I, in am all-star bonehead move, left an empty glass plate in the microwave. I had set it to function as a timer for the meal I was cooking in the ovem, since I can hear the micro’s timer sound better than I can the oven. Unfortunatly, when I came down to check on the food, the plate had fused to the glass cover, cracking the plate, and a large chunk of the cover had to be broken off. The smell was…interesting, but with a stuffy head I may not have gotten the full effect. My question is, did I expose myself to anything that will come back to get me down the line? I’d assume that there wouldn’t be anything harmful there, but considering they used to put aluminum in false teeth and paint nurseries with lead…
All glass is melted glass. That is how they make it. Are you sure it was glass and not hard plastic? Glass melts at around 1500F or more so that seems rather unlikely.
Hm…well, I ASSUMED it was melted glass, but that does seem a little unlikely, now that you mention that fact. So, if it was plastic, is it still bad?
And perhaps I should get the thread title changed, in that case…
Yeah, sounds like plastic.
For future reference, use power level 0 when using the microwave as a timer.
And if you have to get a new microwave, you can just find one with a built in “Timer” function, just like a lot of ovens have.
There’s the really :smack: -y part. It DOES have one. For whatever reason, I didn’t use it.
I am not so certain it wasn’t glass. My brother did the same exact thing, and I’m certain that the tray was glass. Microwaves are wierd like that, one spot can get superheated, while a spot next to it remains cool. I suspect as was the case in my brother’s meltdown, that this wasn’t one of the rotating glass bottoms.
Cool glass beads were formed that dripped through the plastic bottom of the enclosure. He set the timer for 40 minutes.
Yes, yes, that’s all very good, but am I going to die?
Kidding, I’m just annoyed the bloody thing cost 30+ bucks to replace.
Oh, yes. Most definitely.
My guess is June 17, 2056.
That’s…comforting, and yet disturbingly precise.
As a hijack of my own thread, is there actually anything that could give off toxic fumes if microwaved?
There aren’t a lot of things used in cooking ware that become fatal when heated above a certain temperature especially if the food or air exposure is transient and limited to a time or two.
Melted glass is just really hot, liquidy glass. Hot plastic may not be so good but I would guess you have been exposed to heated plastics before and limited exposure doesn’t seem to be a problem for most people. They were designed especially for cooking ware after all.
Manufacturers of cooking ware learned long ago that even stupid dead customers were lost future profit so they try to minimize the damage by using fairly inert substances for these types of uses.
Anything at all?
Yes.
Are you looking for recipes?
Red-hot glass shouldn’t have much of a smell. But unless the glass turntable was sparkling clean, then it might have a thin coating of old food which burned off.
Or, if the glass was clean, then perhaps the smell was from the heated paint on the oven’s metal floor (which was right near some red-hot molten glass, so it easily could be heated enough to make fumes.)
If the fumes had poisoned you, I think the effects would be both obvious and fast.
A brief whiff of hot painted metal isn’t “dangerous.” “Danger” is always relative, so we have to compare it to everyday dangers which we consider insignificant. If you ignore extreme genuine dangers, such as standing up while taking a shower, or riding in a car to work every day, then the microwave paint fumes have totally insignificant danger. As a WAG, I’d say that in order for the fumes to equal the danger of driving a car, you’d have to take a couple lungfuls of dense opaque smoke from flaming paint.
So then, what is dangerous? What do people die from (besides heart disease, etc.) In other words, WHAT SHOULD WE FEAR?
The danger of smoking 1.4 cigarettes equals: driving 300mi by car (accident), eating 40 tbsp of peanut butter (liver cancer), 1 chest x-ray (lung cancer)… from:
http://frank.harvard.edu/~howard/risk.html
Death statistics
http://www.benbest.com/lifeext/causes.html
http://www.american.edu/byates/lectures_bmed.html
Here’s a big one:
Accidental death caused by physicians
http://www.lef.org/magazine/mag2004/mar2004_awsi_death_01.htm