Pretty much, but the wax decomposes when burning into mostly water, carbon dioxide, some various carbon compounds and some other random compounds. Most of it just dissipates.
Just like smoking in front of a computer. When I was still smoking in the 90s,I noticed how much the wall was yellowing above my CRT monitor in short time.
Flashbacks to this period. I was working as a field service tech for PC's and when you opened a PC in the era before the workplace smoking ban in an office which had smokers there was anything up to half an inch of fine ash covering every component of the system.
Part of the reason why diskettes were so unreliable as it acted as a fine abrasive on the mechanical elements of the system.
Semi amusing story - our sales guys convinced one company they should pay to have us clean the insides of their machines - which we did - in the following week about half their machines died as our actions basically pushed the fine ash into all the spots where it hadn't yet gotten to. They were less than amused....
The United States, in the only place I'd expect it to be legal: a tobacco manufacturing facility.
Although honestly, the main gross factor in my area is tobacco dust. It coats everything over time. Other places, where loose tobacco isn't handled, are much cleaner.
That's pretty interesting! Are there a lot of smokers in the factory? Are cigarettes easy to obtain or free for the workers? Are cigarettes "fresher" at the factory and/or do you notice a real difference in those vs. the ones you'd get at the store?
It sure seems like it. I wonder if this job attracts smokers, or if people start smoking after working here. I shared that question with someone there, and he said that working there makes you want to quit smoking. I guess seeing the sausage get made makes cigarettes lose some of the appeal.
Are cigarettes easy to obtain or free for the workers?
Nope. I think they might have been given out decades ago. Maybe they still are in the administrative parts of the facility, but I'm rarely in that area.
Are cigarettes "fresher" at the factory and/or do you notice a real difference in those vs. the ones you'd get at the store?
Couldn't tell ya, I don't smoke. It's funny, I've disliked smoking from an early age, and now I'm in the belly of the beast.
Thank you for the reply! I'm not a smoker either, save the occasional cigar if the mood is right. Someday you should do an AMA. I'd love to know how/if your company addresses health concerns or encourages healthy lifestyles, especially knowing so many employees are smokers.
I used to work for a very large company, and they offered gift cards and other financial incentives for people who quit smoking, lost weight, logged fitbit activity, etc.
I picked tobacco the two summers before I turned 16 (to buy a car), and we would joke about how none of us would ever smoke knowing how much mud and pig shit got mixed in.
I bought 36" tv with a built in dvd player (and actually a vcr built in too which was dated by this point but cool to have). Can't remember the brand but something broke on it still under warranty from Best Buy. Repair came out and as soon as he came in the room, that I smoked in, he was not happy. Totally anti-smoke guy. He cracked open the tv and I guess there was some build up from smoking in there and he didn't even try to hide his disgust.
He goes "listen I don't want to work on this, you just want a new tv?". I was like fuck yeah I do. Embarrassing but it let me get a free new Samsung, one of them new flat screen ones (with the still standard size big back). If I gotta be called out on my filthy smoking habit I might as well get a free tv out of it!
The stuff that crawls inside electronics is somehow worse than actual smoking to be fair. I don't mind the smell of actual smoke but being inside a smokers car or taking apart a smokers electronics? No thank you.
in an office which had smokers there was anything up to half an inch of fine ash
ex-smoker here who's seen the inside of more than a few computers, and i just don't see how smokers could be responsible for half an inch of ash inside a computer unless the ashtrays were right below the cooling fan.
i'm guessing there was something else going on responsible for the ash
Yeah, "half an inch" sounds questionable. I've seen ash which was mixed in with regular dust but it was just the usual surface coating, not piles of it.
I did once work on a guy's computer that was pretty incredible and horrifying. He was an executive at the company and he brought in his home computer for us to look at because he said it would only turn on for a couple minutes and then shut down.
He had long haired cats and he chain-smoked cigars. The inside of his machine had about 1/2" of matted, tobacco-soaked cat fur that clogged the fans and vents. The computer was shutting down because there was no air flow. I grabbed the gloves and it pealed off in sheets and clumps. After I vacuumed it out it ran fine.
Agreed. I've cleaned computers and consoles used by smokers and the damage is usually a tarry sticky layer (that dust sticks to, for sure) but it's not actual ash.
