I think your channel should be required viewing for all high school students. You're so good at explaining and demonstrating things that primary school students would benefit from watching your videos, along with adult supervision. If I was homeschooling my children, you would definitely be on the list.
@@sreetips do you have a video to get the gold out of smart phones and computer part from start to finish I have about 100lbs of parts and then can you make 14k gold more pure
@@josephandjessicaweber613 Gold is expressed in karats weight. That is 10k is 10 parts gold and 14 parts other metals. 14k gold is 14 parts out of 24 parts with the other 10 parts a combination of other metals such as copper, silver, Nickel or Zinc. These are used in any combination to harden the Gold. 18k is just 18 parts gold and 6 parts other metals and 24k gold is pure Gold. There are several processes but for the do it yourselfer separating them should be easy using the process called Electrolysis. You can look that up by doing a google search. Oh and nothing is 100% in chemistry or science. That is why it only says 99.99% on pure bars of 24k Gold and any chemical that is pure only says 99.99% purity. The only thing that is 100% is death and taxes.
Unless someone gets their stuff for free or less than currant prices this is not efficient at all. Tho it would of been more efficient to take cheaper silver and turn it into much more expensive silver nitrate.
@@johnjames5712 yes I know it is not efficient on a monetary scale I meant efficiency as to how much silver is lost in the process compared to the calculated yields as a purely academic exercise
@@chrisharris1522 100% hypothetical yield with no loss in any of the conversions and if none vaporized in the melting process should be about 67.27% pure .999 silver by weight.. so it seems he had a conversation rate of ruffly about 87% efficiency. if my math is close.
7:55 I really appreciate this description. Chemistry remains one of my weakest fundamental science understandings, despite being exposed to thousands of hours of educational material on or relating to chemistry, metallurgy. It has taken me years to make heads or tails of any of it, but by pure repeat familiarity basically a brute force approach some of the basic principles have started to make sense. It's to sreetips credit that he puts this kind of effort into making these videos. I have probably watched a hundred hours of his content and yet I am still learning something new.
I remember when i was in eleventh grade Chemistry class back in 1990 the Chemistry did this exact process to show us what you just fid here with Silver Nitrate. He recovered about 35 granms of silver. He kept that piece of silver in a desk drawer. He would pull it out and polish it with some type of polishing rag. It wasn't a week before some student stole it out of his desk. I still remember that.
I graduated back in the 70s. On the last day of school, I stuck around after all the teachers and students had left. It was completely deserted. I spent about half an hour roaming through the empty halls. Past the library, past the cafeteria, down by the pool and the locker rooms. Past all the classrooms. I realized that an important season of my life had passed, and I wanted to savor my last moments in my high school. It was sad and happy at the same time because I knew that I had my whole life ahead of me. Then I walked out the door and never returned to that building ever again. Isn’t it strange how you remember stuff like that?
Ionic action on Sreetips! Yeehaw! That stuff looked like silver cement, but it was really silver powder. I love seeing all the different ways silver refining can be done. Alchemy!
The reason for using silver chloride and silver bromide in photography, is the fact they are practically not soluble in water. Silver iodide is also sensitive to light, but as it is very soluble in water, it can't be used in film or photographic paper, as it would be flushed away when touching the developer solution. In your gold refining process, the fact that silver chloride is insoluble in water, lets you filter it out from the chloroauric acid solution. Same salts, but very different things we use these for.
Silver iodide is even less soluble than silver chloride. One of the easy qualitative tests for silver salts is dissolving it, adding chloride to precipitate it, adding ammonium to dissolve it and adding iodide for a yellow precipition. The reason silver iodide isn't used is because it isn't white but bright yellow, interfering with other photochemical processes.
@@apveening True. I made a mistake. I was referring to solubility of silver fluoride, but I mixed things up, relying just on my memory. It is true that the yellow color might be a problem - especially in color film.
