Any liquids around my house that will turn solid at say below 40 degrees Fahrenheit? They must turn back to liquid when heated above their freezing point to qualify.
Paraffin wax?
Although water is still probably a closer match to your specification of 40F
lard
butter
oops meant to say above 40,
lard butter and wax would qualify.
Steel, glass (granted, they remains frozen quite a way past 40F)
More generally, almost any metal, ceramic, stone, plastic, polymer, solid sugar, or fat – and most mixtures containing a lot of the above. These are “liquids” that just happen to have “high” melting points, and are solid in their room temperature phase.
so substances that are liquid 40-100 degrees but are solid under 40?
Fair enough.
Mostly waxes and fats (and compounds and mixtures including them) then - in terms of household items.
Acetic acid.
The pure stuff, glacial acetic acid, melts at 62 °F.
It’s probably hard to find since the advent of digital photography, but glacial acetic used to be sold as stop-bath concentrate in darkroom supply stores.
Dilute acetic acid being commonly referred to as vinegar.
Umm… I think it’s hard to find because it’s the main ingredient for heroin.
But hey… your household not mine.
Nah, morphine’s the main ingredient in heroin. Acetic acid just provides a couple of acetyl groups.
Jello
Got coconut oil? It liquefies at approximately skin temperature.
Not only that - glacial acetic acid can fucking kill you.
Maybe two years ago I picked up a plastic (polypropylene) hand-pump in our pilot plant.
It looked clean. I wanted to be sure; I didn’t want to contaminate a particular drum.
Like a god-damned fool I put the drawing end near my my nose and inhaled.
It turned out the last thing this particular pump had been used for was glacial acetic acid. I learned that in the following ways:
Incredible burning that penetrated every sinus I had
Extreme light-headedness
Knees buckling
See, it not only damages your lungs and sinuses (acid burn) the fumes also deprive you of oxygen.
I was lucky enough just to fall on my ass, the pump falling away from me. Then I got rightly chewed out for being a fucking moron by the pilot plant supervisor. Then sent home for general idiocy.
I’m mostly broken of my (bad) habit of sniffing things to test for chemicals.
We won’t discuss when I pulled mostly the same maneuver, but with maleic acid. Much worse. I blacked out that time.
In sufficient quantity, I suspect it could easily kill the average person - mostly through asphyxiation, though nastier things are possible (severe acid burns to the lungs would probably result in fatal pneumonia)
Your description sounds about the same as hydrochloric acid, but you can buy fuming HCl at hardware stores and places that sell swimming pool supplies. Just having the wind blow the fumes toward you from a few feet away is quite unpleasant.
Olive oil.
In the fridge it’s sludge. On the shelf it’s liquid
Ok, well, besides morphine.
Glacial acetic acid is tightly controlled, and armies patrol the southeast Asian jungles on the prowl for the scent of pickles.
Yeah, I suppose that’s a problem if you live on the same continent as Afghanistan.
Here in the US, glacial acetic was easy to get at photo stores at least through the 80’s.