Soon some work is going to be done on the distilled water pipes in our building, which is fine except that for the time that they are working on the pipes, we won't be able to get any distilled water (which is important to some of our work), so we decided to stock up.
We decided to take one of our carboys and fill it up with distilled water, figuring that would be enough to hold us over.
For those of you who don't know, this is what a carboy looks like.
Before we did that though, we decided that it might be a good idea to autoclave it first, just to make sure it was sterile.
An autoclave is essentially a giant pressure cooker. We put our dishes (beakers, test tubes, graduated cylinders, etc) in it and it heats up to about 121 degrees C and goes up to around 18 psi. This kills any nasties that might still be on our dishes so we don't contaminate any of our samples.
Normally our carboys don't have a problem in the autoclave, however this particular one was probably made of a different material because when we took it out of the autoclave, instead of looking like this...
It looked like this...
If you had trouble spotting the difference, here is a direct comparison
Whoops.
By Ben Segee
you should consider this as art and find a nice place on the wall for it!
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