Absolutely gorgeous look at that. Hey guys welcome back today. We have a fun little experiment with kitchen chemistry
we're taking bottles of stump remover and converting them into
Crystals of potassium nitrate and if you look up the mSDS these things claim to be 100%
Potassium nitrate so this stuff should work really well
Now you might be wondering what the purpose of doing an experiment like this is and it's because a crystal is one of the most
Pure forms of a substance that you can get and the whole idea is to leach
Nitrates from the soil and produce very pure potassium nitrate crystals through very natural and very organic process you'll see that in a future video
Now to get started let's talk about solubility of things in water
We know a lot of things dissolve in water
but the question is how much of it will dissolve and what are some of the factors that affect that well first of all the
Temperature of the water itself can make an extreme difference in the case of potassium nitrate
It's actually not super soluble in cold water, but once the water approaches boiling. It can suck up a whole bunch of this stuff
I'll show you what I'm talking about in just a minute
We just filled up this little bowl with three cups of ice water. It's very cold
You can actually see some condensation forming on the edges here. So now that it's cold enough
Let's go ahead and use some measuring cups to measure potassium nitrate into the bowl stir it up and see how much of it
We can get to dissolve
Let's start off with the tablespoon. See if it will take it
one Tablespoon
Look at that one tablespoon in quite a difficult time
So potassium nitrate doesn't really dissolve that well in cold water, but let's see what happens when we turn up the heat
All right, so I've just got everything transferred into the pot here
I've added 1/2 a cup of potassium nitrate, and I'm slowly bringing the water up to a boil when the water hits a boil
I'm going to keep it at that temperature and slowly keep adding potassium nitrate until it stops dissolving and the whole time
I'll be taking notes on the measurements we use
All right, I'm gonna go with another 1/2 cup
All right, that's for one full cup of potassium nitrate
Look at the Splatters underneath when this solidifies to a metal surface
It immediately crystallizes back into that white powder all right we've reached boiling hot and spill it over the edges a little bit as well
whoops
Here's something else that's interesting watch the spoon as I take it out of the solution it hits the air
You can see it crystallizes over as the air hits it
That's a good sign that means our solution is becoming supersaturated
Those are crystals of potassium nitrate you might be wondering if potassium nitrate is poisonous
And the answer is no at least not in small concentrations
It just gives it a really interesting taste. It's not very desirable, but it's not Gonna kill you what an interesting phenomenon
It's actually freezing and melting at the surface where it meets the air currents
It's mesmerizing
So here's the update guys we've had our pot simmering on high heat boiling in fact for the last 15 minutes
And we have added a total of 3 and
3/4 cups of potassium nitrate now granted some of that has spilled out around the edges
So I'm gonna call it three and a half cups of potassium nitrate in the water
That's in there now while that doesn't factor off for any other water that's boiled off in the meantime
I think we're good going along with that
so the next step to making our potassium nitrate crystals is to take a clean glass Bowl like this and
Transfer that solution into it now this bowl is very cold now to expect those crystals to form very quickly
Maybe a little bit too quickly now when making a crystal we want the solution to cool down as slowly as possible
So before I make the transfer
I'm gonna stick some water in this bowl put it in the microwave so that it's brought up the temperature before we transfer the solution
All right our steaming bowl of water is ready so we can go ahead and dump that out set on the table then take our
Pot from the stove and pour our clear solution in then let it sit for about an hour
its steam hot
Whoo that feels that pretty tight, and we're just gonna let that cool for about an hour
Look at the way that top looks really interesting
Look at the mess. I made over here on the stove. That's all the stuff that sprayed out while we're cooking
This could all be recovered and used again
Good thing a little warm water will clean that up in a jiffy isn't it because that looks like a royal mess
Alright guys
I want to give you a quick update on some things that I've been observing
As we've been doing these reactions number one for the first batch that we mix in we actually put in so much
Potassium nitrate it was absolutely insane when we transferred it to the dish
Immediately we started seeing potassium nitrate settling out of solution on the bottom
I'm not sure whether or not they're making crystals yet
But I've put that in the fridge to help it cool down a little bit quicker now while that was cooling just for fun
I put together another batch where we did another 3 cups of water
But this time only two cups of potassium nitrate and that is this batch. We're looking at right here
I preheated the dish the same way so it could cool down slower
But the thing that was really interesting to me was something that I noticed in the pot the pot
Cooled down quicker than the dish did and now if we look down inside
You can see long sharp strands of potassium nitrate crystals, and that is what we're going for
This dish over here has a little bit more thermal, Mass
You can see crystals starting to form on the top and eventually they will form on the inside as well
So we're putting that to the test and seeing what kind of results it produces?