10:30 Tap water desinfecting not only with chlorine, but they also use for it hydrogen peroxide and/or ultraviolet-C light. May be your local water supplier use non-chlorine sterilisation method. 15:00 You can filter waste acid solution throгgh slow-flow filter, and freely use it for first time gold refining. 22:15 Make a diluted sirup and slowly (incrementally) add it to silver oxide suspension while mixing it with glass rod P.S.: you may directly smelt silver chloride with baking soda or with caustic soda and get 999 silver. 4AgCl + 4NaHCO3 + t>850°C => 4Ag + 4NaCl + 2H2O↑ + 4CO2↑ + O2↑, (2Ag2O + t>280°C => 4Ag + O2↑) 4AgCl + 2Na2CO3 + t>850°C => 4Ag + 4NaCl + 2CO2↑ + O2↑. Also you may skip silver chloride step, but with sacrifice the high purity of the silver oxide. 2AgNO3 + 2NaOH => Ag2O↓ + 2NaNO3 + H2O, Ag2O + H2O2(any concentration) => 2Ag + H2O + O2↑
Tap water always contains some chloride ions, as even so-called "fresh water" contains a small amounts of NaCl and trace amount of other chlorides. But we don't see any instant "light clouding" of the solution here, and I'm bit surprised by it. I guess it may have something to do with high concentration of AgNO3 solution, but can't point any specific reaction.
@@MrKotBonifacy so I know nothing abt chemistry. We were receiving notices from the state that our water contained too much arsenic, flouride, and uranium. We decided to buy a softner and reverse osmosis. We asked specifically about it's ability to filter out those things and presented them with the notice we were receiving. They said our city water contained more chlorine than most pools, and we could smell it every time we washed clothes or bathed for sure. He said they possibly did that because it would react with the arsenic and we didn't need the special super expensive arsenic filters because of that. Our city ended up with an EDR system for the entire city. We decided to see how well it worked and switched our system to bypass and it was easily noticeable that there was less chlorine smell in the straight water after that. I personally wondered if they cut back on the chlorine due to this new treatment plant we paid for. Maybe his municipality has something similar where they don't havw to use enough chlorine for it react? Idk. I just know the EDR system we got is very unique and seemed extremely effective. Our softner used much much much less salt and our filters on the RO lasted much longer before we had to move away.
@@ford4life069 "Too much arsenic (or uranium)" says nothing about how much it is there, it merely reflects that some ARBITRARILY set "norms" or "limits" are exceeded. Can't really respond to most of what you wrote as there's very little specific data in there. The only thing I'd like to point out is that I was talking about CHLORIDES and CHLORIDE ions - which are "acid parts" in all chloride salts, and that includes the most common salt, i.e "table salt" aka sodium chloride. That "chlorine smell" you're talking about is the result of reaction of elemental CHLORINE (gas) with water, and that produces hypochlorous acid, HClO, or rather hypochlorous anion, ClO-, which has a rather strong and characteristic smell. (Plus probably some other trace amounts of organochlorine compounds which may or may not smell .) Auntie Wiki says: Hypochlorous acid (...) is a weak acid that forms when chlorine dissolves in water, and itself partially dissociates, forming hypochlorite, ClO−. HClO and ClO− are oxidizers, and the primary disinfection agents of chlorine solutions." Newer methods of water disinfection use UV light and ozone, and while it's generally a good idea to use some home purification system for drinking water (that includes water used for cooking), purifying "municipal" water for dishwashing, laundry and other stuff like this is just waste of money, IMO. Also, if you're concerned about uranium or arsenic you should first make some own research on "how much is too much" and "how much it's in 'our' water" - as fearmongering is a favourite tool of all salespeople. And yes, their stuff is ALWAYS GUARANTEED to solve ALL YOUR PROBLEMS - OK, maybe not always, and not all your problems, but CERTAINLY THEIR PROBLEMS with THEIR sales figures. "Caveat emptor", and remember it ain't no silver bullets and neither "cure it all" magic potions. Or Water Purification Systems that will ensure you'll live forever, and in good health too. Also, ion exchange column would be most effective, IMO, for removing any "excess" uranium or arsenic, but frankly I doubt there's so much of it there to be worried, Arsenic contamination is a real problem in SOME parts of Bangladesh, where ground water (i.e. one taken from wells) does indeed contain dangerous levels of arsenic, but that's rather exception. Reverse osmosis is merely a "general tool for removing all dissolved minerals", and the "home stuff" is just as efficient when compared to "industrial stuff" as a spade compared to an excavator. My advice is learn some basic chemistry regarding this issue, so you could actually make some well-informed decisions, and don't rely too much on "general hype and fears", and certainly take all sales pitch with a pinch... no, wait - with a spoonful of salt (yes, the same sodium chloride - substitute for potassium chloride if you suffer from too high blood pressure). And just to give you a simple examples of unsubstantiated "general public hype and fear" - the one about benzene in soft drinks from more that couple of years ago. So there's this benzoic acid and its salt, sodium benzoate, used commonly as food preservative. And it is used also in many "juice-kind" soft drinks, which contains vitamin C, which is a potent reducing agent - and couple of years ago a hype, or ballyhoo was made about the fact that "WAIT! But vitamin C may actually, under specific circumstances, reduce the benzoate anion into free benzene, which is a potent carcinogen!" Oh, yeah, beam me up Scotty... Guess what, regular gasoline does contain SOME benzene too, and if you happen to breathe in, inadvertently, some of those petrol vapours pushed out from nearly empty tank (which happens every time you fill up your car), you probably inhale more benzene that you could POTENTIALLY (and "potentially" is the keyword here) get from a whole year of drinking those soft drink "possibly containing" trace amount of benzene, but surely very unhealthy levels of fructose syrup. Hey, I'm nearly sixty, still alive and kicking (well, to a degree ;-), no cancer (that I know of), and back in my high school times (and that was when sex was safe and chemistry dangerous) I had way more exposure to all benzene, mercury, asbestos and other "it surely will kill ya!" stuff that any contemporary OSHA inspector could imagine (and if he tried he'd probably faint or got heart attack). So "don't worry (too much), be happy" - too much stress or too much "mac-fodder" (washed down with coke) will do you more harm than some trace amounts of uranium or arsenic.
