postmortem, but with things as they are, that was a quick way to end up on the bench for the rest of my career.
If anything people would fault me for saying “no” so much. It’s part of why I tried my hand at security for a bit but found it exhausting. I was never more “the adult in the room” than in that position.
I’m not saying own all the decisions. With a largish team you want at least three people who will stand by a decision even when it’s not a unanimous vote. (Don’t ever do four or six unless you have a good boss. Jesus Christ that was awful.) When I do say something will definitely work, I’m almost always right.
What I left out and thought of later is that it’s more important to own the cleanup than the decision. Once you do that people trust you more, and the trust leads to other opportunities. So it’s not really, “I was wrong” although that already filters out way too many people. It’s the “here let me help you fix it.” That makes it stick.
I've known enough people at Google that I've gotten a decent view into the broken-ass culture there, from the outside looking in, and I'd say that's a pretty decent summary of some of their worst problems.
I don't see how that manager expected to have a job by deciding not to cut power to submerged equipment, and have it flushed of the brine and cleaned, ASAP. It looks completely idiotic/incompetent from where I'm sitting.
Different industries prioritize different things. I'm speculating but being the military they may consider that the enemy is planning an incursion exactly when some critical detection systems are expected to be down. So they'd rather kill some equipment while they mobilize a contingency measure. No idea what was in the manager's head or if the threat model makes sense but things aren't always super obvious and don't lend themselves to generalization.
Potentially, but if your intelligence is so terrible you have no idea of that attack beforehand, or your radar coverage so sloppy that you can’t take any of them offline without losing that coverage, you probably failed already.
There are plenty people who never changed a lightbulb in their life, and some of them manage other people.
Because that's what companies incentivize for, sadly.
The handbook or SOP somewhere probably does call for a risk assessment.
So they have two choices. Choice A is to do what's obvious, cut power and get to work. That has two branches. One branch is saving the day and potentially millions of dollars. For what? A side mention at the next all hands, maybe. Branch 2 is something goes wrong, and the company says you didn't follow the handbook, and you're fired or worse, found liable.
Choice B is following the handbook, knowing everything will be ruined. But, you keep your job, and maybe the handbook gets updated.
Both choices provide no reward. Only one provides no risk.
Ding ding ding! As an employee you're not there to do good work, you're there to what you're employer asks of you which is sometimes good work. When its your own electronics you can do whatever you want but as a rando employee you're not in a position to accept the risk.
It is only impressive coming from the consumer grade electronics.
Microchips, capacitors, PCB's and other stuff like manufactured for defence have much wider and higher tolerances. One won't find the cutting edge 2 nm processes (depending on the specific area of defence, 200-300 µm would still be cutting edge today for them), materials used are different, plus all sorts of chemical and physical hardening is employed. Most of the time, the chips can't use the consumer grade cutting edge designs and processes as they have to withstand not just abuse but also stronger EM fields (in radar equipment) or EM pulses (e.g. a nuclear explosion).
After electronics have been manufactured, they proceed onto the QA phase where chips are literally baked in ovens for a day or a few, then retrieved and tested. They may get irradiated, soaked for periods of time etc. Most people would call it abuse – from a civilian perspective. The surviving ones are deemed to have passed the QA and are used to make the actual equipment.
200-300 µm would still be cutting edge today for them
Sorry, I think you're off by a few orders of magnitude, do you mean 200-300nm?
I wonder although wasteful, isn't this better than accelerated failures taking the defense radar offline at random times in the future?
Reminds me of a friend of mine who somehow blew a shift in his car and did something bad to his engine. Instead of pulling over and stopping, he just drove it home and ended up destroying the engine.
So he got a whole new engine instead of having insurance pay to dismantle the engine and replace a few valves. It might even have been a similar price, but a much more robust solution.
But the action that has actually been taken just guaranteed the prompt destruction of the radar equipment, and a prolonged outage to replace it.
Unless an attack was underway that the radar was tracking, the right course of action was to power it off immediately, and start cleaning it. After the cleaning, it would go online promptly, and then parts of it could be assessed for damage, taken offline when the replacement is ready, and replaced, likely without even stopping the operation.
This kind of paralysis and fear of making decisions, especially when time is of essence, would be exactly what I'd like to instill in my enemies.
It would explain a surprising amount of events at least here in Sweden if BCG and McKinsey were part of a conspiracy to weaken the crisis preparedness of states worldwide.
If your friend did a money shift the damage happened at the shift moment and driving home didn't change the outcome.
I have a similar experience from waaaaay back (now near 30 years). We had a water leak in the basement of the institute of physics. Nothing terribly major, ran for a few hours shorted power downstairs eventually (that's how it was found). Once fixed, pumped out, all that remained was a musty smell for a few days.
Except four days later network connection failed in the building. Tracing the cabling eventually lead us to the basement; some under-stairs / slightly below floor level comms cabinet, empty other than the building's outbound router. 48V Telco, no mains connect, had sat under"water" (well some rather murky stuff) for almost a week and done well. Once we got it washed (with clear water) and dried, it continued fine (till replacement a few weeks after). We were a little amazed, to be honest, physicists or no. Brave device, that.
The navy used to throw the boards in the cleaner and repairs the failures. Now we have better cleansing solutions, but damn if that isn’t nightmare fuel. I would have pumped and dehumidified the room until parts could be pulled/repaired. These days they just scrap everything. It’s terrible.
It is because people use heuristics to navigate their lives. Instead of doing complicated engineering reasoning all the time to ensure their safety they learn simple “rules of thumb”. These rules are incorrect in as much as they have both false positives (something which the rule prohibits, but is safe) and false negatives (something which the rule lets you do, but is not safe).
I’m a hobby jeweler and I use an ordinary household microwave to melt copper and silver to cast my projects.[1] At the same time “everybody knows” that you can’t put metal in a microwave.
What gives? Is everybody wrong? Of course not. It is just that the statement “don’t put metal in a microwave” is a simplified form of the true statement which would go something like this “don’t put metal in a microwave, unless you follow these safety precautions, and wear these safety gear, and your crucible is made of the appropriate materials, and your moulds are bone dry and …”. Aint nobody has the time to think about all the caveats and dangers when all they want is to warm their meals. So it is simpler, easier, and safer to tell people the abbreviated form of the rule.
1: here is a video https://youtu.be/Oim2QsDp0rY?si=CZrhg6ux1GfiDWqd
You can also just have a spoon in the microwave too, right? I think It's only from things like crinkles in aluminium foil and the prongs of a fork that produce sparks and arcing inside.
My understanding is that if you want to put metal in a microwave keep it away from the walls. If not, you can get an arc jumping from the metal to the wall and it can burn a hole in the wall of the oven.
You should also put something (eg. a cup of water) in the oven to absorb some of the microwave energy. The metal doesn't absorb much energy so without an additional absorber the microwaves can get reflected back into the magnetron and overheat the oven.
A while back on a whim I put my stainless steel coffee cup in the microwave and it just warmed the coffee. No sparks or drama. The metal didn't even get hot.
If your piece of metal is sufficiently thick, the eddy currents will not overheat it to the point of failure. If its surface is sufficiently smooth, there will be no arches jumping off the sharp edges. Crumpled foil is usually very much unlike that, and it gets violently destroyed. A steel coffee cup with a smooth top would likely do just fine.
My microwave oven comes with a metal stand that you're supposed to put into it when doing certain kinds of baking. Likely it's engineered to be massive enough, it has rounded edges everywhere, and is supposedly sized so that there are no pieces that would resonate at 2.4 GHz and thus consume a lot of energy and overheat.
CDs are fun in a microwave, arcing and spitting like fury for a while. So not just crinkly things
CDs are extremely crinkly at a microscopic level. They're effectively thin sheets of foil that use embossed pits to encode data.
ElectroBOOM did a video testing that, and he came to a similar conclusion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyTmJX_TC84
This was really interesting!
Nice! As a perfect example of what he's saying, you've been downvoted for stating something that is absolutely true, outside of certain circumstances, driven by the downvotes not having an understanding of those circumstances.
Yes, spoons are perfectly fine in the microwave.
Mehdi Sadaghdar has a great video on this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyTmJX_TC84
Kudos to anyone who does actual experiments to test “common knowledge.”
I think the social friction from getting all of this right/wrong really damages inquisitive minds.
The visceral negative response you get from, "Wait, I don't think that's right, it's more complicated than that", helps prevent speaking up the next time, unless you have an inherently disagreeable personality (which I cherish working with). I see it all the time with kids. They'll see some fundamental truth that takes a sideways perspective to see, and be told they're wrong, hacking off an interesting way of perceiving the world. It's unfortunate, but it's also something most adults are bad at, including myself.
