Effective Mercury Cleanup: Broken Thermometer Removal in Hard-to-Reach Corners with Child Safety

Sulfur neutralizes mercury
http://wiadomosci.gazeta.pl/wiadomosci/1,1148...adzi__jak_usuwac_rtec___W_odkurzacz_i_do.html

http://silesia-it.nazwa.pl/vmc/forum/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=5234

A good vacuum cleaner, the hose itself attached to the surface around the gap will suck everything that is loose in this gap.
If your vacuum cleaner fails, throw it away and buy a new one.
A good vacuum cleaner will pick up half a brick that has been sucked in.

saskia , please justify that your post is closely related to the topic.

Metallic mercury is not mercury compounds and nothing will happen to anyone by sucking it into the filter bag (replaceable) of the vacuum cleaner. Well, unless someone vacuums without a filter bag.
A centrifugal filter would be best. cyclone.
The collected mercury can then be dealt with.
Introducing chemicals to remove mercury will contaminate the room even more, because then mercury compounds will be formed, which are volatile and therefore harmful.

Added after 6 [minutes]:

Motronic, the one who wrote the article from the link, messed up a bit there, writing about metallic mercury first, and later comments about harmful compounds of mercury, which have so much in common with metallic mercury that they were created with its participation.

This is where the problem is that metallic mercury evaporates, and its vapors are poisonous.

Mercury with many metals (e.g. gold, copper - but not iron) forms amalgams,
that can be solid at room temperature - that is, touch the mercury with a piece
copper, and this mercury combines with copper and changes its color - then you need to heat it
in the open space, so that the mercury would evaporate (there was not enough of it for recovery).

saskia wrote:

Introducing chemicals to remove mercury will contaminate the room even more, because then mercury compounds will be formed, which are volatile and therefore harmful.

You are writing complete nonsense. You have no clue about mercury and its compounds. There was no mention of "chemistry" only about sulfur. Before you start writing your wisdom again, compare the physicochemical properties of mercury and mercury sulfide.

It is possible that the mercury has already evaporated (alternatively, it can be helped by heating it
the floor with a lamp - there are 250W bulbs and more with a reflector) - it remains to ventilate.

_jta_ wrote:

It is possible that the mercury has already evaporated (alternatively, it can be helped by heating it
the floor with a lamp - there are 250W bulbs and more with a reflector) - it remains to ventilate.

And that's really what I meant.
Such small amounts of mercury will evaporate faster before anyone decides to take any action, and thus everyone inhales the fumes, and the mercury may be gone.
Treating the floor with sulfur will contaminate the room more than mercury did. Panic about the harmfulness of mercury comes from the current health and safety regulations, and these apply to workplaces and constant fumes of various substances, and not from a home thermometer, which contains only 2 grams of mercury, of which 1/1000 is difficult to collect. In the case of a broken fluorescent lamp, there are more and more harmful substances.

I wonder how to remove the sulfur later? Well, unless the amount needed for neutralization is measured with pharmacy precision and under the microscope we hit it in mercury balls. Or maybe spray it in the air to bind mercury vapors?
I assume from other posts that sulfur is indifferent to children, and maybe it works like a vitamin? :-)

This statement of the firefighter from the link was not wrong at all, quick action is important.
Besides, there is naturally about 0.05ppm of mercury in the earth, so can anyone guess what volume of earth contains 1/1000 gram of mercury?

In order for mercury to combine with sulfur, they need to be heated.
The vapor pressure of mercury is on the order of 1 millionth of the pressure of air,
so the evaporation of mercury is not fast unless it is heated.

In nature, mercury occurs mainly in the form of cinnabar, which
is a mercuric sulfide, sometimes used by painters.
And mercury is quite poisonous, it's not an invention of health and safety specialists.

_jta_ wrote:

In order for mercury to combine with sulfur, they need to be heated.
The vapor pressure of mercury is on the order of 1 millionth of the pressure of air,
so the evaporation of mercury is not fast unless it is heated.

In nature, mercury occurs mainly in the form of cinnabar, which
is a mercuric sulfide, sometimes used by painters.
And mercury is quite poisonous, it's not an invention of health and safety specialists.

So to use sulfur for neutralization you would have to warm this floor and nooks and crannies properly, and if you don't hit the sulfur around the mercury balls, the heating will cause more mercury to evaporate.
Nobody is saying that it is not poisonous, only about the choice of method depending on the extent and amount of contamination. you don't think that you need a specialized mercury disposal team to remove the mercury residue from the thermometer.
It is as if to put out a harmful cigarette, you would have to flood the smoker's apartment so that the smoke would not harm anyone outside.
A sheer exaggeration of form over substance.
There is a similar panic with asbestos.
There are a lot of roofs made of it and they do nothing to anyone, but only by panicking and quickly dismantling such roofing we expose ourselves to the harmful effects of asbestos.
Interestingly, teams specializing in asbestos removal use masks certified in this respect, but not tailored to the user, so it's the same as working with asbestos without a mask.
In the army there was a good mask fit test, a gas chamber and a gas ampoule.
I wonder how many of these asbestos specialists would try to break down the door of such a chamber?
It was immediately obvious whose mask was leaking.

Am I writing to summon a specialist team? I suggest airing,
combined with lamp heating, otherwise it will take months.
As for the harmfulness of mercury, even the Polish Wikipedia describes it well Mercury ,
however, the English one is much more accurate and states that the concentration is recognized
according to Polish, it is harmless (of the order of µg/m³ has a harmful effect.
This means that a few grams of mercury from a broken thermometer can poison you
all residents of a large block of flats - not in such a way that their lives are in danger,
but causing memory loss, anger, fatigue, depression.

jta, I'm not criticizing your statements, I'm just using them to highlight the problem with the topic and other posts.

In summary, it is necessary to choose the so-called lesser evil, because nothing else can be invented, since the mercury has already spilled.

It was supposed to be short and quick as the author of the topic asked for.
He's had enough advice.
I'm closing the topic.