The water demon is back
And it's completely my fault. In the first incident, I'd been puttering about one of the lab rooms all day, trying to fix things. Apparently while I was doing said puttering, I managed to pull one of the water drain hoses partially out of the drain. This wouldn't be very hard to do since the drain hoses have to drape all the way around the room to get where they need to go and they're very easy to trip on when you're fixing other things. At any rate, after I was done with my puttering and had fixed the system (so I thought) I turned it on, checked that everything was working an hour later, and went home for the night. The next morning, someone from the neighboring labs asked me if I would check on my lab room, since there was an awful lot of water on their floor. Feeling particularly bad, since this would be the second time I flooded their lab, I opened the lab room door to the inevitable pond. Fortunately, the hose was only leaking about a gallon of water an hour out on the floor (which is why I didn't catch it in my pre-going home sweep, it hadn't seeped out from under the tables in front of it yet), so the pond wasn't as spirit-crushingly big as it could have been. And, as the folks in the neighboring lab reminded me, anything that could have been damaged by water on the floor had already been thrown away after the last leak. I don't think they like me much anymore.
Once I'd cleaned up that mess (which required a wet-vac and fans again), I went down the hall to the other lab room I use and discovered water all over that floor as well. Now usually a leak in this particular room is due to a flood in the lab above us, but I didn't see any of the telltale drips on the ceiling this time. Instead what I saw was a smashed 5 gallon bucket. Which had finally fallen from where it was hanging on the ceiling, filled with water (we use it as a reverse heat-sink for a gas line that gets really, really cold). Fortunately it hangs where it would be extremely unlikely to fall on anyone's head if they happened to be in the room (they'd have to squash themselves between a dead magnet and the wall), but none the less, rather disconcerting. Also disconcerting was the fact that we couldn't mop up the water because this was a room with a magnet in it, a magnet that was running an experiment. So even if we were able to keep all the metal bits in the mop or whatever from being sucked into the magnet, the metal bits would still be moving around and changing the magnetic field and messing up the experiment. And the water smelled like pond scum too. Did I mention that we were having an internal health and safety inspection in our lab that day? So the best we could do was squirt the water with a little bleach and post a sign near the door that said "Caution! Wet floor, cannot clean up while experiment is in progress".
And now the lab sink is clogged, making it difficult to wash the glassware. Sigh...
Once I'd cleaned up that mess (which required a wet-vac and fans again), I went down the hall to the other lab room I use and discovered water all over that floor as well. Now usually a leak in this particular room is due to a flood in the lab above us, but I didn't see any of the telltale drips on the ceiling this time. Instead what I saw was a smashed 5 gallon bucket. Which had finally fallen from where it was hanging on the ceiling, filled with water (we use it as a reverse heat-sink for a gas line that gets really, really cold). Fortunately it hangs where it would be extremely unlikely to fall on anyone's head if they happened to be in the room (they'd have to squash themselves between a dead magnet and the wall), but none the less, rather disconcerting. Also disconcerting was the fact that we couldn't mop up the water because this was a room with a magnet in it, a magnet that was running an experiment. So even if we were able to keep all the metal bits in the mop or whatever from being sucked into the magnet, the metal bits would still be moving around and changing the magnetic field and messing up the experiment. And the water smelled like pond scum too. Did I mention that we were having an internal health and safety inspection in our lab that day? So the best we could do was squirt the water with a little bleach and post a sign near the door that said "Caution! Wet floor, cannot clean up while experiment is in progress".
And now the lab sink is clogged, making it difficult to wash the glassware. Sigh...