You can't just post this and not give context. I keep looking at this and go, "How?"
I’m guessing they forgot about it and left it on until whatever was in it boiled dry/burned off, and then heated the pan to the point it began to melt. I’d bet it took at least overnight if not through the weekend. Some pans will take longer to get to this state than others depending on what they’re made of.
The fact they didn’t burn the place down is sheer luck.
When I was in highschool my mother left a pot of stock simmering and went to work, except instead of leaving it on low she left it on high. I came home to a smoke filled apartment, and the pot was full of chicken bone shaped black carbon. As I grabbed the handle and brought it toward the sink molten metal poured out of the heavy base into the sink. It was scary and I’m grateful I wasn’t severely burned and that our place didn’t burn down!
I discovered the hard way when I had my own business with me as the only employee that if you leave a coffee machine with only a small amount of coffee in it on overnight, there will be no fire.
But good luck trying to get the smell of burnt coffee out of your office for the next week.
Put a pot of water on to boil, turned the heating element on high, forgot about it. All the water boiled away, pan got hot enough to get soft and collapse.
Most stove tops can get hot enough to melt aluminum.
My guess is this person tried to boil some water and forgot about it. Without the energy bleed from steam the aluminum melted.
I'm guessing he was trying to boil water in a aluminium pan and forgot about it? I'm also guessing said roommate must have left, because a burning non-stick coating would be rather noticeable.
I mean, I did something kinda like that as a kid, I forgot a aluminium bottomed steel pan once and managed to melt the base (thankfully with no non-stick coating fumes).
Aluminum melts at 1,220° F, I doubt electric stovetops get that hot.
https://www.alineautomation.com/at-what-point-does-aluminum-begin-to-melt/
"For example, pure aluminum metal melts at 660°C (1220°F). However, when you alloy it with other metals, such as copper or magnesium, the melting point can change significantly. Copper-aluminum alloys can melt between 500-600°C (932-1112°F), while magnesium-aluminum alloys can melt between 600-700°C (1112-1292°F).
Additionally, aluminum oxides have even lower melting points than pure aluminum metal. They can start to melt anywhere from 200-400°C (392-752°F). As you can see, understanding the point at which aluminum begins to melt depends largely on what form it takes."
But, steel loses 1/2 it's strength far lower than the melting point, assuming something similar here... how hot can an electric stovetop get?
https://www.thedailymeal.com/1486561/mistakes-cooking-on-electric-stove-top/
"This is because the uppermost setting can result in the stove top reaching extremely high temperatures, anywhere between 500 and 750 degrees Fahrenheit."
"Just like steel, aluminum alloys become weaker as the service temperature rises. But aluminum melts at only about 1,260 degrees, so it loses about half of its strength by the time it reaches 600 degrees."
And there it is...
Stovetops can't melt steel beams. Wake up sheeple /s
“Fire can’t go doors, stupid! It’s not a ghost!”
~ Chang
No lie, about a decade ago I rented a room in a long-term AirBnB in NYC where the other 3 rooms were also rented out (so no choice in flatmates; shit was wild). One of the other rooms was rented by this 30-yo French girl from Paris who moved there to follow an ex-bf. Off the bat she was weird; she only ever cooked pan seared liver, toast, or white rice while talking about how she planned on getting this guy back. She would also always argue in French with the Belgian dude who was also renting a room while finishing his masters. Anyway, the kitchen was minimally stocked, so I bought an extra pot, pan, and a toaster oven. She would use the toaster oven but left plastic bags of bread on top, so it melted and ruined the toaster. She also burned rice into the supplied pot every day. It got so damaged after only a few weeks that I had to hide my pot from her, as she systematically destroyed every other piece of kitchen equipment and tried to move onto my personal belongings.
I have several stories from that AirBnB alone. Weirdest 10 months of my life.
I would love to hear more of these stories.
I'm at work now, but I'm happy to share later. There was a Kazakh family (new immigrants), a Syrian guy (there for medical school), a "stripper" with a large butt implant (on paper, but really she was a prostitute; not judging), an Italian guy (graphic design exchange student), and more. Usually every few months there would be a new flatmate.
All to say the apartment was definitely illegal, but I was young and couldn't afford much.
I want more story time
Maybe there should be a story time channel, if there isn’t one already, I’d generally love to read more of these kinds of experiences
I'm wondering if I should make a few separate posts about these, but for now let me tell you about the stripper/prostitute; we'll call her Ana.
I'll begin by describing this apartment. When you opened the front door you saw a long wood floor hallway. Every door was on the right. First there was a bedroom, then the bathroom, another bedroom, then the kitchen, another bedroom, and my room was at the end. No living room whatsoever.