And, I very often microwave my spoons, forks, even metal bowls, without them heating up at all. But I also have a basic understanding of resonance, absorption, insulation, apertures, and the wavelengths involved. I don't do it at work, because it's not worth the effort responding to "you're going to break the microwave", even if you show them that the food is hot and the fork is cool.
That said, I wouldn't melt metal in an expensive microwave. The metal has poor absorption relative to the magnetron antenna itself, so both will heat. I wouldn't be surprised if the antenna is also glowing a bit (at least early on)!
That said, I wouldn't melt metal in an expensive microwave. The metal has poor absorption relative to the magnetron antenna itself, so both will heat. I wouldn't be surprised if the antenna is also glowing a bit (at least early on)!
You don't make the metal absorb the microwaves. Either your crucible or the inner lining of your insulator will be designed to do the absorbing.
the inner lining of your insulator will be designed to do the absorbing.
That is exactly the case with our setup.
I still remember lots of microwaves coming with metal racks so you could stack multiple things in them. Sometimes they still do come with them.
I've come to realize that pretty much every general rule we have is only ever really true within a bounded context defined by a certain set of assumptions, and models that we think are universally applicable seem so simply because we can't (yet) look beyond their context of applicability.
Even scientific models that we regard as describing fundamental laws of nature will stop describing reality accurately once you hit extreme conditions -- Newtonian physics breaks once you're dealing with relativistic contexts, for example.
The human mind has tendency to generalize its heuristics, and hold certain rules to be either absolutely true or absolutely untrue, which unfortunately hobbles our ability to use our rationality to its fullest potential. People will often dismiss an entire model as being universally "false" as soon as they see a single data point that it doesn't work for, and then try to formulate a new model that's still trying to encompass everything, everywhere. Maybe we'd do better to interpret falsifying data points as helping to map the outer boundaries of the model's applicability, and formulate multiple models, each optimized for different contexts, and each regarded as valid within its bounds.
Just had this exact discussion with the kids at dinner yesterday. In our case, we talked about the simplified traffic light rule “go on green, stop on red“. This to come up is wrong, of course. Because if the light turns red while you are crossing, stopping would be the worst thing you could do.
Also, just because the light is green does not mean it is safe to go. You should still look and make sure the other traffic is actually coming to a stop.
I suppose what you're doing is insulating the metal and also obscuring the reflective surface, right? Or does it not reflect microwaves? Curious.
The way I understand it. (and here I'm just telling you what I have heard from other people) is that the brick we use has two layers. So going from the outside to the inside the structure is: layer1, layer2, graphite crucible, metal to be melted.
Layer1 is thermally insulating. Keeps the heat in the brick. It is still 300ish celsius at the end of the melt, and it increases further as the whole structure "cools".
Layer2 "captures" the microwave radiation and is the thing the microwave oven heats. All that energy is captured inside the brick and layer1 doesn't let it out so it heats up very quickly.
And then layer2 heats up the crucible via mainly heat conduction (so the interface has to be neat between them) and only to a lesser extent via heat radiation.
The main dangers of the operation is the same as with any other process which results in tens of grams of molten metal. Those would be not new to anyone who casts metal. (But entirely outside of the experience of someone who never worked with molten metal before.) Everyone with normal household experience would know that molten metal is hot, what might surprise someone without specific training or very good intuitive grasp of physics is that if it contacts water the water immediately turns into steam and that will make the molten metal fly everywhere. [1] So that would be the first unexpected turn of events. Hopefully you have a bucket of sand ready to put out the resulting fire, because water is not your friend in this situation.
It is also important as you pack the crucible to not form a "bridge" between the walls with the metal. Because before the metal melts it expands. And if you pack the to-be-melted metal too tight it will crack the graphite crucible. Which would ruin the brick.
Then the other surprise is that the layer1 keeps heating up even after you have removed the brick from the microwave. (because layer2 is very hot, and that heat is slowly dissipating through layer1) And if you use the brick too much without letting it cool down between melts it might crack, or it might crack the glass plate of the microwave.
1: this is how that looks on a much bigger scale https://youtu.be/oWSHEC1N770?si=lc1ZKXxQ9kOsuhz0
"No metal in the microwave" is good general-purpose advice but a reasonable person might notice that the microwave interior is basically all metal so there must be more to that advice than meets the eye.[0]
[0] Microwaves also contain transformers.
Exactly. All models are wrong, some are useful. And a simpler model is easier to teach and remember.
This whole thread is the most significant thing I've learned in the last 5 years. Thank you.
There'a really funny chapter in "Good Eats" by Alton Brown where he has you make your own microwave popcorn (basically put unpopped kernels in a paper bag). It contains a long section on whether it's safe to use a staple to keep the popcorn bag shut in the microwave; he structures it as a dialog with his father, who is a physicist.
He concludes that this specific instance is not unsafe (if you have a turntable, the mass of the staple is low, etc). But then, I've put grapes in a microwave and produced plasma.
"Don't put aluminum foil in the microwave" works pretty well as a safety rule, and it's plenty simple. It's not exhaustive but neither is a rule against metal.
“GFCI” is maybe a bad name because it describes what the system is supposed to accomplish but not what it does.
It interrupts the circuit in response to a current imbalance between hot and neutral. Kirchoff’s laws… if the current is imbalanced, it must be going somewhere else.
New homeowners: Know where your GFCI reset switches are located.
I just had a fun time debugging why some of my outlets weren't working. Turns out there was a GFCI tripped in the garage, a few rooms down from the outlet.
I have never seen a GFCI reset switch in a different room from the outlet. I’m not surprised it exists, but it would make me unhappy.
I've had the GFCI switch in the main fusebox in a couple of modern-ish apartments. That seems a perfectly sensible place for it, it's where you'd go to check whether the room breaker had tripped anyway.
That complicates things a bit in the panel because the breakers need a connection to neutral, but yeah, otherwise a slick setup.
Newer panels and breakers are plug-on-neutral, older breakers have a pigtail to the neutral bar.
My house came with an EV charger wired through a GFCI breaker. That damn thing tripped constantly because I guess it was malfunctioning? And they are quite expensive for a 50A version.
Or maybe the charger was badly wired and the breaker was preventing it burning down your house?
You can daisy-chain the rest of the outlets in a circuit off of a single GFCI. They have two sets of terminals -- one for the leg of the circuit that goes to the breaker panel and the other for attaching the rest of the circuit.
At a previous rental, we had an outlet in the hallway that never worked -- only upon moving out did I discover the GFCI outlet hidden in the back of a cabinet in the adjacent bathroom.
GFCI outlets have two sets of terminals, line and load. Line is meant to take hot & neutral from the mains panel. For load, you can run wire from there to downstream regular outlets, and it will give them GFCI protection too.
This is annoying when the outlets are in different rooms and it's not clear what's connected to what, but can save money when wiring up a bunch of outlets in a kitchen, for example, since a GFCI outlet can be $20 or more, while regular outlets usually only cost a couple bucks.
In France (and apparently the rest of Europe too) our GFCIs are not located at the outlets. They are inside the electrical panels and protect a row of circuit breakers.
I've seen builders put the all the outlets for bathrooms on one circuit with the GFCI in one bathroom - typically the master bath. In my last house the outside outlets were on the GFCI with the outlets in the garage. Anything to save a few bucks as long as code allows it.
I spent a whole night worried about electric hazards when the meat smoker killed an outlet outside my basement door. My wife's aunt, an electrician, asked if we checked the GFCI. I had read about it online, but didn't find the switch near any of the outside outlets. Nor was it by any of the inside outlets on the opposite side of the wall from the outside ones. Turns out, it was in the upstairs bathroom. Because why not?
Technology Connections has a good video on the topic, but you probably already knew that.
Most of my electricity / electronics knowledge comes from books and old forum posts. I would have loved Technology Connections if it came out when I was younger.
We call them 'Residual Current Devices' elsewhere in the world, which is at least a bit more accurate.
R&D electrical engineer here! I have to do this sort of thing all the time and can confidently tell you it's pretty normal.
The real risk isn't really to the toaster (who cares, it's just a toaster, and even if it starts on fire when you plug it in, you're probably watching it pretty closely).
No, it's that you leach lead or other such nasties (sealing rubbers, PCB epoxies, what-have-you) into your dishwasher and start eating them when they get redeposited onto your dishes. Lead isn't that harmful... except when you eat it. Don't eat lead.
In fact, if you have a dedicated dishwasher for this (or ultrasonic cleaner! those are pretty awesome, most of the time, for most things!), I'd say it's perfectly reasonable to do this! You know what we call those kinds of things where I work? Parts washers. You know what we wash in them... circuit boards! It's fine! Circuit boards are cleaned with aqueous solutions all the time as part of normal manufacturing! If you don't have a dedicated dishwasher... well, I wouldn't do it then, but if you must, you'll want to run the dishwasher a few more times, empty, with a strong detergent, preferably a lead-chelating one. (You might also make one of those runs with dishwasher cleaner, and strike the whole "yearly dishwasher cleaning" task off your to-do list for the first time this... uh, decade?)