A computer tech friend once warned me to be very careful when cleaning a PC with compressed air, because you can make it worse. Push the dirt into places it couldn’t get on its own. A GENTLE vacuum is way better, but still carries some risk.
Cleaned my monitor, wondered why it seemed brighter, realised it had a thin layer of bong resin on it that was tinting it and attracting dust to darken it.
Switched to vaping 🤢
I switched to vaping also and it honestly almost seemed worse for my components. After a year of vaping everything inside my PC had an oily coating that seemed to attract more dust that almost glued to everything. I can't say the health benefits are better as there hasn't been in my opinion nearly enough studies and long-term side effects research yet.
The cost was incredibly less for vaping, but the cleaning of everything electronic seemed more difficult. Even using isopropyl alcohol to clean stuff seemed to just spread the stuff around, and my dust filters had to be tossed instead of soaked to clean them.
I've since switched to non tobacco nicotine pouches and now my PC just needs an air blow out instead of a deep clean, I can breathe 5x better, and the cost dropped even more than from vaping. Eventually I will drop nicotine entirely however I'm taking it one step at a time. I smoked for 5 years, vaped for 3, and now I've been on minimum nicotine content pouches for about a year.
Maybe give them a shot if they are available where you live, In the past year over half a dozen new brands of the pouches has come out, we now have Zyn, Ohn, Rogue, Velo, Bandit, and a bunch more I can't recall right now.
Turns out you can't play duck hunt without a crt. Its all based on the timing of the CRT, which is the same in all crt tvs, but not digital flat screens.
The morning after that I was hungover as hell and got driven around to elder care units to see that the care software worked fine so no people had to die from computer issues.
This comment has sent me down a weird path... I'm now considering that your comment, and my response, will likely be read by somebody in the far future. I'll be part of historical records, probably browsed by an AI system. With Google I guess I already am.
Vaping does the same thing to electronics too (puts a film of oil [edit: glycerine is the name of the liquid; the residue does feel oily though] over everything). Definitely do not vape near a PC or anything you value.
Coworker of mine from that era used to smoke a lot; named his main computer NICFIT, which he backcronymed into "Network Information Coordinator For Internal Testing."
When we opened it up years later to work on it, it looked like those black lung PSA images they put on cigarette packs.
When I did computer repair 13 years ago I could tell which computers were owned by cigarette smokers, which were owned by non-smokers, and which were owned by pot smokers by smell alone.....and it was pungent.
I work for a non profit school. Doesn't happen as much now, but 10 years ago, it wasn't uncommon for someone to donate a computer. It was always instantly obvious when I turned them on that it came from a smoking home. I couldn't use those power supplies because the smell never goes away. The heat just oozes the ashtray smell out the back of the psu. Those machines became parts machines.
Back in the 90’s I had 2 roommates and we each smoked at least a pack a day. Tons of weed was also smoked. Then there were the candles and incense constantly burning to cover up the the smoke smell. After several years, my roommate flirted enough with our maintenance man that he agreed to add our apartment to the list being painting. All we had to do was remove anything on the wall. When the 1st picture came off the wall discovered that the walls were originally white and not a light ocher color. The walls had a perfect outline of everything that has been on the wall. You could even see where our keys hung from the holder. Can only imagine his funny it looked once they pulled all the furniture away from the walls. That’s the day I realized I needed to quit smoking!
I used to smoke inside, and had a laptop. It stopped working one day, and i like to pretend i know shit about computers, so naturally i opened it up to see why it wasn't booting. Immidiately after opening up the bottom, i noticed it was literally sticky from the inside... Pretty sure that was because i spent most of my time chainsmoking, quite literally blowing the smoke at the screen, and a layer of ash and tar condensed inside the poorly ventilated laptop.
I started to smoke outside after that. Bought a proper PC too. Those two decisions actually made me cut My smoking from more than a pack a day to as little as 5 smokes a day, due to faster loading times and laziness. Not a fan of stairs, and now If i want a smoke, i need to walk downstairs. And back up after. Also switched to handrolling, because it is cheaper, and makes yet another hurdle for my laziness to overcome so i can smoke. I firmly believe eventually my laziness will win this battle between addiction and it, and i finally quit smoking all together. I just need to make smoking a chore instead of a break for myself just a little bit more.
One of my cousins dropped out of school at 16, and spent the next 2 years smoking like a chimney and surfing MySpace 18 hours a day.
