Silica gel desiccant showdown - normal versus crystal cat litter 

Thank you :)

Point to note unless you have the desiccant in an air tight container the moisture will be immediately replaced! So have one of those units for every 4 cubic meters inside your house and have your house sealed inside a plastic device(never open it!) or otherwise dont bother!

Could the cat silica be refined? Baked at 420f for 42mins?

@@BrettCooper4702 I bake my cat litter at 100 Celsius for one hour when drying my 3D filament desiccants. Same goes with the bead bags that come with every spool.

@@danquaylesitsspeltpotatoe8307 "This easy trick that carbon dioxide sellers don't want you to know."

I'm still wondering if he is using his self made hat-microphone!

@@tuttocrafting I had to mic a guy at an event, he had a baseball cap on, so the lavalier was clipped to the peak. I thought of Clive when I did it!!

You've summed up his channel so well!

dont forget the pen and paper instead of a powerpoint graph thing

Yep, Clives low key production does not affect the quality of content. Glossy presentations are fine and all, but the content is what brings me back here and several other channels too.

It's also much easier to scale a recipe ... I've started converting all of my ingredient lists to gram weights

There is a caveat. 90ml = mg is in reference to water. Anything more dense isn't strictly applicable and would need some tweaking to the weight.

@@JLneonhugI understand. It's more the general concept that helped me evolve. My wife and I just had a lengthy conversation about dry vs wet weight. She still doesn't get it. I do all the cooking.

@@jeremiahbullfrog9288 Yeah, cook by weight. Don't use volume as it can be inaccurate due to things like flour being compressed etc. Sifted is bigger than straight from the bag and so on.

@@j.f.christ8421 Flour can still be inaccurate due to moisture content... although I think in typical kitchens it's not a huge deal. I can't imagine a bread recipe written in Arizona to work the same in Florida though lol.. Overall I find weighing everything to be much more convenient and repeatable!

It seems to have just gotten drier, after Big Clive spent all that time with the desiccants...

The less dry ones come out on Saturdays, if I remember correctly. Until then, Patrick Boyle, and don't look away.

​@@tactileslut Boyle Appreciator 🫡💰

The puns are just pore-ing out from this thread!

Droll doesn't mean what you think it means

Give Mushroom some pats for us

🐾🐾🐾 🐈 💖

It has everything a cat would want. Litter reviews, and crinkly bags moving across the screen

Dried Mushroom go great in soups and stews.....(just kidding of course; I like cats, and cats have owned my wife and I in the past, but my current pack of dogs won't tolerate cats).

I don't like Mushrooms. Sorry for the offence.

I just checked and it seems like the difference is rather significant. The cheapest beads I could find on Amazon cost me around €15 for 1 kg. Conversely, 5 kg of cat sand (the silica gel variety, obviously) was only approximately €10, which breaks down to €2 for 1 kg. Seems like cat sand wins the day on a price to performance ratio.

@@herrpez but then you need more units to store the greater volume to acheive the same result........ but, it's good info to know............. cos then you can make choices.......

@@BerkeleyTowers True, but if it absorbs a third what the beads do, but you get 8 times the amount for the same price, that's still a significant amount of drying capacity.

​@@ZeroPointAlpha But having more dehumidifier units running will also mean more power used. So I'd think it might be a wash in terms of cost at the end of a month or year. _(or I could be wrong, which is just as likely lol)_

@@DUKE_of_RAMBLEYou don't necessarily need a dehumidifier. Leaving it in open air in a closet you wanted to keep drier or a firearms safe to prevent rusting will result in it having a passive effect. I'm actually going to be looking into doing this as a way to keep my firearms in a less humid environment.

We have used it, it works well for controlling smells but it's very expensive and I hate the amount of hard, scratchy granules the little sods kick out onto the wood floor.

The issue we have had with them is that our cats have particularly sensitive paw pads, and the crystals have uncomfortably sharp edges. I don't know about you but I might not choose to stand barefoot on broken glass whilst urinating either.

@@ferrumignis Try wood pellets! you can find them cheap and they're much cleaner than the regular litters

Imagine feeling like you're urinating on a series of landmines... I'd stop doing that too!

I've tried using it. I prefer the toilet however.

That's what I use it for. And storing powder-coat powders. (Of course powder-coat powders are powders, stoopid language.)

I like calcium chloride commonly known as "DampRid" it can be found for less than 2 usd per pound and it auto dissolves into the water it traps, giving you a visual indicator of when it has absorbed all the water it can. If you wanted too you could reuse it by boiling the brine water it turns into but its so cheap it might be more cost-effective to simply buy more calcium chloride depending on where you live. It keeps my nylon absolutely pop free.

smaller bead size helps with the air contact. I'd like to see the normal bentonite test too. it depends on air moisture how it behaves to a big degree (we go through 150 kilos of the bentonite litter a month give or take few tens of kilos. I haven't come up with something to do with it other than have the garbage guys take it away so if anyone has recycling ideas I'm all pis I mean ears)

@@lasskinn474 is your cats name 'Sir Krapalot ' ?? .... or perhaps it is a tiger ? ;

Oooohhh….good thinking. I like your style. 👍🏻

Would it increase the amount of moisture absorbed (given Clive already waited until full saturation was achieved), or just increase the rate of absorption thus quicker arrival at full saturation? I'm thinking the latter.