You will, of course, want to dry things well. This is both easier and harder with a toaster. Easier because, well, toasters get hot, and this will get any nooks and crannies dry. Harder because one of the tricks to get things dry faster after they come out of a parts washer is to rinse them in alcohol, because alcohol dries very fast. You, uh, don't want to do that with a toaster. At least not one you intend to run any time soon.
dishwashers normally dry the dishes by heating them with an electric heating element; this is more likely to damage electronics than the water
there are also some electronic components that won't deal well with water, especially strong streams of water. microphones and speakers come to mind, because they commonly include exposed paper, thin membranes, and sponges. i'm thinking an ocxo would also be a problem both because overheating it can cause rapid aging and hysteresis and because drying out the fibrous insulation is going to be hard
Right about the heat, definitely something to be careful with for the mechanical parts. (The electronics, not really so much... anything that can survive the lead-free reflow profile has some pretty solid heat tolerance.)
And also right about not washing speakers and microphones, I'd never put those through a water or solvent wash once their protective taping was removed. Surprisingly XOs are not really known for wash issues, at least these days (I think they're all hermetically sealed now), but they are notoriously sensitive to ultrasonic cleaners. So be careful there.
thanks for the tip!
Yep a toaster (oven) and hair dryer have to operate while getting very hot but most devices aren't supposed to get hot.
You, uh, don't want to do that with a toaster.
Maybe I'm slow, but what goes wrong if you rinse a toaster with alcohol?
I guess the joke is that it evaporates rather easily and it's rather flammable, especially fumes that are nicely pre-mixed with air for completer combustion. But that's just my guess at what they meant, author should ideally confirm
That is indeed exactly what I meant.
At one point I was involved in cleaning out a large system with alcohol to actually get the thing clean and dry. We went through I think it was three 55-gallon drums of absolute alcohol. By the time we were done, the air in the shop (not a small space!) was noticeably... alcoholic... and we were, uh... sensitive to it. So alcohol vapors in the air are a real thing.
I may be too used to RoHS2. I had completely forgotten that electronics could have more than a trace amount of lead in them.
Yeah, RoHS and REACH and friends have really made things better on this front. But older electronics, both pre-RoHS and simply aged (aging definitely changes many things' composition), are different.
So, do you reeeeeeally want to run this risk with your food? The one thing you should not do with most of the actual nasty chemicals is eat them. Bottom line: please do rinse your dishwasher if you try this.
Poof, it’s dry now
I used to ask electrical engineers who design building utilities if they ever touched a live wire with voltage running. If not, "how do you know it is really dangerous? How do you know it will electrocute you?"
They don't. EVER. Want to talk to me again if they don't have to. #ConventionalIgnorance
For reference, I touched 10k volts with microcurrents. It hurts! I touched 240 volts wire and felt the vibrations run up to my elbow before realizing what happened. It terrifies. And I touched 120v electricity leaking through a brick wall in vicinity of a lighting fixture. That hurts too much but doesn't kill.
That hurts too much but doesn't kill.
It didn't kill once. Not enough of a sample to draw a firm conclusion from.
Reminds me of a post on HN: No random clinical trials were done to demonstrate parachutes actually work.
Most papers that cited that one have ended up getting retracted. Turns out rigour matters.
It can be very lethal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_chair
The entire execution took about eight minutes. George Westinghouse later commented that, "They would have done better using an axe",[27] and The New York Times ran the headline: "Far worse than hanging".[28]
Looks like it takes a while to kill.
I've seen 400V industrial equipment shock people and not kill them and I know someone from my hometown whose grandfather died of an electrocution on a 230V outlet.
We have the ability to learn from others' mistakes, that's one of the main reasons we've gone so far as species. Not every child needs to get serious burns to learn that fire is hot and can be dangerous.
And looks like this hurt people on HN.
how do you know it is really dangerous? How do you know it will electrocute you?
It is possible to learn from others. In fact, our society's entire foundation of knowledge comes from building on the knowledge of past generations and others in our current generation. Not everything needs to be verified from scratch by every user of the knowledge, and if it did we'd never make it past roman tech levels.
The anecdote of walking into a flooded band room to unplug a submerged power bar is uhh.... "shocking" to say the least.
I would never walk over to a live, submerged power bar to unplug it. Especially with your feet in the water. Very risky.
"Power bar" is that a Commonwealth English term? As an American, power bar sounds like something you would eat
It’s what we say in Australia.
If you purchase an edible “power bar” anywhere (not just America) you can be sure it has and can provide no power. It might have a little energy stored as a carbohydrate though.
I live in Victoria and I've always called them powerboards. Which state/territory/island calls them "power bars"?
I can't get over the irony of doing this because one was previously wrong about something they thought they were right about.
They are intellectually secure in the center of a vast mob; their wisdom was received, not crafted. It doesn’t need to be crafted, because it is already known, established, beyond question (but demonstrably wrong).
Fwiw I wouldn't do it either... But I guess if there's a valid reason, it's good to know the risk is apparently (as this article says...) exaggerated..
Why? If both your feet are in the water (or one, for that matter) there’s no current flow. But do be sure to pull the plug from the wall by grasping the plastic cord and not touching anything else dry.
The rest of the time don’t ever pull the plug out by the cord, even though NEMA requires some appliances to use a power cord with a special bar in it to defend against such mistreatment.
Personally I think that it is how you finish with a Darwin award. Being overly confident. Same kind of thing as driving a bicycle without a helmet because you are used to and never had a problem or like working on fixing your wall power plugs without stopping the electricity because "it is ok, you will not touch the metallic part of the live wires"
It's always interesting to me to see what you can get away with washing/getting wet without ruining it. I bought a bunch of vinyl 45's off of eBay several years ago and they were pretty gross. I stumbled across a forum where someone recommended washing them with water and a little bit of dish soap. As you can probably imagine, a lot of people freaked out in the responses and said it was a terrible idea. I gave it a whirl because the records were cheap and they sounded perfect after they dried. There was no warping or damage, although a few of the labels got a little messed up (but the needle doesn't go there anyways, so I didn't mind). I guess you're supposed to use distilled water, but Chicago water worked just fine.
Most vinyls are made from PVC. That's actually where the name comes from: the V in polyvinyl chloride. So they are actually pretty resistant and can deal with a significant portion of the stuff found in your cleaning cabinet.
First, they are called "records", not "vinyls." Do you call your compact discs "polycarbonates?" Second, the records was working with were not vinyl. He said 45's, and most 45's were pressed in Styrene, not PVC. It is a lot more susceptible to both warping and scratching than vinyl.
Nice. Once, just for fun, I followed online advice and cleaned a record with wood glue. It takes some time to dry, but it’s really fun, and the record was _spotless_ afterwards.
Oh yeah, I remember seeing that recommendation as well! I think the reason I avoided it was because it seemed like it would be too messy. I'm guessing it's probably more effective than dish soap, though.
I've saved a couple keyboards from soda spills by unplugging them immediately, pouring the fluid out and running them through the dishwasher. Doesn't always work the second time, but it works often enough. It's worth a try.
The commonly accepted way to clean records among audiophiles is to use an ultrasonic cleaner, and a homemade cleaning solution containing some industrial attractants and anti-static additives that are recommended by the Library of Congress, but a few drops of dish soap works about the same. You don't need a lot, just enough to break the surface tension. There's usually a motor that slowly spins the record so that the label never gets submerged, and there are label protectors with o-ring seals that you can use while rinsing to protect the label.
The distilled water is mostly needed to avoid deposits from water spots after the rinse water evaporates. This can be mitigated with a vacuum drying system, which you can buy for between $25 and $500.
I'd be more worried about a scrub sponge than the water itself. Those things scratch metal
Jewish law requires some new utensils to be ritually immersed in water before use[1]. There are differences of opinion around electrical appliances, but I have successfully dunked toasters, cheese toasters, and many other small appliances, let them dry for a few days, and never had any issues.
In fact, had OP found this[2] article, they would have seen that
Practice has demonstrated that immersion generally does not harm most equipment if allowed three days to dry out.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tevilat_Kelim
[2] https://oukosher.org/blog/consumer-kosher/tevilas-keilim-a-p...
Sorry for digressing, but what's a cheese toaster? That sounds exceedingly interesting.
Sounds like a toaster oven to me
I'd expect regular sandwich toaster with humongous amount of cheese in between bread. Not a bad thing per se, poor/busy man's source of calzones, just not a good way to make regular lunches/dinners since nothing that comes out is very healthy in non-small amounts.