@@MrKotBonifacy TCEQ was sending notices that our city water was above EPA allowable amounts of those chemicals. The city said the water didn't change, the EPA changed their allowable amounts and forced the State of Texas to send out notices and they didn't think they should have to abide by the EPA because it was a small town, abt 1500 people. The people disagreed and the treatment option they chose was this EDR system to bring it into EPA compliance. I can't remember the exact numbers since this was almost a decade ago now. The mass hysteria was limited to this town, the individuals served by those specific wells, even after mixing cleaner wells with the dirtier wells to dilute it closer to what the EPA allowed. My OBGYN also said while we were trying to get pregnant to avoid that water until it was rectified which prompted our getting a system for long term health. Arsenic is apparently cumulative exposure also and we intended to be there much longer than we ended up being. The softner takes out a lot of minerals using the much cheaper salt and allows our basic RO filters to last much longer in the system. The salesman actually didn't take advantage of our concern about the arsenic notices to sell us an overpriced arsenic filter for the RO. He said the city's extremely high chlorine levels in the water changed the arsenic into a different form, some of the chemistry that I don't know, and that allowed it to be taken out by this base level system w/o the specialized expensive arsenic filter. He cld have gotten an extra abt $500 per filter change had he done so. We moved it with us because where we are now tastes like fish shit filled lake water and it is cheaper to buy the softner salt every month than bottled water. Like I said, I don't know the chemistry, I was just making a suggestion on why his water may not have the concentration of whatever it is needed that he expected it to have because I know after the EDR the water went from smelling like you almost stuck your nose in a bottle of bleach to smelling really like not much of anything when we set our system to bypass to see what the quality really was for the money we the citizens had paid for the system. I appreciate the information you included in your response. Thank you.
@@ford4life069 _"the water went from smelling like you almost stuck your nose in a bottle of bleach"_ - yeah, forgot to mention that the regular bleach is (typically) a sodium hypochlorine solution which does the bleaching job (plus some "stabilising" agents), and that's the "hypochlorine" smell. And that's what you get when you chlorinate water "very generously", so to speak. Anyway, seems like the case of that "small Texan town" was rather isolated one, at first I though a regular medium sized town/ city, with proper "industrial sized" water treatment plant taking its water from some river - which was clearly not the case. I guess some wells, especially deep ones may indeed produce very mineral-rich water, so yes, in this case that softener would be a good idea for ALL water used in your household (from what you said I guess it's some sort of sodium cationite based ion exchange column - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion-exchange_resin#Uses). _"where we are now tastes like fish shit filled lake water"_ - sounds like some third world outback... Anyway, that would suggest some poorly treated surface water (i.e. drawn from a lake or a river), but since now you have your own system (which is a good idea under THESE circumstances) you're OK, I guess. Cheers!
I work in a lab, and I’ve had to dissolve large quantities of some compounds in small volumes. The impurities left behind are pretty typical because even high purity chemicals have insoluble impurities that becomes more obvious in more concentrated solutions.
