As I mentioned in my last post, the freezer melted down. Now there is this question of how it happened. Jim (the PhD student that I work with) thinks that someone was rearranging stuff in the freezer (which was packed to the gills) and then overworked the compressor when the freezer was trying to cool it down. I am inclined to believe this specifically because I could tell that things have been moved around. One of my fellow grad student (Ian) joked that he was going to collect forensic evidence to determine what happened (I'm not sure what evidence there would be). So this whole catastrophe has at least made it more interesting in the lab.
"Do it, you monkey boy! I'm the boss of you!" - Jimmy
7 comments:
Hey Katherine,
I am a little skeptical of this explanation unless the freezer was left open for a very long time. If it was packed there should have been a lot of thermal mass in there. More likely something in the heat transfer apparatus iced up and the ice began to be an insulator and things began to warm. Is this a chest or an upright?
Trey
I would say that was a possibility except the freezer was completely off (as if a fuse had blown) and unable to start-up again. And it is possible that the person had to go through a lot of stuff to find what he/she needed(it's an upright).
I think the problem could still be that something iced up. That could cause the compressor to run continuously...and burn up.
Trey
A lot depends on how the controls for freezer are set up, and how commercial the freezer is. On a good unit, if it got too warm, and it could not keep up, it would have kicked off on hight head pressure. It should have then re-started. If it does not come back on, then something failed, be it a fuse, or motor. If it's that critical, there should be an alarm on it. It should be checked before re-use.
i can't believe that trey spelled your name with a 'k'
i don't think that he could determine the culprit. i suspect that most of the specimens had almost everyone's fingerprints on them.
Sorry about the wrong spelling. I am terribly auditory with language. If I hear it right the spelling doesn't matter. Look at my blogs to see this. They are full of improper use of similar sounding words even "are" and "our".
It is a little surprising there was no alarm on this unit. The uprights are notorious for failing in strange ways and they don't hold temperature nearly as long. Also, in an upright, the theory that someone held it open too long is more likely because when opened the cold comes tumbling out.
How much stuff was really lost?
Well that mutants that I have been working on sequencing are okay, but some of the cell lines are completely dead. There is an alarm but the problem is that no one checks on the freezer on a regular basis so no one is really sure when the freezer stopped working.
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