Maybe a raclette machine?
https://www.amazon.fr/raclette-electrique/s?k=raclette+elect...
The drying is straightforward, water evaporates, but do you maintain a personal mikveh?
I'm reading through the requirements and this is a serious piece of plumbing, expensive to install at home.
But it has such a purifying ritual function that I think showing up at a communal mikva'ot with a toaster would be awkward.
Does everybody expect that some people will have toasters? You take out your dental bridge and your earrings, trim your nails and your calluses, pick up the toaster and walk on in?
These facilities mostly resemble nice spas.
I'm not mocking the belief here, just curious what it's like as a human participating. If I were trying to purify a toaster I'd pour deionized water into a rubber tub but I gather that doesn't count.
Edit:
To answer my own question, it looks like communal mikva'ots are built with separate sections similar to a sink just for the immersion of things like dishes and toasters and don't require as much personal cleaning, so that's simple and human. As these things usually are.
Are appliances such as toasters considered a culinary utensil?
Kitchen Utensil appears to be defined as `A kitchen utensil is a small hand-held tool used for food preparation.`[1]. Perhaps you don't actually need to submerge electronic appliances in water...
The big issue is not the water that will dry if you wait but that the hot water will make something that is glued or something that has two materials that expand different when heated break.
There is no amount of letting it dry out or adding rice that will solve if things are apart.
Also, corrosion/oxidation and any chemical interactions with Dish powder (if that was used) that might not be noticeable at first
This is a detergent selection problem. There are many detergents (like enzyme based) that are specifically designed for not corroding metals.
In part, sure, but given that we're talking about a dishwasher here (as opposed to an electronic device washer), I think it's not a stretch to assume using dishwashing powder. Which won't be highly corrosive, but certainly does interact with aluminium. But even without detergent, contact with water can start things rusting pretty fast.
And detergent might wash away grease or oil from parts that need it.
I assume most parts of a toaster are designed to handle a bit of heat
I've done this with dirty keyboards before, it works pretty well actually!
I would never do it with a toaster :)
But curious, how did you dry the keyboard ?
I just let it air dry for a day. I turned the heated dry option off on the dishwasher just in case.
Reminds me of that time my mom spilled a cup of coffee on the keyboard — and then dried it with the hair dryer.
We spent a few weeks using the other end of a paint brush to hit the keys whose caps melted off until we could get a new one.
I put it in an oven at low temperature, and then let it dry outside for a day. It did not work so I thought it was broken. And then, a few days later I plugged it in and it worked fine (and still does)
Please, please, clarify this bit for me.
All that day, kids got to see Mr. Stillwater’s hair dryer running under water in a fish tank. I thought I knew about electricity and water, but what I possessed was Conventional Ignorance posing as Conventional Wisdom. Humbling.
Should I put the wifes running hairdryer into our fishtank to entertain our child?
No; the author made a number of reasoning errors throughout the article.
"""Underwriters Laboratories modified its marking requirements for hair dryers after the CPSC brought to UL's attention reports of injuries and deaths attributed to consumer misuse of hair dryers. Under the modified requirements, hair dryers must be permanently. marked "Danqer-- Electrocution possible if used or dropped in tub. Unplug after using." A tag with warning instructions also is required by UL to be attached to the power supply cord."""
TL;DR insurance underwriters observed enough deaths that they believed it was wise to change a product's markings to avoid having to pay out as much money.
The electrocution only happens if you get into the tub with the plugged-in dryer. Or try to fish it out with your bare hands while it is still plugged in.
Assuming that the dryer continues to run, it is perfectly safe to keep it running indefinitely in a fish tanks (without fish, of course). You just have to unplug it before removing it.
See the other comment with a YouTube video attached. If the aquarium is not conductive, should be ok
Not if there are fish in it. Otherwise maybe.
I often run my (PCB) boards through the dishwasher after soldering components to them. To clean off any flux that might be on them.
I'm sure the boards are fine after that.
Wouldn't feel so great about the dishes you put into the dishwasher afterwards.
Ain't no getting fine metal dust out of porcelain, and idk what else got washed off of those boards.
I appreciate the concern voiced by you and sibling comment! I failed to mention that I do use a dedicated dishwasher in my garage for this purpose! (And occasionally washing other shop-things). I also have two toaster ovens, a microwave, and a couple minifridges I've dedicated to non-food use over the years.
Now we're talking!
Curious to hear about non-food uses of those.
So far, I've used a dehydrator machine to dry 3D printing filament, and was going to use a slow cooker for acetone vapor bath smoothing of ABS prints, but never got to it.
A small health PSA from a previous poster [0]:
The real risk isn't really to the toaster (who cares, it's just a toaster, and even if it starts on fire when you plug it in, you're probably watching it pretty closely).
No, it's that you leach lead or other such nasties (sealing rubbers, PCB epoxies, what-have-you) into your dishwasher and start eating them when they get redeposited onto your dishes. Lead isn't that harmful... except when you eat it. Don't eat lead.
As a electronics person with microscope-level repair experience: the problem isn't the water, it is what is in it. And it can become an issue weeks later when residues of minerals and detergent combined with current flows corroded your contacts away, leakage current ts flowing in all kinds of unintended places. PCBs are laminated and can do funny things when treated wrongly. Whether that kills the device or not is hard to say without knowing what is inside it. If in doubt open it, wash everything with isopropanol and a toothbrush. Or you know, using a ultrasonic cleaner with the right solution.
Toasters and hair dryers (depends on the kind of course) are as low tech as it gets. Getting them wet is indeed not a big issue, when unplugged. But as a physics teacher he probably has heard about galvanization, oxidation and similar chemical things.. I hope. Corroded electrical contacts have a higher electrical resistance. Higher electrical resistances produce more heat. More heat produces higher resistance..
But as a physics teacher he probably has heard about galvanization, oxidation and similar chemical things.. I hope.
As the post says
I learned two things [...] (2) GFIs only trip off when in bodies of water that are grounded. They won’t work in an aquarium sitting on a lab table, or in a plastic laundry sink with plastic drainpipes, or in a plastic shower with plastic drainpipes.
I'm neither an electrician nor a physics teacher but I knew that these devices looking for ground leakage work only when the electricity leaks to ground (I guess that's what GFI refers to; I know them as aardlekschakelaar, literally: earth leak switch).
That's also why I find it so weird that this teacher describes the functioning as "detects that current is leaking out some other route than expected": it's not like electrons have routing labels you can match against an itinerary. It can very well flow through your body before returning via the normal return wire. Rather, the device detects electricity coming through the ground wire, and so it stands to reason that you need to close the circuit into that ground for it to observe the fault...
Why else do all electrical devices with a metal case or a metal structure have these metal bits connected to ground, if not so that most shorts will lead to the circuit being closed towards ground? Anyone who ever took anything electrical apart has seen these extra cables -- I did last week while cleaning the dehumidifier for example.
I applaud careful experimentation as they did with the hairdryer and, presumably, the toaster (using it on a protected circuit, observing if it works correctly, etc.). But there are also quite a few sentences in this post where my eyebrows moved
Why else do all electrical devices with a metal case or a metal structure have these metal bits connected to ground, if not so that most shorts will lead to the circuit being closed towards ground?
That predates GFCI, it's to ensure that in the event of a short the metal case/structure will always remain safe to touch by a (presumably grounded) person. Tripping GFCI is just a bonus.
Also: metal structures can be at different potential than ground for reasons unrelated to the grid (e.g. static electricity). Grounding them helps to ensure they aren't which is especially helpful in environments where people handle sensitive electronics or ignition sources.
Rather, the device detects them coming through a second wire, and so it stands to reason that you need to close the circuit into that second wire for it to observe the fault...
GFCIs measure the difference in current between the hot and neutral lines, and trip if the difference is above some threshold. This way, they can detect current flowing from hot to ground through _any_ path, not just the ground terminal on the same outlet. If they only measured current through the outlet's ground terminal, they wouldn't be able to detect e.g. a (usually 2-prong) hair dryer falling into a bathtub (which would typically be grounded through the metal plumbing of the building.)
I have a similar but less extreme experience.
I have a Tommee Tippee prep machine for baby formula milk. The part it has water coming out got so dirty after months of use. Due to lack of sleep like any father of newborn does, I flip it upside down and clean it with running water, and then I found out all the water finds its way into the machine.
Then I completely disassemble it, I use a dehumidifier to blow dry air directly to the screen that water made its way between the glasses.
Then after it is completely dried, I put it back, it continued to work.
So happens I’m a physicist too.
Now I should find an electronics to throw into the dish washer. Unfortunately I already get rid of my toaster because it got so dirty, I should have kept it.