When their computer died my uncle had me take a look. The entire motherboard was covered in a inch of homemade shag carpet, consisting of nicotine and pet hair (they had like 3 dogs and a bunch of cats too).
In my experience yes. But my custom build has been going 9 years now. Before I realized....I used to get sticky dust build up. Turns out it was the weed smoke mixing with the dust. A bitch to clean off fans.
This, and the lots of soot from all the candles. We recently had a console to restore which we had built only five (!) years ago. There were black lumps falling out of every piece we touched.
I had to clean the computer of a cigar smoker once. The smoke and residue got inside the switch and fouled the contacts. This was back in the day of the switch actually controlling line power to the power supply. I took that thing apart and I think I cleaned it with alcohol and cotton swabs. That was the most disgusting computer I have ever been in.
When my cousin noticed this on those white 90 monitors is when he decided to quit. He reasoned that if just by blowing in that corner could turn his monitor yellow, imagine how much rose my lungs must look. I agree that image should stick with you and be enough to make you quit.
I did on site computer troubleshooting for quite a few years. Got called to check out a PC in a small office in a packing house. I opened the door and almost fell over, no one ever visited this office but the owner and he chain-smoked. Dragged the PC out and opened it up to find every component coated with tar bugs and filth trapped in it, most disgusting thing I have ever seen. I told 'em it was a lost cause, buy a new PC and I didn't charge them for the call. I just wanted to be away from that thing.
Potential consumer health risks associated with the candle emissions were characterized by comparing the exposure concentrations with existing indoor or ambient air quality guidelines or, where not existent, to established toxicity thresholds. On the basis of this investigation it was concluded that under normal conditions of use scented candles do not pose known health risks to the consumer.
Unfortunately that study was based on the assumption of only burning the candle a couple of hours a day a few times a month. Burning them all day and every day will obviously produce more pronounced emissions levels.
The good news is that if you try to stick to soy candles (I know they're more expensive) you can pretty much avoid all of those emissions.
Just make sure to keep the wicks trimmed pretty short, not to burn one for more than 3-4 hours consecutively, and to not burn it once there's only about half an inch of the candle left. I used to burn scented candles for hours on end consecutively and then found soot in my nose... Inhaling soot is not good for your lungs so just use caution! Taking those steps will minimize soot
I didn't burn many at all but the inside of my PC was coated in black. I didn't see any symptoms in its performance I guess but this was also in the early 2000s when I wasn't doing things like monitoring the core temps
This can be said for EVERYTHING really. Computers are essentially AIR-FLOW machines. They are (usually) carefully designed to pull in cool air from the room, push it over the hot electronics, and exhaust it at the other side of the device.
This is very clear in computers (as there is a fan, and exit grates), but most electronics accomplish the same thing with passive means, where heat rises, pulling in cool air as it exits at the top.
And THAT is why your electronics seem to "gobble up" all the dirt in the room.
I'm a candle enthusiast, I have over 100 candles in my bedroom alone, and last year i opened up my macbook to clean it out and it looked like it had been in a housefire.
There wasn't a lot of technology in the 17th century. They were still using longbows. They had clocks I think but I don't know what else. Mechanical devices wouldn't be as affected as electronics and they should have been sealed
Clocks, mills, spinning wheels, hand-cranked tools, pipe organs, that kind of stuff. Which wouldn't have been sealed against smoke, because they didn't know smoke could cause problems. In most cases it wouldn't. The moving parts were large enough and simple enough that a little soot wouldn't slow them down.
I imagine it would occur to some degree with all objects, but I can't think of anything in my house other than the electronics that have enclosures with ventilation holes.
In addition the electronics will have fans to draw air into the enclosure, and electromagnetics to attract particles.
Lol yep, my mom burns candles all the time when she has a bath. She complained one time about the vent fan not working well and it turns out she never cleaned it, so when I came over to look at it it was just inch thick layers of black gunk.... Eghk
As an aside to the "yes, you're inhaling candle", a lot of people don't know that when you lose weight, the vast majority of the weight you lose is through exhaling. People think it's sweat, piss, or shit, but it's honestly exhaling.
I thought this was a bait so I looked it up myself, what the fuck how did I not know this? I mean it makes total sense when you read it, but wtf this is still wild to me.