When Ana was moving in she only had a few pieces of luggage. I invited her to my room to get to know her, offering to make her some tea. She accepted and while she's telling me how she works at a strip club near midtown she's eyeing up my room. Pretty quickly she notices one of my windows has a fire escape; the window facing the front of the building. It's spring so the window is open. To her that was an invitation. She climbed out and started yelling down at the passersby while twerking. At this point I got a good look at her body; I mean it's not like I didn't notice she was curvy before, but now I could clearly see the butt implants. I started to put two and two together. After wrangling her back inside, I diplomatically moved us to the kitchen.
Later that week, early one morning, I heard screaming down the hall, but an unfamiliar man's voice. Apparently she brought a "client from the strip club" home. Guess he wanted a little extra that morning without having paid. Ana pepper sprayed him as he retreated into the hall, and the first person to run out to the commotion was the French girl. She got pepper sprayed inadvertently. The guy quickly left, the girls got into an argument, and me and the rest of the residents stayed in our rooms until it became dead quiet. Ana was gone next month.
Mine... I guess you can say they are tempting fate with their house...
Rather than calling in a professional, they decided to take it upon themselves and poison a tree that was starting to damage the slab. After a couple "treatments," the tree eventually did die and is now just standing next to the house about 3ft away from one of the walls just drying out. Despite my warnings to cut it down, as its rootball would eventually decompose enough to allow it to topple over during a gust, nothing was done.
This past summer though, something different happened that I didn't think of. Wood-boring beetles and termites moved in and set up shop. Three feet from the damn house... The owner even tried to deal with the infested tree themselves, as they tore off the bark to about 6-7 feet up and hit it with bug killer, completely oblivious to how capillary action works in a tree.
As of right now, even though there's been no inspection (I guess they don't think professional pest control is worth it), I can almost guarantee that the termites and beetles found their way in through the eaves of the roof and are feasting like kings in the attic. (I've found termite wings inside)
I've tried warning them numerous times, just to have it go right out the other ear, and eventually gave up wasting my breath.
I'll be looking elsewhere at the end of the year once all the smoke from the elections and voting clears.
I'll be looking elsewhere at the end of the year once all the smoke from the elections and voting clears.
Shit, where do you live? Haiti?
The SF Bay in California.
I'm just a bit cautious as the politics of the different candidates (including state/local) could cause a ripple in rent costs and there's also a proposition about rent control that could go either way. The COL may not actually change much, but I'm more the type to look observe a bit (i.e. look before leaping) as I've been out of the market for a bit and have always gone the roommate route.
How dumb must one be to get a stove well hotter than they should rightfully be able to get that it melts your pot and even the heating element itself? 🤨
Oh get down off your high horse and stop pretending that you haven't tried to make macaroni while entirely too drunk to operate a doorknob and passed out in the bathroom wearing a toga you made while trying to espouse the glory of Rome to an imagined detractor of the empire based on a conversation you had five years prior.
You need therapy and ave Imperator.
I don't understand how it's possible to melt a pan? What's going on?
While I don't know exactly what happened here, if the pan was dry or all the moisture was cooked out of the food, there isn't really much to dissipate heat.
If this pan was a cheap alloy, it was possible that it had a low melting temperature. If the stove was on high, the pan will eventually get as hot as the stove allowing it to melt or at least, collapse under its own weight.
Non-stick pans tend to be made of aluminum (660°C melting point), sometimes alloyed with some copper to improve thermal conductivity. Aluminum-copper alloys tend to melt in the 500-600°C range. Most aluminum alloys melt at a point which an electric stove can easily reach if left on high. The coils can glow cherry-red pretty easily, which is 815-870°C.
It appears to be aluminium with a ceramic coat.
My guess is that someone put Gallium in an Aluminium pan. Similar to https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IgXNwLoS-Hw
But why
YouTube revenue?
That much gallium would be really expensive. Someone just melted a pan on the burner by turning it on high and leaving.
A long long time ago, I lived with a roommate who tried to set a timer for thirty minutes on our microwave.
He instead set the microwave to run for thirty minutes.
The steam dome thingy inside did not last for thirty minutes.
Are you that roommate? Or are you saying he tried to set it for 30 seconds?
Neither.
That roommate was a separate person. As described in another comment, he tried to set a timer that would not cook anything, only start beeping in thirty minutes. Instead, he set the microwave to run - which is to say, cook - for thirty minutes, which melted the non food item inside the microwave.
I apologize for the ambiguity of my phrasing.
You win! Your roommate deserves some kind of prize, and you deserve a reward for putting up with them.
Surviving them*
Isn't the price normally given at events like these called a darwin award?
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