ichudov@Algebra.Com (Igor Chudov) wrote :
One thing I would like to buy is a pressure cooker.
I have found them to be of little use. Save some $, try a garage sale.
Another is a kind of charger that charges water with CO2, to make homemade fizzy water insteado f buying it at stores. In Russia these things were called syphons. Any ideas?
Apparently they're called siphons here too : http://www.williams-sonoma.com//srch/name.cfm?ftype=name&imgs=on&name=soda
igor
Try your regular stove. Set it to, say, 400 degrees and pray that the papers will remain legible. I'd prbobably be more likely to be attacked by meteorites or abducted by aliens than be anthraxed via mail, but *if* I had to sterilize mail, I would use a stove.
In labs an autoclave is used to sterilize everything.
Autoclaves are basically pressure cookers, high pressure steam at 121 deg. Celsius and ~2 Bar kill everything.
If 121C is adequate why not use the same temperature in your oven? I doubt the absolute pressure matters. A nitrogen atmosphere might be a good thing to reduce oxidation of inks and paper. I doubt it would help your new Visa card though. Mike I use 107C in a conventional oven for ~8hours to do pork ribs. I'm considering getting a smoker to do the last hour though.