Quick update guys I ran two different batches the first one
We did with three and a half cups of nitrate and three cups of water
And we ended up with something that looks like this. It almost look like a bowl full of cream of wheat or something
I'm not sure if that's crust over on the top and if we break that away what we'll find on the inside
But I also made another batch right here
The same three cups of water, but this time two cups of potassium nitrate so almost half as much nitrate well
You'll notice that the solution came through a lot more clear and as a cool-down it made these long strands
Of potassium nitrate crystals which look very very cool, so let's take our first bowl here
Let's break off that Top crust look down
See we got inside and transfer off the liquids so we can see what kinds of crystals we get down the bottom what blows me away
And this has been sitting in the fridge for half an hour, and it's still warm
relatively speaking
All right, let's see how thick this layer is
Almost like a creme brulee. I'm just that top layer really and you want to be delicate because you don't know what's inside yet
It's actually covered with so much water. Let's go ahead and dump this off and see what we got
There we go waters off. Oh, wow oh
Oh That's now better than expected on the inside there look at all those layers of crystals with Shards
It's almost like Shards of broken glass, but a lot finer
The walls here. It's like half an inch to an inch thick of nitrate but then you get all these crystals in the middle
It's kind of like a Geode
actually
That's spectacular. Is there any more water to come off?
that is pretty
You can be relatively sure that that is pure potassium nitrate right there
It blows me away is how thick these walls are Im going to dig into those later
But those crystals are beautiful aren't they let's just take a second to appreciate that
These are so sharp and pointy it looks kind of like the fortress that superman build in the old superman movies
fantastic
Lil bit Pointy
Look at that little potassium nitrate Crystal
So I'm curious to see our second bowl here this one was a very clear solution and as it cooled down you can see already
There are nice beautiful shards at the bottom. Let's pour this liquid off next
Oh already on the bottom you can see a really cool, crystalline structure
look at that Latticing and the reveal
OH ho ho ho hooo
That is beautiful
absolutely
gorgeous
Look at that. I think we nailed it
I think we figured it out two cups of potassium nitrate - three cups of water look at that one
That's just sticking straight out like a long spike
You know what else is cool is the stuff we had leftover in our pot made crystals at the bottom as well
So even our leftovers you can just leave them in the pot and some of these crystals look how long and beautiful those are
theoretically we clean this up with ice-cold water and
Clean up any impurities
but crystals by nature are about as pure form of substances as you can get
So guys the results are in and based on this set of experiments if you want beautiful long strong crystals
I would suggest three cups of water to two cups of Potassium nitrate or any
Variation of that recipe the walls on this dish are absolutely coated with nitrate
So I'm just gonna take a fork and dig into it and see it looks like it's coming from the side here
This is kind of got a weird texture
It's kind of squishy but kind of hard to get through at the same time almost like wet salt
Okay, so nothing really happening there. I mean, it's crystals on the inside, but it really is just this
Potassium nitrate mush on the outside very nice stuff. We could dry that out
It's very usable, but it's not nearly the crystalline effect
We're going for it, but this here is my pride and joy look at the difference there that is absolutely perfect
So Im Gonna Reach down in there.
See if i can pull some of those out
Look at that
Those are cool looking crystals man
And these are just our leftovers, and they're some of our nicest crystals and look at that
So we have done it guys we have made crystals of potassium nitrate and here's how we made it happen
we started off by filling up a dish with water and adding one tablespoon of potassium nitrate to
Ice-cold water and found that it didn't really dissolve very well in fact
We couldn't dissolve more than about one and a half tablespoons
So he transferred the solution to a pot put it on the stove and let the whole thing come to a boil where we found
The hot water accepts potassium nitrate a lot more readily than cold water because we were able to add over three and a half cups
Of our potassium nitrate stump remover
We poured that solution into a preheated bowl to help it cool down a little more slowly
But it was so saturate with potassium nitrate that the crystals started coming out of solution
Almost immediately so we whipped up the second batch the same way
But rather than using three and a half cups we use two cups of potassium nitrate
And got a really cool reaction that looks like this long thin strands of sharp potassium nitrate crystals that look absolutely gorgeous
But in the mean time guys Thanks for joining me for this experiment today This is fairly safe
It's something that you can try at home. Go grow yourself some potassium nitrate crystals and let me know in the comments
How it worked out for you Thanks for joining You for this video I'll be looking for you the next one. Talk to you then
like making snowballs
Nitrate Crystal snowballs. hi everyone. My name is nate, and there's a good chance. I'll be joining the king of random team
That's right guys
I'm bringing nate on to help with some of the projects and the videos here on the king of random
So he's probably gonna become a familiar face. I just wanted to pop in and introduce myself. See you around