I've owned the same machine for five years. I haven't inspected the bit where the water comes out. Maybe I should. Though neither of my two kids seem to have been harmed!
It looked like the water going down splashed some milk back to there repeatedly and dried and formed some sort of crystallized milk powder that looks quite disgusting. I would recommend a wipe.
Right! I'm doing this ! Thanks :)
Unfortunately I already get rid of my toaster because it got so dirty
I highly doubt that a dishwasher run would change that.
The real reasons not to use the dishwasher are:
— dishwasher isn't a replacement from scrubbing
— caked-on grease will still be there
— you'd need to clean your dishwasher afterwards (more work)
— it's far easier to shake the bread crumbs out when they're dry (and there's a convenient latch on the bottom for that) than if they're wet and stuck to the insides
— There's a potential for rust to form somewhere inside the toaster, which will not make it work (or look) any better. That's not specific to toasters.
Crumpled aluminum foil does wonders for cleaning metallic surfaces from rust and burned grease though. And chemical solutions like 409 can make everything else sparkling clean.
Today I learnt that pure water is not conductive and than tap water is a poor conductor at 120V which I believe is the american standard...
What about Europe's 230V ? Would he still have gone in the water to unplug the piano if he was in Europe ?
I was immediately reminded of the stern warnings to keep out of flooded basements until you've made sure the electricity to the house is cut off. I found[1] at least one person who died this year because of this lesser-known risk of flash-flooding (the more intuitive concern is drowning because you can't open the door due to water pressure). It's possible that it was more voltage at play, though, there are 400V lines in most German homes (electrical heating and stoves, mostly).
[1] https://www.rnd.de/panorama/67-jaehriger-will-keller-leer-pu...
Would he still have gone in the water to unplug the piano if he was in Europe?
Given that they did feel tingling, honestly I am not convinced one should follow that example anywhere on earth.
The post also describes that the breaker thing trips when the electricity takes an "some other route than expected" (their words), which I'd say tingling is indicative of: some electricity was being conducted away via the water and, at some point, their foot. Yet the breaker no trip, so either it wasn't a protected circuit or they drew another wrong conclusion based on that aquarium observation which they expected to go differently based on a previously wrong conclusion.
If you can assume the water has a similar conductivity as the tap water in the aquarium (not sure that's a safe assumption after it flooded a room with all sorts of dust and objects in it), and you can assume that your body can handle more electricity than the breaker needs to trip, then a fairly short distance ought to indeed insulate you well enough, but the objective was to get close and turn it off. The post sounded like they based this "I'll do it" opinion basically on the hairdryer-in-aquarium thing which we already know didn't go as expected. To me, the situations "hairdryer runs by itself in water" and "I, standing on a ground, stick my hand near the device's off switch in the water" are two very different things. There could easily have been further unknowns -- and apparently there were since the breaker didn't function in the way that this very post describes it should.
Since moving to Germany I've often noticed wariness around "Halbwissen" (loaning the word since it carries extra connotation), meaning half-knowledge but not in the sense of "you know something about it!"; rather, you kinda know but you don't know the details and that causes overconfidence. That works out until it doesn't
I don't honestly subscribe to that a whole lot: you can't know everything about everything and we use partial knowledge all day long for nearly every topic. Also electricity, I've noticed before a lot of mysticism and fear goes around unnecessarily. So I like the part where experimenting, when done carefully (letting it dry, using a protected circuit, being aware that it might fail and you should observe it first), is encouraged. However, this particular bit about going into the water and "I felt the electricity but everyone cheered me on!" is not what and how you're supposed to do these experiments
Luckily we have equations for this!
Assume that the water has a fixed resistance of R. You have increased the Voltage V about double.
As a result of V=IR, the I, or current flow, will be doubled. Which in this case is probably a moderate tingle since R is so high.
For reference, the heart muscles start getting involuntary twitches around 100mA, and at 200mA causes cardiac arrest. And the standard units of Voltage, Amp, and Ohm will serve you well here for any conversions.
My favorite example of conventional ignorance: some guy was traveling on a plane the girl sitting next to him asked him whether there was wifi available so she could browse the internet. This was about 20 years ago... and the guy was convinced that the girl was an idiot. "We were flying in the middle of nowhere, 20000 feet in the air, and this girl is asking me whether we have wifi?? Some people have no common sense!" Turns out there's a fine line between being an idiot and being ahead of your time.
It still amazes me, even in a world where I can order starlink. That it works with the other 200 people onboard also using it is incredible.
We should all take a moment to appreciate the internet. Soon (if not already) we'll be in a time where most people take it for granted, but few think about what is actually happening. The internet lets you send a packet of data to any other computer on earth, as long as it is connected to the internet. To get that access yourself you only need to connect to the internet somehow, that's it. So sure there are more difficult cases like planes, about they only have to worry about their own particular problem of the last mile, once the data has reached the internet it can go anywhere. Imagine if the planes also had to make arrangements with BBC, Google, governments etc to get data access. It would never happen.
I stopped watching the show Ozark because of the episode where the saboteur takes an AC line and drops it into the water by a dock in order to electrocute someone. I'm no expert in electricity, but I know that your body has to become a part of the circuit.
Similarly, the pivotal moment at the end of The Astronaut's Wife (1999) had me groaning.
Don’t forget the former president’s story about the electric boats and sharks.
I haven't seen the episode in question, but from what I understand people be can electrocuted/drown from swimming in water with current running through it. It is for this reason that it is not recommended to swim in marinas.
See e.g. https://www.electricshockdrowning.org/esd--faq.html
I've always figured any device containing a capacitor would fry some part of the board when water short circuited it. Wrong thinking?
Unless they are charged they are no different from any other component.
Capacitors can keep their charge for a long time, especially big ones. But you can discharge them by trying to run the device when it’s not plugged in or waiting a few minutes/hours/days.
Most capacitors are drained heavily just by being unplugged for a short period of time, as the other poster mentioned.
The other thing is that the capacitor would need to somehow be shorted to a component it wasn’t supposed to… instead of just itself. Shorting to itself is relatively safe (although might result in a pop and some arcing).
For something like a toaster (especially the old school ones with just a dial to control toast degree) they’re all mechanical contrivances. No electronics to speak of.
My son is starting his first week of high school. I am recommending to him that he pose related questions to his physics teacher:
- "Is it okay to wash a toaster in a dishwasher?"
- "Is it okay to put an electric hair drier in a fish tank when it is plugged in?"
And I am hoping he gets a very productive year of science for the effort.
If he's anything like my high school science teachers he'll be told to shut up and hated by his peers for daring to ask questions.
We loved to get my high school physics teacher off on tangents by asking questions about weird things or stories about how he almost died or something
I'd use de-ionized water and Simple Green (a citrus-based cleaner which evaporates at about the same rate as water), but I'd expect a toaster to survive once dry. I've cleaned several Teletype machines that way. The problem isn't water; it's solids left behind when the water evaporates, and corrosion.
Not all parts will survive this. Microphones and MEMS devices tend not to do well. Motors and transformers with paper insulation don't do well. Most modern electronics goes through a dishwasher-like process after assembly, to remove any excess solder and paste. A few parts have to be added past that point.
Oh speaking of. I have this really gunked up Model 35 tape typing unit and was about to dunk it in motor flushing oil. But then I see it has felt pieces and the magnets appear to be coated in shellac. Do you submerse your units completely or do you remove the sensitive parts?
I've done the older machines, Teletype Model 14 and 15, nearly a century old. I remove the magnets and the motor and immerse everything else. The Model 35 has many plastic parts and some electronics, so I can't speak from experience. Look up Greenkeys Digest and ask there.
("All gunked up" usually means the wrong lubricant was used at some point. Usually something that has heavy fractions. The short, light hydrocarbon molecules in the oil evaporate, leaving behind the long chains that are basically asphalt.
The original Teletype oil was whale oil. I lubricate Teletypes with 0-20W fully synthetic motor oil, which is supposed to be a consistent length of hydrocarbon. So when it evaporates over a few years, it just leaves dry metal. Especially avoid WD-40. All wrong for this.)
This might be the best (at least most useful) post I have everr read.
If I change my mind I will let you know.
If you die of electrocution, let us know.
Your GFCI outlet may not always trigger:
I loved that video, it was really entertaining although I didn't see anything in there about GFCI outlets not triggering. The original article does mention how GFCIs don't trigger if current isn't flowing to ground and how that's actually fine (e.g. the hairdryer in water example)
(2012)
I wonder how much the fraction of toasters that contain electronic components has increased since then.
I have a feeling the basic cheap toaster has remained unchanged for decades.
Ah, but your question is what % of toasters is now non-basic...
For my part, I ‘kept the faith,’ and continued searching for Reason.
This is science. Theory says one thing, but what does the evidence show?