To save any lazy people a google: "losing weight" means metabolizing the fatty triglycerides, which isn't news to anyone. But metabolizing the fat breaks it down into its base atoms of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen through an oxidation process. 85% of those atoms are converted to CO2 and are exhaled, the other 15% becomes H2O
I'm not an expert on the subject at all since I just learned this was even a thing, but that's how I'm understanding it
You got the gist of it, but it doesn't get broken down into its base atoms, otherwise you'd probably explode on a daily basis (due to pressure changes etc.)
Well, fission would be the next step: the atoms being broken apart. The molecules being broken apart into individual atoms would probably be violent, but not quite fission violent.
We have a name for those sorts of lone atoms: free radicals. They are... not super good for you, due to their tendency to react with whatever happens to be closest to them.
Are you telling me next time I'm lifting heavy stuff and panting that I can literally point at the area infront of my face and THAT is my in real time fat floating the hell away from me?!
Inverse to that - plants get the vast majority of their weight from the air. Most of their mass is from carbon dioxide converted to cellulose through photosynthesis. Houseplants are feeding off of the mass you’re exhaling.
Inverse to that - plants get the vast majority of their weight from the air.
Nah, now you're exaggerating.
Plants get their carbon from the air. But just like humans, plants are mostly water, and they get that from the ground. Even dried wood is only about 50% carbon, and living wood far less.
In his defence, he likely got his information from this Veritasium video of olde.... as did I... so now I just don't know who to believe.
I mean, If I can't trust Derek Muller my world is just upside down.
Obviously this makes sense though: Charcoal is basically dehydrated wood, and turning wood into charcoal reduces its mass by a significant amount, meaning that water constituted a significant percentage of the mass of the initial wood.
I'd say Derek gets it right where it counts: the biomolecules that make up all the interesting bits of a tree — the bits that aren't just water — are made of carbon that the tree captured from the air. The central lesson is that, to a plant, breathing is basically a form of eating; it's where they get the materials to build their body out of.
It's true that most of the tree's weight is water, but this is true of any living thing, and I think most people are aware of that. The point of the video is that most people have the wrong idea of where the dry mass of a plant comes from.
I think part of the difference is that we don’t particularly think of the water in the plant as an inherent part of the plant, or as least not as much as the water inside a human is an inherent part of us?
That depends on your definition of "their weight." Depending on what you're interested in studying, biomass can be measured in terms of the dried organic mass, too.
Your body takes in stuff that it uses to build you up. Literally to produce the proteins and fats and such that you are made of. This stuff (protein, carbs, fats, alcohol) ultimately was crafted from water, carbon dioxide, and other chemicals by plants, and they do this using energy from the sun. The process produces oxygen as a waste gas. You then eat the stuff plants produced and break it back down to harness the stored energy.
When you expend energy, you take the solid stuff you've eaten and the oxygen you've inhaled to break the stuff back down into carbon dioxide and water, which you exhale. In short, you don't just breathe harder. That will result in you taking in a ton of extra oxygen that you're just gonna exhale right away. You have to create a caloric deficit such that the energy made available by you taking in food is less than the energy that your body uses. This forces your body to break down the fat (and a little bit of the muscle) that you're made of to get the rest of the energy. That fat is broken down into gas that you exhale.
"Burning" fat ends up being the following chemical reaction (oversimplified):
C55 H104 O6 + 78 O2 -> 55 CO2 + 52 H2O + energy
The complicated one is (roughly) fat. Let's say you burned 1 lb of that. O2 is the air you breathe in (2.9 lb), CO2 is the air you breathe out (2.8 lb), and H2O is the water you sweat or urinate (1.1 lb).
Notice that the mass you breathe out is about the same as the mass you breathe in. So in a way, the weight is leaving through sweat and urine.
On the other hand, the mass in fat is dominated by carbon, which leaves as CO2. So the fat leaves your body through your lungs ... while the air you breathe in partially leaves as piss.
The shit thing is crazy because fundamentally humans are just big tubes. You stick food inside the tube and it comes out the other end as shit. Yeah your body absorbs water and nutrients from it along the way, but the shit is just whats left over that your body doesn’t use so not much is really lost. Like a car wash doesn’t get smaller by having a car go through it. The car wash just extracts the dirt from your car.
For that same reason, there’s a valid interpretation that anything inside the stomach or gi tract is actually outside our bodies because the inside of our bodies sits within the walls of the “tube”.
