Years ago when I worked in the heating business I removed a couple mercury switches because I thought they were neat. When I bought my own house about 11 years ago I still had those switches which I kept in a paperback book sized metal container with some other “treasure”.
At one point (I would estimate about 7 years ago) I was cleaning up a room where I still had boxes of “stuff” including my little container holding the switches, and when I opened the tin container the switches were somehow smashed to bits. No mercury was present in the metal container…no idea where it went. I do know that switches must have been smashed while they were in my house so I am pretty worried.
What should I do? Is there some kind of test I can buy at a hardware store?
I would guess that the mercury is still in the metal container, literally. Mercury dissolves most metals (forming an amalgam), so there’s a good chance that it’s still there…
As an aside, metallic mercury is much less dangerous that it’s made out to be. If your house has good ventilation, you shouldn’t become too dain-bramaged.
Mercury has a not-insignificant vapour pressure, and this is in fact one of the common methods of systemic exposure. So if the box was left open at some point it could have evaporated. Beowulff is correct though that the toxicity of elemental mercury is often overstated - it has low solubility and bioavailability - there was a memorable thread on here one time addressing this that asked ‘if i drank a quart of mercury would it squirt out of my anus?’ or something similar.
But really, you’ve not touched the box for donkey’s years, the switches are all smashed and the mercury is gone? Surely someone else has been messing around with it?
Mercury readily forms amalgams with tin, copper, gold, zinc, aluminum and silver. So if the box was made from any of those, the mercury is probably still there, integrated into the walls of the container.
To best of my recollection I had some other stuff in that little box like a set of keys, maybe a arrow head. Just a few items and odditities that I considered to be ‘treasure’. So what I am guessing is I moved the box from one location to another and wasn’t gentle enough. Regardless, it sounds like I don’t have much to worry about. Thanks all for the replies…
When I was little I played with metallic mercury frequently. We had a jug with perhaps 10 lbs in it. Over the years it all got consumed somehow, lost here and there. I lived in that house for 16 years and have no indication it did any harm. YMMV.
>Mercury is already a liquid, so what is the dissolver and what is the dissolvee?
The concept of solution has connotations built into it, so that we say a liquid dissolves a solid when the two are discrete at first and later are just a liquid together. But if different chemical substances have a good enough affinity for one another, they will diffuse into one another over time. If two liquids do this quickly, we say they are miscible. If a solid and a liquid do this, we usually say the liquid dissolves the solid. I don’t know of a term for when two solids do this, and this is a very slow process but for example minerals that have been solids together for millions of years often exhibit it.
And I thought I was the only one. I had a 5 lb jar of Mervury that I played with as a kid. I mostly played with it outside, but I definitely spent a lot of time with it in my hands and in close proximity. I wore a cheap ring at the time and Mercury became infused into it, just as mentioned in a post above. So far, no ill effects 40 years later (that I know of - what’s supposed to happen anyway?). I will say that I never drank any and I never heated it up.
I laugh when I hear of classrooms and schools being evacuated because someone broke a mercury thermometer!
The hype over mercury drives me nuts. I spilled a very, very small quantity of mercury at work one evening. Much, much less than a drop. When I came in the next afternoon, the area was cordoned off and we had a hazmat company in to clean up the “mess”! There was a mercury sniffer installed to ensure that there weren’t hazardous levels of mercury vapor in the air. Friggin’ ridiculous.
You’ll love this. I used to clamp spoons in the vise in the downstairs shop, and melt solder in the spoon over a bunsen burner. Then I’d add mercury, and try to make a mix that would be like toothpaste at room temperature. Though, as a child, I was worthless at measurement and was just guessing all the time. Part of guessing was sometimes getting the solder too hot, so that when I put the mercury in it rapidly boiled and spattered and formed a bluish cloud.
Not that I’m promoting this hobby, mind you. But, hey, what was I, 8 or 10 or so maybe? And this was back before people wore goggles in laboratories. No ventillation, by the way, this was a windowless room in the basement and the house had baseboard water heat, no ductwork.
I’m another one that played with mercury as a kid, with no obvious after-effects and is bemused when people freak out and call in hazmat over tiny spills.