Theory and evidence will show the same thing here. If you've got the right theory. And a common toaster.
(2012)
I did this in 1994 personally. It was fine. I am not a scientist and did not overanalyze it. It seemed obvious to me it would be fine. For whatever reason, since that one time I have never had the need to run any other toaster through the dishwasher again.
This was a super simple basic toaster. I wouldn't do it with a modern one with all the various encoders and soft buttons and microelectroncs. Not for any scientific reason, just for similar reason as I wouldn't run my phone through the dishwasher.
I dunno why one would want to put the toaster into the dishwasher in any case.
Any caked-on grease would still be there.
The outside is easy to clean in any case, and the inside doesn't need to be sparkling (it won't be if you ever actually use the toaster in any case).
There's a door on the bottom of the toaster to get the crumbs out; that's necessary maintenance, and it's far easier done if the toaster is dry. Adding water to crumbs will cause them to stick, so the dishwasher shouldn't be the first thing in any case.
Parts of my BBQ grill would fit into the dishwasher too, but that's not how I clean them either - dishwasher isn't a replacement for scrubbing.
Oh, and there's absolutely a higher risk of getting rust on metals in a dishwasher. And cheap-ass toasters aren't made to be rust-proof throughout.
The conventional ignorance of "don't put the toaster into the dishwasher" is based on at least some truth... and the toaster's instruction manual :)
A few years ago, an 8 port Cisco 2960 that was under my management went offline. This switch was in a plastic NEMA box mounted on the outside of a ski lift. When I went to imvestigate, I found that a small glacier had formed over the NEMA box, and had ripped the door off the box. When I got there, the box was full of ice, which was in the process of melting. The switch was still running, but the ice had ripped the trunk patch cable out - apparently the root cause of the switch going down. I unplugged it and extracted it from the ice, and dumped a not-insignificant quantity of water out from inside the switch. I let it dry out for a couple days, got a new cover for the NEMA box (which I screwed shut this time in addition to the little flip latch) and it's been running fine ever since. Who'da thunk?
I found an HP Elite 8200 behind a dumpster in the rain once. Brought it home, examined the innards, confirmed there was no rust. Let it dry for a few days while I waited for the hard disk to arrive from Amazon (it was once a corporate box, so its permanent storage had been removed and securely disposed of).
Sparked it up, it worked fine. I use it as a repo/build server to this day.
“Sorry #5, but a toaster is an electrical device, not an electronic one, and I’ve already soaked an electrical device in a fish tank for several hours, while it was running.”
Not entirely true. Most modern toasters have some sort of electronics in them
The article is absolutely loaded with falsehoods/misunderstandings.
But what would happen if you Microwaved a Toaster?!
This kills the microwave
Indeed, it does depend on the toaster. Conventional toaster OK as long as it fully dries. Some kind of fancy toaster with a microprocessor, well - it depends
Are you saying it might no longer connect to the wifi?
It's funny because I was wondering exactly this on Monday. I never did try to put any electronics in the dishwasher, but, several times in the past, I was a bit amazed on how electronic devices - not rated as water-resistant - that got completely soaked, worked just fine after I turned them off and let them dry for some days.
In my past experiences, most stuff that got unusable was because water got inside the LCD display, and left some debris that was impossible to remove.
I decided to put my toaster in the dishwasher after that.
The line is between people who work in the real world and people who are mostly online.
In the real world, like a job site or auto shop, the hammer and flathead screwdriver are the two top tools. Generally abused and rarely mentioned in service manuals.
In the "online" world, every tool has strict boundaries and restrictions.
He had me up to wading into the water. That seems unwise, and unnecessary when you could shut off the breaker first.
Also, as I assume others have pointed out, modern toasters are both electrical and electronic devices; I expect they wouldn't handle the dishwasher quite as well as older ones did.
Generally though, 100% on board with the author's point about strident repetition of common "wisdom".
What we're told is realer than what we see.
I was hoping they built a functional toaster inside the dishwasher, such that you could put bread in with your dishes, both would come out hot and ready, and the crumbs would be automatically washed away.
Curious after reading the post, I asked GPT:
Sent by you: Can I put a toaster in the dishwasher?
Sent by Copilot: It’s not a good idea to put a toaster in the dishwasher. Toasters have electrical components that can be damaged by water, and it could be dangerous if water gets into the electrical parts. Instead, you can clean the exterior with a damp cloth and use a brush to remove crumbs from the inside.
Is there anything else you need help with?
Sent by you: I'm feeling adventurous and plan to let it dry out real well
Sent by Copilot: I admire your adventurous spirit! However, even if you let it dry out thoroughly, there could still be hidden moisture that might cause electrical issues or even pose a fire hazard when you use the toaster again. It’s really best to avoid putting any electrical appliances in the dishwasher.
If you’re looking for a safer way to clean your toaster, I can share some tips! Would you like that?
Sent by you: I did it anyway.
Sent by Copilot: Oh no! I hope everything turns out okay. Just to be safe, I recommend not using the toaster until you’re absolutely sure it’s completely dry, inside and out. You might want to leave it in a warm, dry place for several days.
If you notice any unusual smells or sounds when you do try to use it, it’s best to unplug it immediately and consider getting a new one. Safety first!
Is there anything else I can help you with?
Like all good writing, this article is not about the subject in the title. This is the pertinent line :
They are intellectually secure in the center of a vast mob; their wisdom was received, not crafted.
The "running blow hair dryer in a water bucket or aquarium" story checks out: .https://youtube.com/watch?v=oJNbBP5MNE8
Great article. I had an argument with a coworker how a normal breaker works and that it won’t just fail when exceeding the rated amp-age. That it can happily continue for minutes. And of course the biggest misunderstanding: Breakers protect the cables in the wall not humans. That they can do that as well is just a nice side effect.
Never the less, I would still argue to kill the power before stepping into water with an active mains line running through it.
Just a question. How about doing this experiment in 240 land? I would assume the result would be different?
Edit: replaced rated power with amp-age
Why didn't he just turn off the fuses before rescuing the pianos instead of hoping it would be like the hair drying episode?
it's nice to occasionally see a post-galilean mind
I put USB keyboards in the dishwasher.
Having done that, I do recommend taking them apart and just washing the upper keycap board, and the elastic membrane underneath it.
The reason I recommend that is that the drying time takes long before all the water is gone from between the contact layers and all the keystrokes are reliable.
If it's okay for the keyboard not to be ready for use for a bunch of days, then you can just wash it as-is.
The relevant question here is: what version of NetBSD is the toaster running?
One of Dave Rat’s old Red Hot Chili Peppers tour videos/blogs has him putting the channel cards from a very expensive analogue Midas sound desk in a dishwasher to fix them after somebody spilt beer over the desk during a gig. Worked great!
Bias and assumption are needed features of non-deterministic thought. We live in an infinite universe so thinking and exploring until you have truly 'got it right' would lead to death. I have built non-deterministic NNs (which are exceptionally effective by the way) and the key is the loss function and training for learning when to predict that the loop should exit.
I really like this article because it shows someone who keeps pushing their 'when to exit loop' training and the positive and negative implications of that.
Unless the toaster's plugged in (and I don't see how it could be) AND as long as it dries completely, then it's probably fine.
<goes to skim the article>
Yeah, sounds about right.
Ooh, I love these points of Conventional Faith presenting itself as Reason. I would argue that most true Knowledge is actually knowing what is not true, yet commonly believed. Actually, if used wisely, you can execute arbitrages on financial markets for profit, aside from other social benefits, at the cost of appearing insane in the beginning. Peter Thiel says that almost every successful person has "secrets", i.e. things that they know about the world that fly in the face of Conventional Faith and that they therefore exploit to their advantage until it's a fait accompli. Personally, I have quite a few, which if I posted here, would get me downvoted like mad, even on HackerNews, but here are some of my LESS controversial ones:
* Cloud services like AWS actually take more time, resources, and headache to maintain than baremetal servers, whether at the scale of a few backoffice users or millions of consumers. Related: the vast majority (95%+) of apps could run on a single baremetal server and be more reliable than whatever cloud shit you use.
* Most SPAs are garbage. Unless you are building something like Figma, write backend code only, don't use a frontend framework like React, and when reactivity is needed, tie it to the backend with something like Livewire. Actually even Figma uses WASM.
* Using a framework like Laravel that makes the business logic easy is far more important than choice of a language based on its technical characteristics.
* People who are outwardly racist are often the easiest to work with, as a minority. And vice-versa, people who outwardly appear anti-racist are often masking a deeply inbred superiority complex and patronizing attitude (hello Democrats), and are the most difficult to work with unless you submit to their authority. Allowing open racism actually makes it easier for a minority to live, and I say that as a minority.
