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| Let’s Talk About Pets Being In The EE Lab |
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| station240:
Has someone been watching DiodeGoneWild videos ? Not sure he has a single video w/out his cat in it. Fish or other marine life in a lab, absolutely not. Chemicals in the air can easily make fish sick/dead, no one makes 100% sealed tanks. Rabbits ? :-DD RIP cables, and bugs too perhaps. Honestly it would be easier to make a second mini lab/filming area, which is pet safe. |
| Nominal Animal:
If the cat prefers a box with a nice old T-shirt or towel with suitable scents as their observation post somewhere up when their human is around and stays out when the human is not around, I don't see a problem. If the dog loves to sleep on a cushion near their human, positionable in a safe place under some table (so no danger of falling hot stuff or heavy items), I don't see a problem. If the bunny likes to sleep in their cage in the same room as the lab, and the human doesn't mind lugging the cage around, I don't see the problem. All this assumes the lab is safe for the human in the first place, including proper ventilation and filtering for soldering fumes. I like to think child- and pet-proofing similarly to organizing my work area so that even the dead-tired-me is unlikely to hurt themselves, while the perky me has everything within reach and organized. Yes, some pets like to chew wires, so that's a problem; but you can work around that using conduits and (plastic) shields and such. Leaded solder is not a problem. In the solid form, it really passes through the intestines of animals with almost no absorption; it's the fumes (solder pot too hot?) and certain lead compounds (like tetraethyl lead that used to be added in gasoline, or the lead compounds used in paints) that are much more dangerous since they actually do absorb easier. I recommend reading the NIH report on carcinogens; lead and lead compounds although it does not address solid lead alloys like Pb-Sn as used in (leaded) soldering. My own estimate is that leaded soldering with colophony-based rosins (based on pine resin) is safer than lead-free, because the lead-free rosins are much more toxic, and not all hobbyists have fume extraction with activated charcoal filtering. (For example, few people realize that depleted uranium chemical toxicity is much more important than any radiation it produces. The chemical toxicity LD50 dose -- the dose that on average kills at 50% probability -- is a fraction (1/4 to 1/2, depending on the activity left in the depleted uranium) of the LD50 dose due to radiation. That is, if you ingest enough powdered depleted uranium, or breathe in enough depleted uranium fumes, you die from the chemical (heavy metal) toxicity much before you get any effects from the radiation involved. Yet, all the experts and military using depleted uranium address, is the radiation; never the heavy metal toxicity. Same is with soldering: the fluxes and rosins are often much more dangerous than the metals used.) Right now, I don't have a pet, and live in an apartment with only an ad-hoc electronics workstation (no fixed test equipment even, with the largest unit a programmable single-output power supply), so this is more based on when I had pets and lots of electronic devices (so chewing wires and hair plugging up stuff were the key issues), and I could be missing something. |
| cgroen:
I never try to keep my two critters out of the lab, after all, they are like colleagues ^-^ |
| james_s:
Two of my cats hang out in my "lab" frequently, mostly they want to sleep on my chair when I'm not sitting in it or curl up on my lap while I work. They seem to have no interest at all in my workbench and the stuff on it, I've never seen any of them get up on that. If they had a tendency to get into things I'd keep them out but they're old, mostly they just sleep. |
| TheSteve:
HunkyBill is almost always in the lab with me. He has his own chair and never jumps on the lab bench or the equipment. He does have some sort of fascination with the transmit foot pedal for my amateur radio station though and seems to enjoy weaving his way through all of the wires/cables below the bench. It just wouldn't be the same without him. |
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