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Comment by lr4444lr | Hacker News Reader

Steel wool is safer, no doubt, but this shouldn't really be anything more than a freak occurrence if you clean a grill properly. The wire brush is just the first step to remove the coarse stuff. Soap, water, and some kind of fine abrasive pad or scrubbing cleaner should remove these barbs. I guess at some restaurants, they're more concerned about speed and don't take the care...

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I'd say products that are only safe if used properly are unsafe products.

Being safe is a perfectly good strategy for an individual, but it's asking for trouble on a societal level.

So do you think Home Depot should close down? They sell hammers.

You’re attacking a straw man.

He’s doing “reductiō ad absurdum”, which is not the same thing.

I wonder if he was making the opposite point. That enforcing safety at a society level is not productive.

I don't think so. Its a common argument that generally available products should be safe by default, not safe because of training. The reply is a bit of a straw man, there's obviously nuances to that stance. In this case, expecting _everyone_ to know exactly how a wire brush is unsafe is not realistic. If there weren't alternatives, well, there wouldn't be much to do. But in this case, there's plenty of safe alternatives to wire brushes, thus a strong argument can be made that they should simply be banned.

What would such a ban look like? No wire brushes for BBQs? What about the wire brushes they have in the hardware aisle? Do they need to add 'not for BBQs' to the label?

Seems like good fodder for tabloid evening news and then just let it be.

Most people are just going to go to the barbecue aisle and find the "safe" brushes. Someone really determined to buy a wire brush might find the rust-scrapers or something, but that's no different from paint thinner not being sold as a household cleaner.

It makes sense to me to make the safe option into the easiest, most obvious path to take. Stop labeling wire brushes as "barbecue brushes", and stop stocking them directly alongside the cooking tools. That's the form I imagine a ban would take.

Ah yeah, re-read it and realize I misunderstood.

I'd think so if all their hammers had heads that went flying off if you used them at a slightly wrong angle.

No, that's a (mostly) fair point. I'd distinguish between objects whose dangers are obvious and those whose aren't.

The danger of hammers is obvious. You know to treat them safely, and so there's comparatively little trouble. The possibility of having an untreatable needle stuck in your throat unless you use your tools in the right order is rather less so.

I didn't say anything about banning unsafe objects, however. I think there's a case to be made for it if they're easily replaceable, but that's not the point I put forward.

As an aside on the BBQ brushes & Home Depot. This seems like a great consumer education opportunity that could build some goodwill. Surely HD, or at least the HD merchandising team, is aware of this issue.

Is there a trade-off between safety and usefulness?

Chainsaws, C compilers, C-4 ...

Certain industries would be crippled without these tools. Safety training helps.

More of a trade-off between flexibility, cost, and safety.

Safety features tend to constrain or eliminate various uses, which may be needed in some cases.

Alternatively, safety features may be expensive (e.g., the mechanism that instantly stops a table saw when it touches flesh).

In some cases, great design can improve safety at low cost while retaining utility.

C4 is a much safer alternative to TNT, and TNT was used widely to replace the much unsafer Nitroglycerin.

The question shouldn't be "is this safe", but rather "does a much safer alternative exist that works almost as good or even better"

There's a big difference between a tool only sold to people in a specific industry, and not generally available, and a tool available at retail outlets which is meant to be used by the general public. (And with one thing you mentioned, C compilers, the tool itself isn't dangerous, but the artifacts you can create using the tool can be dangerous. This is why aerospace software, for example, has a lot of procedure around it.)

>I'd say products that are only safe if used properly

That's literally every product ever.

I challenge you to come up with an example of something that's readily available to the general public that cannot reliably cause harm or death if used in a sufficiently ignorant way.

People intentionally eat Tide Pods. Should we ban all cleaning products that an average person is capable of injecting a lethal amount of?

You know, I've observed a lot of home grilling, and I feel like a lot of people stop at the brush scrub phase.

But people use them to remove firey fat while grilling. I've done that. Obviously, bad idea.

You can buy coarse steel scrubbies. Just use those with a long pair of tongs and they work great.

Isn’t steel wool flammable? I wouldn’t want to use that on a grill.

Pretty sure steel wool will have the same issue as the steel brush.

From personal experience as a dishwasher, old steel wool tends to lose little pieces as it gets more and more brittle. Pieces would get caught in the rivets where the pan handle attaches. I was yelled at more than once because of that—but how else do you clean a pan?

> I was yelled at more than once because of that—but how else do you clean a pan?

Steel chainmail is awesome for cast iron, and probably safe for anything steel wool is safe for. For pans with coating (enamel or nonstick) where that's not safe, soap, water, and sponge works (sponges have the same shedding problem as steel wool, but usually higher contrast and harder to miss and fail to rinse out when they do shed.)

I concur about the steel chainmail. I washed dishes in a New Mexican Restaurant when I was younger. The worst was the 30 quart bean pot. The starch and the beans. The chainmail made short work of it.

But focusing in on the rivets, there are two ways to look at it. The remaining fat that has undergone polymer-type conversion due to heat is seasoning, not dirt. Or if you really want to get in there, probably an ice pick.

Steel wool is generally much much finer and more ductile than the bristles on a stiff steel brush. Steel wool is just a thousandth of an inch across so it's totally fine to consume a few fibers so long as it's not the extra course stuff. Even then it wouldn't be as bad as a bristle off a steel brush.

Have you ever tried it? The forces you're applying are completely different. You're squeezing it against the wires of the grill, and it's all one connected piece of metal. If it does break, it will tear, not splinter. Plus, you want to wash off the crud you loosen anyway. Also, it's dirt cheap, You wouldn't keep an old one around for very long.

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