Hi, Sreetips, I am watching your video for couple of years already, but still I do not do this by myself. And, my question is - would your please create a video and explain what kind of equipment and chemicals I have to have and nice to have to start that kind of hobby? and thank you very much for your videos - they are very informative and intetesting
Cool video Sreetips. It's amazing how much distilled water gose into refining of precious metals. I was doing a small karat scrap run and distilled water appears to be a hot commodity now a days. Normally they're gallons of distilled water lined up on the shelves. It was late and I fell just short on distilled water. So, I ened up taking my tap water and running it through an electric distiller I have.
Sreetips have you seen the recent APPLIED SCIENCE video of the RF tempeture stir bar he has made? Sure looked like a great item to add to your line up to assist you in your reactions.
My personal favourite way to make my AgCl is with KCl. I get that beautiful AgCL and I'm left with some very nice (and fun?) KNO3. Granted I use mine to make more HNO3 but I suppose one could do other things with it if they were so inclined. 😁
@@arnedalbakk6315 Hello Arne! I'm up late... thunder storm just popped up. We need the rain here in Dade city Florida. Hope your weather is treating you well.
Does the time and energy input to produce this silver come out cheaper than purchasing the actual silver? I'm interested in this stuff to create my own silver and make coins for barter, but can't tell if it's something I should pursue
@@303sprinklers I’ve thought this after watching some of Sreetips previous videos. A lot of time and materials used for little result. Perhaps it’s more to show the viewer the different processes that may be used. There is also the entertainment value to his subscribers.
Terrifically fascinating! Appreciate the explanation of what kind of chemical reactions were happening. Would be really cool if one could observe what’s going on at the atomic level.
Very Informative and a fast alternative to the Silver Cell and it's 10 day process. I noticed that you did not do a stannous test on the liquid, after observing the final reaction of the Sugar, you just poured the waste out, However when discarding gold waste you always test for the presents of metal, ,, could there have been any metal in the waste water?
maybe your tap water has a low amount of chlorine(most likely only normal salt and some calcium salts if it is a membrane system) in is and/or they use ozone instead of the chlorine since it is easier to get as it can be produced on site from an ozone generator system. i think that is the reason there was a low reaction when you added the tap water, i dont know for sure but i think it had a very small cloudiness to it but my eyes/screen can be playing tricks on me.
Great demonstration. For the amount of silver nitrate in the jar I would not have guessed there would be 9 ounces plus, I suppose that handful of granules would be surprisingly heavy to hold in ones’ hand. Inappropriate comments have been reported. Thank you Sir!👍👍🤟
Could you make a video on recovering silver from halides, especially iodide? These are insoluble so I wonder how one should proceed - using excess halide (to dissolve silver halide by pushing solubility equilibrium) or using excess thiosulfate (to complex the silver)?
The quality of these videos is phenomenal Sreetips. Thanks for including the chemical equations involved in the process, Shoutout and thankyou to David for helping you with them and for providing the silver nitrate, helps those that are interested gain an understanding of the processes. Excellent video mate bravo, and what a beautiful result.
Nice one Sreetips. You could make sugar soap from the sugar lye waste solution. But you’d likely need to add more sugar since you used a truckload of lye. I found the following on the gold refining forum so as to not use any more materials than I need to: For each troy ounce (31.1) of silver (41.3g of AgCl), it takes 20g of NaOH and 26g white sugar. These figures were proven in a lab. In practice, add 10% extra of each and mix with a stick blender till it turns black. Heating the mixture for faster reaction. Place beaker in a bucket and slowly add sugar. It gets hot and boils over easily. Once the reaction is done it forms Silver Oxide that can be reduced with borax. Use the Volhard titration method to calculate how much ingredients will be needed for 100% conversion. 1.42 ml of water (at least) is required for each gram of expected silver. You can also use only the NaOH to convert the silver chloride to silver oxide and then decompose the silver oxide to silver metal with heat. According to Wikipedia, the decomposition temperature is about 540 ̊F, 292 ̊C.
For silvering mirrors the reaction is generally reduction of the silver directly from the nitrate. This would be a simpler reaction but it leaves you with nitrated sugar which is an explosion hazard. Your method avoids this hazardous reaction product by removing the nitrate in a separate step. That probably also helps with the purity because any metals with soluble chlorides will remain behind in the first waste. I wonder if you could precipitate the silver with sodium chloride instead of hydrochloric acid, leaving a solution of sodium nitrate.
Sreetips, thank you for the video! Random thought, can you premiere your videos and add a live chat with super chat? Whatever is the best way for you to make money off of your content, when it comes down to it.... Live chats and influencer engagement is a great time though! Plus I am sure there are alot of questions related to refining and unrelated as well that your followers may have.
