Originally published at: Couple dies in their South Carolina home with a broken heater at 1,000 degrees - Boing Boing
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Needs some
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By bypassing the hi-limit switch. Safety features exist for a reason.
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I’m not an HVAC expert, but every furnace and hot water heater I’ve owned has had a high temp limit switch. Those would have to be disabled to reach the temps quoted in the article. Not really fiddling so much as sabotaging.
Oop, @FSogol-
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And cutting the water input, or it would refill as the water boiled.
They must have done some serious fuckery to that water heater.
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1000 degrees?! How did that thing neither explode nor melt down to slag?
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Maybe I’m being pedantic but 705F (373.99C) is the hottest possible temperature for liquid water. 1000 degrees wouldn’t be possible for liquid water. That’s pressure (217.75 atm) is 3200 psi. That’s quite a feat for a residential water heater.
The homework:
The critical pressure is the temperature above which, a gas cannot be converted to liquid even by application of pressure. (sciencedirect.com). This is 217.75 atm which corresponds to 373.99C or
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I think the high temp was achieved after the water had boiled off.
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Yeah, as @RickMycroft pointed out above someone would have had to shut off the water input and all the water would have had to boil away for a water heater to get anywhere near that hot. Water heaters also have pressure relief valves that open at 150 PSI or 210 degrees farenheit, whichever comes first.
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What a sad state of affairs. 
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This article is breaking my brain.
Between the insanely high reported temps and the seeming use of carbon MONOXIDE and carbon DIOXIDE interchangeably throughout the quotes, I kind of don’t believe any of it, except that a poor couple is dead, and they were hot.
In my work doing QA on home energy retrofits I had to spend a bunch of time in Spartanburg over the course of 5 years a while back. Given what I saw, I’m kind of unsurprised at the seeming lack of technical knowledge from some of the “experts” on the record, though.
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i mean, we like our water hot, but omg.
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Sorry for being morbid - but at what temperature would a ‘slow cooking’ process begin?
I just keep getting the mental image of the house turning into a large Crockpot.
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Yes, no Hartford loop.
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Slow cooking… uggg… I had a relative who got run over and dragged by his own tractor in a field many years ago, finally stopped at it went into a fence. Sadly, he was pinned under the running engine and I guess oil pan… somehow a neighbor heard his screams (after some time)… dude’s thighs and abdomen were… well done.
Lots of deep skin grafting, painful surgeries… muscles were very damaged, amazed he can walk… but he’s never been the same.
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Gross!
Glad he’s still around
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Seems the summery of the story is wrong saying the hot water heater was 1000 degrees. Here’s the quote from the story “After deactivating the heater, authorities measured its temperature and found it to be ‘over 1,000 degrees’” - that’s the heater, not the hot water heater.
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A typical crock pot/slow cooker will operate at simmering temperatures (>170F) but sous vide can be as low as around 130F, though it may take days at that temperature to cook some things.
I could certainly believe that under the right conditions someone could fall asleep as or before a home heats up, and then be delirious and/or unable to get up (dehydration, CO, etc.) before realizing there was a serious problem. This is why you don’t jerry rig your own HVAC work.
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Basically over 40 degrees Centigrade is where your enzymes start to coagulate and stop your body working. That’s why very high temperatures in a fever are dangerous.
Sous-vide cooking is done at about 50 C.
Lots of elderly people suffer slow burns to their legs because they sit too near a fan heater or radiator.
In the UK, modern homes have temperature limiters on the hot water taps for the bath because of the danger of filling a bath with 60 C water and then falling into it.
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