Because you haven't leaned the golden rule of _any_ work in bathrooms. The lid always goes down and the plugs go in the bath and basin _before_ you unleash the tiny loseable screws / whatever.
Andy Dingley wrote
Arrgh! - I dropped the plug in now ...
Pah, amateurs compared with what we got up to: see
David
Excellent. NH3NI3 was good stuff.
Bollocks. The glaze is GLASS.
Only one acid attacks glass..hydrofluoric. Brick acid is hydrochloric. The same acid as is in vomit, so if your glaze is that delicate, throw up on the wife instead of down the toilet next time OK?
Could he not go on a bender and then put his fingers down his throat?
Gastric acid in your stomach has a pH between 2 & 3, conc hydrochloric can drop well below 1.
I speak from experience here - I once ruined a bog with con hydrochloric.
Brick acid is not conc. Its about 30%, and when you tip it in to the bog, it dilutes even more.
"Glass" is a description of the degree of crystallinity in a material, not of it's chemistry. Restricting discussion to more-or-less transparent materials mass-produced for the last few hundreds of years, some glass compositions are well-known to leach ions and etch under quite mild conditions. Soda glasses (rich in sodium, relatively low in potassium and calcium, silicate base) in particular were known for this in acids as low as a pH 3 or 4. Soda glasses would etch worse in alkalis at pH above about 10. Makes them buggers for laboratory work. But soda glasses are workable at temperatures more than 100C lower than most alternatives. The lead glass used for X-ray shielding in your (CRT) TV will leach biologically important quantities of lead at similar pH to soda glass. Something for people to not think about when throwing the old telly into the corner of a farmer's field - don't eat fresh food, or drink the water!
Care to go to your chemical suppliers and get a bottle of 40% hydrochloric acid? (That's 40g of HCl in 100g of acid solution, btw ; stores men do get terribly confused between w/w, w/v, molarity, molality and normality when getting the reagents. It's a struggle repeated every time we get a new store man.) Useless information : a mixture of 36~37% w/w of HCl in water has an equilibrium vapour which is also 36~37% w/w HCl in water. Which is why the strongest easily available concentration of HCl in water is
36~37% w/w. If you want stronger, you're going to have to pressure-dissolve your additional HCl into the water (and be prepared for the excess HCl to come off as a gas of higher concentration than the liquid phase, so that the liquid phase approaches 36~37% w/w). Second useless information : the exact concentration of the azeotropic mixture of HCl and water varies with atmospheric pressure, which is why no one will guarantee the strength of your "technical" acid. But it does provide an alternative to GPS if you need to know your altitude and you don't have the months to survey your way in from the nearest coast.As a natural philosopher, you should remember this stuff from your A levels.
Purple mushroom clouds. Ahh, the memories. Pardon?
Okay, I think I get the consistent message from posters. The bowl needs replacing. Thanks.
Just to confirm, as some others have assumed to the contrary, the marks on the bowl aren't on top of the glaze - it's been scratched right through, by (as another poster guessed) the metal backing on a plunger.
It didn't occur to me that this will have rendered the bowl porous (yes I know it's obvious & I even have a few letters somewhere after my name which are meant to indicate I'm not a total moron), so when I complain & point out the risks hopefully it'll get fixed sooner rather than later. Only problem is they'll deny they did it - & it's been several weeks now. I once reported a cracked basin which one of their glaziers did for, within 30 seconds of him leaving, and they still denied responsibility, though they did replace it - albeit after six months.
As to who damaged the bowl, I admit I'm more than capable of cacking up pretty much anything however in this case it wasn't me - my plungers are of the cheap plastic/rubber type which fall apart as part of their clever design obviously intended to avoid such damage to ones fixtures. Clearly only the professional guys have the seriously heavy duty plunging equipment around here, I just can't compete.
Oh, concerning things being ejected from toilets, we've had sewage spat out of our bath plughole - though this isn't in the same league as the entertainment enjoyed by one of our neighbours, who had their toilet vomit sewage over half their flat, resulting in them having to move out. Then there's the elderly guy downstairs who tripped over swollen flooring caused by another leak which had gone unattended for months - he broke his neck; it's now bolted together - his neck that is, not the pipework. The plumbing's great around here. Amusingly, local radio is currently carrying an advert from our landlord offering apprenticeships, including plumbing. Maybe I should apply, then I can cut out the middle man & trash my own flat.
Thanks for all the replies, including the chemistry lessons, social advice & jibes about my hygiene habits :)
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