Very cool video, but Silver Nitrate is very expensive (500g is over $1000) the 9 OZ of pure silver is valued at only $225. Cool school science project.
Is it possible to do a video on refining silver chloride? Many have made so many mistakes and create silver chloride containing lost gold. Some low quality bottled water labed distilled can make bad outcomes. Thanks
I just did that trying to make a reference standard. Somebody had refilled my water bottle with tap water. Silver chloride appears impossible to redissolve in an acid environment or at least I couldn’t do it.
I'm assuming you found that old bottle of Silver Nitrate at a yard sale or something? New, AgNO3 costs a lot more than the silver you collected is worth! lol I use a lot of it with my Chemistry students. As you alluded to, it's very useful when testing for chlorides. lol
It should be noted that not all "Distilled Waters" found in Walmart, K-mart, etc are created equal. I once tested Distilled water from walmart, and it was clearly not true distilled water. It was clearly re-mineralized. As distilled water is non conductive. A mere 9V battery should not cause a reaction lol It may be purified via distillation, however.
I was trying to do a cost analysis and it just wasn't adding up to me to make money with a chemical reaction. Everything is real fascinating. I I wish they had stuff like this back when my kids were growing up as children, I never was taught that stuff so I couldn't teach to my own kids if I never do it myself really appreciate the videos.
Fantastic video - just a question, why can't you use something like sodium chloride (table salt) to precipitate out the silver chloride instead of hydrochloric acid?
@@sreetips Cool - thank you for the reply. I guess the activity of the hydrochloric acid is far better than normal salt solution. Probably avoids passivation of the surfaces as well to allow the precipitation to go to completion.
I think the "trash" in your silver nitrate solution is just silver. As you said, light has interacted with the crystals and allowed some of the nitrogen to release.
@@sreetips how much silver could you extract in weight? And what was the volume of silver nitrate you used in the process? In short: what is the ratio of extracted silver in weight per volume of silver nitrate?
I’ve only recently started watching - I have no idea why you’re on my feed but I’m glad. One thing I’ve noticed is you’re very careful to not waste any silver resources - always rinsing out with water to scrape every little bit from whatever container 🙂
is it possible that "trash" or "impurity" in the silver nitrate, was somehow ultra-fine metallic silver? it could even help explain the yellowness of the liquid, since colloidal silver in solution can have almost any color, dependent mostly on particle size. p.s. i know you've added only a tiny bit of tapwater, but tap water is usually contaminated with dissolved metal ions and calcium hydroxide, and not just chlorine. so aren't you worried about base-metal contamination from water? even if it is very very small amounts?
The particulate was a rust color in the filter. It could be anything. Tap water has contaminants. But they are measured in Parts Per Million (ppm). This is not enough to report in a precious metals assay. Industry standard for pure silver is three nines fine. That’s 999 parts per thousand pure silver meaning that for every one thousand atoms only one of them is not silver.
All I was seeing was at 9.905 just didn't balance out but I forgot you still had a whole bowl sitting over there that you had a meltdown so that was quite a profit margin I'm guessing.
I just converted silver nitrate into silver metal last week and have already made jewelry out of some of it, of course I got a bit of it on my skin and have the brown spots but not too badly.😁
Believe me, scrub the stains with hydrogen peroxide. I found out by accident that this works amazingly well. Won’t get it off 100% but sure looks better than wearing those stains for a week and a half.
I just want to apologize for all my comments I just wasn't paying attention to every little detail and then when I finish the video things just didn't add up in my head but I missed the fact that you had melted down the first bowl and they kept adding to that bowl the powder and that all makes sense. Why didn't make sense sorry for all the confusion.
Thank you, my teacher, for fixing the translation now, okay, I'm following you now on all your channels, God willing, you are a great man and an expert
Hi Streetips, I have been watching a lot of your videos and I have been trying to get an answer from you buy still haven't gotten a response. I have been following the growing of silver crystals using the electrolyte cell. My question is : can I produce more silver than I have to use to make use this process ???
This is my hobby. I’m not a professional refiner. I only work on material that my wife and I find at local sales. Someone once said, “if you turn your hobby into your work, then it becomes just that, work.”
I think powdered sugar has cornstarch or some other anti-caking agent in it. Not sure if that would do anything to the chemistry, but would probably be a pain to remove at the end.