@@Thermalions The point would be bigger crystals give bigger empty gaps between crystals. The beads are smaller, so not as much air between beads.

The difference is in the pore size. Crushing cat litter into smaller crystals will make it work _faster,_ but it won't make it adsorb significantly more moisture.

@@RFC3514 Except, if you could get more mass of crystals into the same space, wouldn't that allow it to absorb more water?

When I filled the container, it was very dusty

Don't forget that once silica gel is fully saturated, it will no longer be able to absorb moisture. See my other comment which includes a bunch of other tips & also how to regenerate the silica gel so they can be reused again.

@@nnamerz absolutely!

they might be a bit too filling

"Donut Eat"

Crunchy too.

When place right. It stops diarrhea😮

The larger pores are deliberate. It's meant to trap liquid quickly.

In this case, absorb is correct. Adsorb has a different meaning. Look it up if you don’t believe me.

@@grahammilnes7256 - No, it very much isn't. Everyone understands what it means, but silica *adsorbs,* it doesn't _absorb._

@@RFC3514 Technical you are correct. I think someone could be forgiven for saying that the porous beads of silica material absorb (hold) water. Just my opinion.

btw, reason for using the cat litter gel is because it was cheaper and easier to get from a store around the corner. I do not know if it makes a difference if you were to use the other stuff. But my experience is that the cat litter stuff is good enough for drying out flowers so you can preserve em for a very long time, and the leaves do not crumple up or discolor much. Sure, they always discolor a bit. I guess unavoidable.

Well you can "recharge" calcium chloride, it just takes more heat than the beads.

I think if you need constantly low humidity, you can also use a solid state electric dehumidifier. See a video from clive from 5 years ago: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Vabq-s62IVM.html Though the cost of these might shock you a bit.

Me thinks it also produces acetylene when wet ? . @@whynotdean8966

@@tarakivu8861 wouldn't surprise me, a small town near me tore one of those membranes in their water treatment plant and were on bottled water for something like two months while a new membrane was shipped from somewhere in eastern europe...

@@tarakivu8861Stephan at CNC Kitchen channel recently picked up on the solid state dehumidifiers after seeing that video. They are not cheap, but with greater exposure (public as opposed to specialist engineering) the cost might come down as economy of scale the more people start buying them.

I think the key factors for cat litter material is how well it is suited for cats (i.e. do their feet sink into it etc.), and how easily it can be cleaned by the cat's slave. This can result in very different characteristics than in most other use purposes for silica.

That will probably heat them up too much, recommended is convection at 120°C (thats what the manufacturer of my silica gel recommends)

Correct, I learnt this trying to dry my socks in the beam box and that didn't work very well. @@tarakivu8861

Was surprised to see the return of the Wilko brand. It seems to now be part of the Range company.

No easy access? I can just buy kilos of that stuff online.

@@tarakivu8861 your not in butt fuck nowhere africa where shipping costs more then the product itself !!! africa is BIG , bigger then the maps actually portrays it

​@@tarakivu8861Amazon isn't that common in Europe, it is there but it can get expensive.

Check out solid state electric dehumidifiers, a video from clive from 5 years ago: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Vabq-s62IVM.html That is, if you have some money to burn as the bigger ones can become quite expensive. Though the small ones should be enough for most storage boxes. Maybe paired with some silica gel to quickly initially reduce humidity after e.g. opening the box, the solid state element will then gradually also dry the silica gel.

By saying that it’s half as effective you are not able to say you will save money by not using it. The cat litter silica gel could still be effective enough to do the job. Comparing the average vehicle to a Porche and following your logic, it would be saving money to buy the Porche because it goes faster than the average car and it gets to the top speed quicker. But the average car is absolutely fine for everyone. One needs to take the cost into account. Even if one has to use double the amount because it is half as effective, if it costs one third of the price then money is saved by using the cat litter silica gel. There was no testing on how fast each product removes moisture from the air. Perhaps the cat litter silica gel is able to bring down the moisture levels in a 3D filament bag faster than the other silica gel product. It would be an interesting experiment.

@@capitalinventor4823 By saving money I meant: I saved the money buing the cat litter to find out It is not working for drying my filament in the AMS of my Bambulab X1C. Of course, if you have enough space: just double the amount. But in confined spaces you can't do that. So: I saved money in buying a product I can't use in the place I intended it to.

Sphere as a shape, have the least surface for a given volume. But I agree that small size and large number can compensate that.

@@NoHandleToSpeakOf So I mixed that up. Thank you for checking.

Just smoke that poop off.

LMFAO!

I actually use both interchangeably. Whichever fits the application.

@@bigclivedotcom Up until about around 35 years ago, I did the same. Then I went exclusively metric as it is much simpler, faster and more accurate for calculations when it comes to designing and fabricating precision parts. If I come across something from the old days the I consider might useful at some point, then I will convert it to metric. If both units are used on a data or specification sheet, then I would expect the primary units to be metric.