At 08:12 PM 2/6/2003 -0600, you wrote:
At 10:15 AM 2/5/03 -0600, Julia Thompson wrote:As long as it doesn't get dumped down the sink and solidify, causing a nasty clog, what's the problem? :) Julia Been there, done that, took apart the drain pipes
The people who clean the Harman (math & science) Building have been told (repeatedly) not to empty their buckets in the lab sinks after waxing the floors. Every now and then, they either forget, or maybe it's a new person: In any case, the wax goes down into the drain pipes and makes a plug somewhere in the sewer. This of course usually occurs at night, when the cleaning crew are the only ones in the building. The next day, then, when the chemistry labs are meeting on the second floor of the building and doing an experiment requiring significant running of water (frex, distillation requiring them to run cooling water through the condenser jacket), the water runs down the drains from the second floor, into the sewer, where it hits the plug of wax, cannot get through, and so starts backing up in the pipes until it reaches the level of the drains from the sinks on the _first_ floor, which gives it a new escape path: out those drains and all over the floor of the rooms on the first floor. (Guess what floor my class was meeting on? That's a rhetorical question, BTW.) One time when it happened, someone thought the solution was to dump some sort of solvent down the drain to attempt to dissolve the wax. Of course the solvent backed up, too, and when I went into the room the fumes made it smell as though something was burning. Another time, I was already in the room when the water found the outlet and started pouring backwards out of the sink all over the floor.
-- Ronn! :)
The first University I attended, the science building was newer but was built with exposed drain pipes from sinks and these pipes were see through. The school had no biology department, but the stuff you could see growing in those pipes.....
Kevin T.
Snow day!
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