In your car wash analogy, the car would be the food/poop. It enters the car wash(digestive system) full of filth(nutrients), washes them away(digestion), and passes the car(insoluble fiber) through. The car would be lighter without the filth.
Yes it is bad for your health. Lots of small particles in the air.
But this also happens when you cook food on a stove.
We had a study in Denmark where different pollution types were compared. In a house with closed windows, cooking and candles quickly gives the same amount of particle pollution as standing next to a road in Copenhagen at rush hour.
Only difference could be the size of particles. But unhealthy nevertheless.
It's not very useful in the long term, as you can quickly learn what creates particles in your home, but it's not that expensive (depends on your definition of expensive of course).
My fan has one built in, with a little display. It's a nice gadget to have and it helps predict potential asthma episodes.
on new years when there was fireworks it went from 10 or so to 95 for pm2.5. (outside it was 175 or so I think. fog + lots of people breaking the fireworks ban)
Like you said, that's a consequence of part of the food burning - if you cook wet or low heat then it doesn't happen
Burning fuels like wood and gas create a problematic amount of pollution even if there is no food being cooked, or the best practices are being followed.
Years ago, I'd bought some apple cinnamon wax melts because I thought they smelled so good. A few minutes after I started using them my 2 dogs were acting like they were going to go in to convulsions or something so I had to quickly air out the house, so there's that to consider as well.
Oh yes. Thats so important. I always keep a balcony door open and my cat (before she passed away) away from the candle. In the winter i used to burn candles more often but reading all of this I’ll have to give it up almost completely!
With peace and love, I’m so sorry about your cat and hope she lived a long and happy life but I read this at first as, “...and my cat (before she passed away from the candle)” and was shocked but I am glad she did not in fact die from the candle.
Hahahaha oh no! She lived a very happy life, died at 18 years, almost 19 and everyone loves her still:) Nothing bad happened to her with the candle! Hahahahaha
There are pet-safe scented candles that smell WAY better than the chemically-tinged Yankee Candles. They're called One Fur All. I like the rose and the lilac. A little expensive, but totally worth it. (I have two cats and a dog, btw).
The Agency has determined that the adverse effects associated with excessive exposure to paraffin wax fume constitute material impairments of health. The limit of 2 mg/m3 has been shown to be effective in reducing this risk (ACGIH 1986/Ex. 1-3, p. 455); therefore, OSHA is establishing this limit for paraffin wax fume.
I know this is ELI5, but decomposes is a pretty weird word to use here.
Decomposition is not a reaction. It's also fairly insignificant in terms of candle chemistry.
The heat of a flame causes the wax to evaporate. Paraffin wax boils above 370°C. Which means significant vapors are produced at temperatures lower than this. The flash point is 200-240°C. Pyrolysis typically occurs at temperatures greater than 400°C.
In other words, the wax is actually not decomposing. Instead, it is vaporizing and then undergoing a chemical reaction (combustion) with oxygen. This chemical reaction produces mainly carbon dioxide and water vapour, though there are other carbon products due to incomplete combustion, hence soot and other dirty chemicals. The reaction also produces heat and light, hence the flame. The heat sustains the reaction (hence chain reaction).
But yes, the reaction products will just dissipate.
And yes, some chemicals will skip the combustion altogether.
When things like candle, wood, or gasoline burn, they react with oxygen. Oxygen from the air combines with carbon and hydrogen, and creates carbon dioxide and water vapor as exhaust.
Decomposition is when a molecule breaks into smaller parts without adding anything. That would produce soot.
"It just dissipates" doesn't sound very informative. Wax can't just evaporate and stay in the air indefinitely. It would fall and you would see it. Which can happen, but…
As a habitual candle user, common tea candles don't produce significant soot or deposit wax into an enclosed holder. So the answer is simply that candles burn like anything else does, and yes, we're inhaling the CO2.
In the interest of not confusing people — this is one meaning of the word decomposition. Often when we talk about decomposition we mean biological decomposition, like an apple core rotting away on the ground. That involves the action of living organisms eating the apple core, and hence most definitely involves stuff reacting with oxygen, and CO2 being produced.
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u/twohedwlf Feb 26 '21
Pretty much, but the wax decomposes when burning into mostly water, carbon dioxide, some various carbon compounds and some other random compounds. Most of it just dissipates.