You can’t just post this and not give context. I keep looking at this and go, “How?”
I’m guessing they forgot about it and left it on until whatever was in it boiled dry/burned off, and then heated the pan to the point it began to melt. I’d bet it took at least overnight if not through the weekend. Some pans will take longer to get to this state than others depending on what they’re made of.
The fact they didn’t burn the place down is sheer luck.
When I was in highschool my mother left a pot of stock simmering and went to work, except instead of leaving it on low she left it on high. I came home to a smoke filled apartment, and the pot was full of chicken bone shaped black carbon. As I grabbed the handle and brought it toward the sink molten metal poured out of the heavy base into the sink. It was scary and I’m grateful I wasn’t severely burned and that our place didn’t burn down!
Put a pot of water on to boil, turned the heating element on high, forgot about it. All the water boiled away, pan got hot enough to get soft and collapse.
Most stove tops can get hot enough to melt aluminum.
My guess is this person tried to boil some water and forgot about it. Without the energy bleed from steam the aluminum melted.
I was going to make a joke about different melting points of metal but then I realized I don’t fully understand stoves.
No lie, about a decade ago I rented a room in a long-term AirBnB in NYC where the other 3 rooms were also rented out (so no choice in flatmates; shit was wild). One of the other rooms was rented by this 30-yo French girl from Paris who moved there to follow an ex-bf. Off the bat she was weird; she only ever cooked pan seared liver, toast, or white rice while talking about how she planned on getting this guy back. She would also always argue in French with the Belgian dude who was also renting a room while finishing his masters. Anyway, the kitchen was minimally stocked, so I bought an extra pot, pan, and a toaster oven. She would use the toaster oven but left plastic bags of bread on top, so it melted and ruined the toaster. She also burned rice into the supplied pot every day. It got so damaged after only a few weeks that I had to hide my pot from her, as she systematically destroyed every other piece of kitchen equipment and tried to move onto my personal belongings.
I have several stories from that AirBnB alone. Weirdest 10 months of my life.
How dumb must one be to get a stove well hotter than they should rightfully be able to get that it melts your pot and even the heating element itself? 🤨
A long long time ago, I lived with a roommate who tried to set a timer for thirty minutes on our microwave.
He instead set the microwave to run for thirty minutes.
The steam dome thingy inside did not last for thirty minutes.
Are you that roommate? Or are you saying he tried to set it for 30 seconds?
Neither.
That roommate was a separate person. As described in another comment, he tried to set a timer that would not cook anything, only start beeping in thirty minutes. Instead, he set the microwave to run - which is to say, cook - for thirty minutes, which melted the non food item inside the microwave.
I apologize for the ambiguity of my phrasing.
He tried to set it for 30 minutes and instead set it for 30 minutes. Sounds like he got exactly what he wanted, metal soup
Many microwaves have a timer that can run without microwaving things.