Oh I could go on but I'll stop here.
Whenever I think I've cracked the code on something and know better than everyone else, it's often the case I haven't accounted for everything.
From his PPS:
until I planted my bare foot on that bare concrete floor a few inches from the submerged power strip, at which point I felt a mild but discernable tingle in that one foot.
I'll give up a clean toaster in exchange for not getting myself into those kind of situations.
Love the distinction between "Conventional Wisdom and Conventional Ignorance" :)
I am not educated in the US and never used toaster before entering the US, and I am surprised so many people think toasters can't be washed. Most electronic and electric products can be dried if you leave it there for a long enough time. I washed many of them throughout my life.
A colleague pointed out that toasters are cheap. So I tried it. Mine works, too. JD
That's the single best conclusion I've read.
My uncle had great fun hosing out his TV in the front yard, many years ago. It was the old CRT type with nice furniture type box, had years of dust built up and was causing problems he suspected in the high voltage. The neighbours raised eye brows, but all worked after.
I would fear the dishwasher would rust my Sunbeam vintage toaster.
Toasters are roach magnets
I like their post Eleven Senses. Great blog!
https://jdstillwater.blogspot.com/2019/12/eleven-senses.html
I have cleaned keyboards and coffee pad machines in the dishwasher several times. Not sure it is recommended, but the things came out clean and after prolonged drying worked flawless every time.
These commenters are speaking authoritatively on subjects about which they are completely ignorant
Welcome to the internet. First time here?
I still wonder how electrocution is not a big issue. My local electricity codes say absolutely no electricity within zone 0. I get a bit nervous about hooking up IP 65 rated lights to a IP X4 rated switchbox a meter away from the shower head
There's a reason you don't see this type of water heater in most of the world.
yes, and that reason is mostly the kind of people who were asking the original poster how he made it to adulthood
Right, I'm sure it has nothing to do with the plethora of "shocking" tales regarding these water heaters.
I can count on zero hands the number of times my shower has given me a jolt, even a minor one.
We mostly see these types of devices in relatively poor countries without the means to install more modern and safer alternatives, such as whole house water heaters.
You're absolutely right that they're common in poor countries and that we can't afford more modern and safer alternatives. Not to mention that the more modern alternatives heat the water much more effectively, providing way more comfort.
no, electric showers heat the water much more effectively, providing way more comfort; here in argentina i have to wait 45 seconds or so for the shower to stop running cold because the hot water has to run all the way from the hot-water tank in the kitchen. and i have to cut the shower short after about 20 minutes because i run out of hot water. i had the same two problems when i lived in the usa, though constant-recirculation systems have become more common there in recent years, solving one of them
electric showerheads, by contrast, provide instant heat, and they provide it for as long as you care to shower. what they don't provide is hot water in the sink for washing dishes, unless you take the dishpan to the shower to fill it. and if they're incorrectly installed they can be deadly, but that's a pretty rare problem both with hot-water tanks and with electric showers. i've never talked to anybody who knew anyone killed by an electric shower, and the nature of electrocution is that it's unlikely to injure you without killing you
(tankless hot-water heaters, called calefones, are common here in argentina, and they also solve one of those two problems—the other one. rooftop evacuated-tube hot-water thermosiphon hot-water heaters are also somewhat popular here)
i think that, aside from dishwashing, the main advantage hot-water tanks have over electric showers is that historically natural gas has been much cheaper than electricity. since chinese solar panel producers have driven the cost of solar panels down by a factor of 20, that's not necessarily true anymore—but the intermittency of solar-energy production favors hot-water tanks, if anything, even more strongly
apparently electric showers are common in the uk, which is not a poor country: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41250251 but with much better safety measures than i'm used to seeing in latin american countries
You're right that electric showerheads provide instant heat. My comparison was based on the electric showerhead I have at home, which can't heat very much due to electrical limitations. It's definitely not the case of every installation. On the other hand, the hot water I experience when showering at the gym or in fancy hotels is extremely, extremely hot and much more comfortable on a cold day. I also see some wealthy people installing gas heaters in their homes, which is why I associated electric showerheads with a lack of options.
oh, yeah, i don't think an electric showerhead in my house would work very well at all; some dumbfuck wired it with 15-gauge wire (1.4mm diameter, safe for up to about 10 amps) and at 240 volts you need more like 40 amps to provide a comfortable shower, depending on water flow rate
the entire house is on a single anemic 25-amp circuit breaker. at a low-flow 6 liters per minute (100g/s) heating from 15° to 40° (Δ temp = 25 kelvin) at 4.2 joules/°/gram, you need 10.5 kilowatts, which is 44 amps at 240 volts. at 120 volts just forget about it
i have had a super cheap non-tankless electric shower in a couple of places i've lived in argentina, which sucked. you would fill it up with water, plug it in to start heating the water, unplug it half an hour later to stop heating the water (hopefully before it overheated), and then open the valve at the bottom to run the shower. dangerous, inconvenient, and uncomfortable
on the other hand, if you're building an apartment building in brazil or a hotel in costa rica, there's nothing stopping you from including an 80-amp circuit in every bathroom for the electric shower. it's definitely cheaper than a hot-water tank or a tankless heater, and it might be safer too, since it might allow you to avoid running gas to the room
Do these countries not have any limit on the current in a circuit? Over here we're not allowed more than 16A in residential use and that's over 2.5 mm^2 wires. What kind of conductors do they use in Brasil for 80A circuits?
i'm not familiar with brazilian regulations but normally 80 amps would be about 3-gauge, 26mm². you can bend it with your bare hands if you get the stranded stuff. here in argentina people are evidently a lot more lax than that, so maybe in brazil they are too, but clearly you need at least 12mm²
I had one of these in an outside room as a teenager and in the winter it was terrible:
You can only heat water so much for the available wattage and when it was cold the water was so cold that only a thin trickle could be heated to a comfortable showering temperature.
i admit i've only used them in countries that don't really have winter, where they were great. except the time i got shocked
no?
i mean it's the same reason most people in the usa don't have a bidet in their house; it's not because they're too poor to afford one. technology adoption is path-dependent and mostly random, and fear makes people conservative. yes, there are a few people who are familiar with the actual risks and rewards of the different technologies, but they're vastly outnumbered by the pre-galilean minds who are entirely guided by conventional wisdom
most people in the usa can count on zero hands the number of times they've sprayed water on the bathroom ceiling from their bidet, too
This assumes a bidet is objectively better than a regular toilet. That is debatable.
It's not debatable these electric showerheads are objectively better, just because some poorer communities around the world use them.
well, it only assumes that bidets are subjectively better to many people, which they certainly are; it doesn't rely on the assumption of an objective, observer-independent scale of valuation in the way you're describing
(bidets aren't an alternative to a regular toilet, and the fact that you think they are is a minor indicator of why it's difficult for even widespread, highly beneficial innovations to become universal even after centuries)
not only is it debatable whether or not electric showers are better in that sense, i have in fact debated it; i refer you to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41250642 and eagerly await your opinion
If given the option, free of charge, to continue using electrified showerheads or using whole-home water heating... how many would continue to use electrified showerheads?
The fact that they are only common in poor and impoverished areas, tells you everything you need to know.
This argument is a lot like asserting instant-coffee is better than fresh brewed coffee because some people have no alternative choice.
probably most people would continue to use either what they're familiar with or what they think is fancier, with little regard to what they would actually like more—in the same way that many people have opted to live in suburbs where the commute makes them miserable, or drink and smoke heavily despite the impact on their health, or date abusive partners
humans are not automatically strategic. one reason is that they're subject to many kinds of irrationality; the particular species you are currently exhibiting is known as 'the fallacy of affirming the consequent'
a pretty large fraction would continue using electric showers just because they're familiar with them—but that is at best only a very weak argument. we can do better than that by debating their actual advantages and disadvantages, as i did in the linked comment, rather than mindlessly subscribing to vox populi, vox dei
if given the option, free of charge, to install a bidet in your house, would you take it? evidently not, because you don't know what a bidet is or how to use it. the same could be said of most people installing a computer in their house 50 years ago. or many modern innovations today, like a gfci, corningware, and borosilicate oven dishes, some of which have fallen out of use because consumers didn't understand them
using a cellphone instead of a landline was only common in impoverished areas 30 years ago, and even today, having front-door locks that are hard to pick are still only common in impoverished areas. also, speaking lingala is only common in impoverished areas. that's not because there's anything wrong with lingala
finally, as it happens, my wife prefers instant coffee to fresh-brewed coffee
I wonder, though, why there are so few incidents where this type of shower is prevalent, given that people not used to it are so worried. If the fatality rate were 0.0001%, hundreds of people would die every day.
Just in this thread alone we've found several stories of people being mildly shocked by these devices while on vacation.
