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Driver 'blows up' car with 'excessive' use of air freshener
- gwbas1c 7y agoI personally find this story a little hard to believe. Anyone able to explain this in a bit more detail? Naively, I wonder if the driver may have had other flammable substances present?
- notjtrig 7y agoA quick spray in a potato cannon has the explosive energy to propel a potato, it’s not unreasonable to think a the entire can can blow up a car. https://youtu.be/fioP8cflUIA https://youtu.be/fioP8cflUIA Hairspray can in bonfire
- yibg 7y agoYea but the volume of the inside of a car is quite a bit larger than the chamber of a potato cannon. It’ll take much more to create enough pressure.
- shakna 7y agoAnd the attendants to this incident list "excessive" use as a cause. You're only look at about a 4% mixture to get there. It is entirely within the realm of possibility.
- pcx 7y agoOn a related note, a lot of folks feel air fresheners actually make the air fresh. Don't they usually just hide the smell?
- 0xBA5ED 7y agoEasy brain hack. Name your thing what you want people to think it does.
- jojo2000 7y agoTotally, the reality is : smell is masked and air is full of chemical components harmful to your health [0]. Our olfactory receptors are there to protect us. It should be noted that persons with bad perception of odors are closer to their end [1]. At least, use some natural products which may be dangerous, but for those, our body has had generations of evolution to tolerate those. There is nothing like odour destruction. It's just tricking the nose into believing that another scent is around. Odours add in bizarre ways. If something smells bad, 1) open the window and 2) solve the root cause. [0] https://www.considerable.com/home/cleaning-organizing/are-air-fresheners-bad-for-you/ https://www.considerable.com/home/cleaning-organizing/are-ai... [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3561743/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3561743/
- peterwwillis 7y agoHiding a smell is air freshening. If you're thinking of purifying, that's a separate thing.
- blattimwind 7y agoNo, replacing foul air with fresh outside air is air freshening.
- peterwwillis 7y agoThe parent is talking about a literal air freshener, not removing and replacing air.
- bovermyer 7y agoCorrect. Unless they're based on whatever chemical combination makes Febreeze work, in which case it does actually eliminate odor. There's a fascinating story behind the invention of Febreeze.
- zamadatix 7y ago"The use of cyclodextrin as a sprayable odor absorber was patented by Procter & Gamble until November 24, 2019." Interesting note on the patent from Wikipedia.
- zeroflow 7y agoAm I the only one thinking that this was no "excessive air freshener use" but more like someone huffing flammable gasses?
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoThe fuel:air ratio for getting high is way richer than the fuel:air ratio for combustion. Also if you're getting high off it you're probably not going to want to waste it. I'm assuming butane was the propellant for the air freshener since IIRC that's a common propellant for things that are supposed to smell nice. https://www.mathesongas.com/pdfs/products/Lower-(LEL)-&-Upper-(UEL)-Explosive-Limits-.pdf https://www.mathesongas.com/pdfs/products/Lower-(LEL)-&-Uppe...
- shakna 7y agoAchieving the right fuel/air mixture before the lighter ignites it requires so many things to go right (or wrong) that this might be one of those things tossed around by conspiracy theorists for a long time. Probably significantly helped by the improvement of door seals over the years.
- flareback 7y agoI wonder what really happened that he came up with that story to tell the cops? I'm not sure I'm going to believe this story until we have Adam Savage show it's possible.
- snazz 7y agoAdam Savage already blew stuff up with spray sunscreen (for the same reason—propane as a propellant). The hard part is getting the stoichiometry right so it explodes instead of just burning.
- yetihehe 7y agoIf you contantly have source of ignition and add fuel, there will be a time when mix is just above sustaining near ignition source and more rich elsewhere. It doesn't take that much pressure to blow out windows in a car, it doesn't need to be properly mixed at right ratio in whole volume of car. It doesn't even need to be explosion, but very fast burning will increase pressure enough to blow out windows.
- ThrowawayR2 7y agoVaporized fuel + air explosions is essentially what occurs in the cylinders of a gasoline engine of an automobile; there's nothing mysterious about this.
- blattimwind 7y agoNever experimented with potato cannonry?
- dundercoder 7y agoHow much pressure are we talking here to blow a windscreen? Enough to rupture an eardrum?
- netsharc 7y agoThis happened a few years ago in Germany with deodorant: https://www.welt.de/regionales/nrw/article134335255/Auto-explodiert-weil-Frauen-Deo-verspruehten.html https://www.welt.de/regionales/nrw/article134335255/Auto-exp... From the pics, they must've been quite violent explosions...
- adamcharnock 7y agoMe and my friends had a lot of fun as teenagers using aerosols for a similar purpose. We'd scavenge old aerosols from our parent's houses and use them as the propellant for spud guns and the like (we didn't blow up any cars, for the record). I think the trick was to find the ones with propane propellant rather than butane. I also suspect that the (rapidly boiled) moisture droplets from the aerosol would have added to the explosive force too. Eventually we decided to go straight to the source and got ourselves a little oxy/propane welding kit. That worked a treat. I'm kind of surprised B&Q sold that to a bunch a teenagers actually.
- janpot 7y agoWhy would you use an air freshener if you're gonna smoke in it anyway?
- zamadatix 7y agoSmokers tend to not notice the smell of smoke since they are constantly around it/smell of it themselves.
- airbreather 7y agoMany things hit an explosive atmosphere at around 4%. Also, there is the concept of deflagration vs detonation, the latter being decidedly worse, but unlikely in this case due to the geometry. There is a whole field of electrical engineering dedicated to defining potential for and avoiding of igniting explosive atmospheres in industrial plant.
- justin66 7y agoA very strange use of scare quotes by the BBC. The guy blew up his car with an excessive use of air freshener. "Blow up" isn't a precise technical term we need to worry about abusing. "Excessive" might be subjective or subject to debate, but when the resulting damage is enough to blow out the windows and bend the sheet metal, let's just go with excessive.
- davefp 7y agoThose aren't scare quotes, they're just regular quotes. Here I assume they're taken from the police statement on the incident. Edit to add quote in context: > West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service said the cause of the "dramatic" incident was "excessive" air freshener use.
- justin66 7y agoNo, they're scare quotes. Quoting the police statement would involve... quoting the police statement (or a portion of it, or multiple portions joined by elipsis), not quoting two separate words from the police statement. Regarding your edit: yes, they use scare quotes in the article text as well as the headline. It's stupid.
- xxpor 7y agoThat's standard British style. Look at every BBC headline, they almost always have at least one thing in quotes.
- justin66 7y agoThanks, I'll keep an eye out for that. To be honest the BBC is probably the only British thing I read much. Am I right in assuming it's generally a bit less tabloidish than a lot of the other popular stuff?
- robjan 7y agoBBC isn't a tabloid but it's also not particularly high quality either, especially the output of the BBC Worldwide service (BBC.com) which has different editorial guidelines.
- mrkd 7y agohttps://go.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters-jr-on-discovery/full-episodes/dynamite-air-freshener https://go.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters-jr-on-discover...
- Reason077 7y agoSeems to happen pretty regularly! The “More on this story” links below the article list two other similar incidents, in November 2019 and September 2017.
- Reason077 7y agoExcessive air freshener use can’t be healthy even if it doesn’t “blow up”. Inhaling all that propellant and volatile compounds.