It's not that people die every day from these devices, it's that in general this isn't a great way to heat water if you have alternatives available.
I don't know about you, but I would prefer not to receive a shock, no matter how minor it might be, when I step into the shower...
Electric showers are very common in the UK - although the heater is in a wall-mounted unit, with the head on a hose, rather than the heater being in the head itself.
The heating element has three layers - innermost, a wire that gets hot. Around that, a ceramic insulator. And outermost, a metal cover to protect the ceramic insulator. Then the heating element is mounted in a small water tank. And that, along with some other components, is put into a suitably waterproof outer plastic box. The insulation is of course all tested at the factory.
The tank, heating element outer, and all the pipework in the general vicinity is then grounded, and the power supply passes through an RCD (our equivalent to a GFCI). There are also two or three temperature sensors, and a water pressure sensor.
Installers also have to have an up-to-date electrical safety license - so for they know better than to (for example) compromise the waterproofing of the enclosure by adding extra holes to make the wiring simpler.
A lot of things involving electricity in places with type-G plugs seem more dangerous if you don't know/assume that almost everything is grounded. Took me a while to realize that hairdrier he mentioned in the blogpost likely didn't have a ground connection in the plug.
In the case of a toaster with a grounded frame, the most likely route for a short is straight to earth which will trip the RCD on that set of plugs.
Toasters (usually?) don't have RCD (what they call GFCI in the UK) in the US. Maybe your circuit will have a GFCI, but it depends where you put your toaster. Do all circuits have RCD in the UK?
Most buildings that were built or have had substantial renovation work done will have RCDs installed, yes.
While you can have a separate RCD for each circuit, and the newest installations do, it's more common to have two RCDs in the panel/fuse box/consumer unit, with each circuit on one or the other. This arrangement is known as a 'split load consumer unit'. The intention of having two instead of one is that plugging in faulty electronics at night not plunge the entire house into darkness. These RCDs usually have a trip current of 30mA, making them less sensitive than American GFCIs which trip around 5mA.
In some countries, electric showers use a metal coil as a heating element, similar to a spring, located directly in the showerhead. When you turn on the faucet, water fills the showerhead and touches the metal, effectively bringing the positive and negative wires into contact. The coil then heats the water as it flows out. Occasionally, the coil can oxidize or break if there's not enough water running to keep it cool. When that happens, most people replace it themselves.
i'm pretty sure that the electric showers i've used didn't have the sealed magnesia insulating layer you're describing, nor were they connected to an rcd/gfci
i do agree that the measures you're describing would make them much safer
Electricity takes the path of least resistance. If things are done right, that means through the metal heating element and the ground wire, and not through your body.
This is a dangerous myth. Electricity takes all available paths, with less current flowing through the paths with greater resistance.
As far as I understand, the main reason people don’t get electrocuted even with improperly grounded shower head heaters is that (as noted in the post), tap water is generally not very conductive in the first place, so you’ve effectively got a gigantic resistor between you and the wires (assuming there’s a continuous path through the water at all). So even if the least resistance path is through you, the amount of current will be tiny due to Ohm’s law.
It's not a myth. Your second paragraph basically agrees with me and contradicts itself.
so you’ve effectively got a gigantic resistor between you and the wires (assuming there’s a continuous path through the water at all). So even if the least resistance path is through you, the amount of current will be tiny due to Ohm’s law.
That is, by definition, NOT the "least resistance path".
Your local codes almost certainly say no electrical outlets in that zone, not no electricity. The assumption being hardwired devices installed by professionals are not a huge risk.
I have one of those at home in the UK, in fact I only recently changed the older unit that was getting long in the tooth. The house is old and an electric shower the only way to have a proper shower. I also have a shower extension, a rubber tube with two inputs you connect to the hot and cold taps in the bath tub and which outputs cold water if you hold it lower than the taps and hot water if you keep it above the taps, but never a mix of the two.
For those who don't know, the sinks and bathtubs in UK homes and businesses often have two completely separate taps: one for hot, one for cold. You're supposed to fill the sink with water from both and "wash" your hands (or your dishes) in it. No, you don't rinse them afterwards. It's just soap, it's good for you.
Sorry, but I really can't tell - was that sarcasm?
Yes. The point is that it's not just soap but soapy water that has just washed off all kinds of gunk and dirt off your hands or dishes. It's a good idea to rinse it off. But, apparently, that's not the done thing in certain sectors of British society, e.g. see:
I wash up like a normal person: I fill a sink with hot water and washing-up liquid, and scrub the dishes in order of what needs the least attention. Glasses need a quick wipe and then they’re put aside, while the cutlery has a nice little soak at the bottom. You finish with the pans. If at any point the bubbles are not sparkling white, the water is dirty and needs to be refilled. I then move the dishes to the drying rack, without rinsing them off. In my opinion, this is the cleanest, most hygienic way of doing things, because everything has a little bath in the sink.
https://amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/may/06/you-be-...
To be fair, dish washing turns out to be a very controversial thing. When I was doing my degree I lived in a shared student house with a British girl who was muslim, a Chinese girl and a British girl of unknown religion. The Chinese girl and I always insisted on re-doing the dishes after the second British girl did them the "normal" way as above. Then the muslim girl did them all over again with her own sponge to make sure they hadn't touched pork. But nobody picked up the used loo roll tubes from the bathroom. They piled up like abstract art :D
Don't you then have soap residue on your glasses, plates, and cutlery? I assume it's probably not a problem for your health to consume trace amounts like that, but I'd be surprised if it doesn't affect the taste of whatever you later eat using them.
Maybe a little, if the soap somehow stuck to it and didn't slide off while it was drying. But never enough to notice (at least, I never heard of anyone noticing - even foreigners who are horrified at British washing up have always talked about being grossed out by it rather than actually tasting anything).
Watching a roommate leave mountains of suds on dishes always made me cringe. Consuming detergent seems like a bad idea to me, and rinsing is so quick anyway. But I used the dishes anyway and never tasted any residue.
Wait until you tell people it's not a good idea to wipe-dry the dishes after washing with a rag towel. That's when you start to see true animosity.
Oh yes.
As an aside, I wonder if places like the UK with a lot of antiquated plumbing are responsible for more than their fair share of safecrackers? Every time I see a heist movie with someone crouching, grimly turning a dial an almost imperceptible amount I think back to the last B&B shower cold tap I used. A few degrees turn can often mean a large and uncomfortable temperature change.
I was literally shocked at a hostel in Nicaragua because whoever installed the heater didn't ground it. Those electrons wanted that sweet, positively charged earth and I was the fastest way to get there.
I don't know if the circuit was through the running water or if it was the metal tap handles, but it was quite a jolt.
edit: Now that I try to remember it, it was definitely either the tap handle or the metal pipes. ZAP.
Made me think of Electroboom's visit to Mexico.
https://youtu.be/d1mPemYUrVc?si=C9zfy6jQJaO3BZ7e
Nontracking link: https://youtu.be/d1mPemYUrVc
"less tracking" might be better as there's no link you can follow to youtube that won't result in you being tracked.
As a Mexican, I can confirm. I received my house with half the grounded outlets actually not grounded. Fun times.
Same experience in a Costa Rica hostel! Except in that case my skin just gently tingled where the water touched it. It was a case of, “I know that sensation, and I certainly shouldn’t be feeling it in the shower”
That was one major adjustment when I visited Jordan last year. The electricity was so dirty that my laptop charging was outright buzzing while plugged in. Typing on it was like a gentle massage. Good times lol
A soldier died in Iraq in 2008 because a water pump wasn't grounded.
https://www.cnn.com/2009/US/07/27/military.electrocutions/
Same experience in Turkey a month ago. The exposed wires everywhere in the hotel complex should give me a clue. Also following a smell I ended up in a burned down apartment , not really a surprise given the amount of negligence in everything electrical I've seen there.
I'd hope they're grounded correctly.
Next, you'd hope that houses have proper ground wires instead of empty holes for the third pin. :)
In the US you're also allowed to use an ungrounded GFCI if you need to retrofit an existing electrical circuit and the ground wire wasn't provided originally.
I believe in this case, it also has to be labeled "no equipment ground". IANAE
i've been shocked by an electric shower, in perú. the hotel gave me a different room. normally the metal case around the heating element is grounded, which prevents this
i don't remember ever seeing one here in argentina (perhaps they're illegal), but they're common in many countries
I remember seeing my first of these in a small beachside hotel (pousada) in Brasil.
In this case the wiring was over-stripped and copper was exposed at the shower head. I used it but I was very, very careful not to splash…
Yeah I used one in Costa Rica... it was shocking me the whole time. I didn't realize until after my shower what was going on.
I saw one of these on electro boom, he was almost disappointed not to die