>>what effect does the electrode sludge have on production efficiency?
This is a very important question to ask. When I first created the PPM calculator, Ole Bob Berger and I found that the electrode sludge can have an important effect on the accuracy of the calculators prediction. The calculator (and Faradays law) predicts the amount of Ag liberated from the anode with fairly good accuracy. The problem is, not all of that Ag remains in suspension, so the actual ppm of your brew will be somewhat less than the calculators figure. How much less depends largely on how much Ag plates onto the cathode. Therein lies the problem. Ole Bob and I tried without success to come up with a standard correction factor for the plate-out. It seems that plate-out depends on a number of factors, and there are many threads in the Silver List archives studying that problem as well. I personally have not been able to entirely overcome plate-out and its effects. If I had a PWT meter of my own, Id be doing more experiments aimed at establishing a standard correction factor, which I could then incorporate into the calculator spreadsheet. But I havent yet been able to scrape together the funds for a PWT (other obligations always interfering with pure science!). And I cant keep pestering Ole Bob to do the volume of tests that would be necessary for this. Hes been more than generous already. All I can tell you is this: the more Ag you see plating onto your cathode, the further off your calculator readings will be. Our tests showed the actual ppm being anywhere from 10% to more than 40% less than the calculator predicted. The higher deviations were from large batches (3300ml) brewed for relatively long times. The lower concentration, smaller batches were relatively accurate by comparison. If you brew small batches (less than 1000ml), limit current and dont try to get very high concentrations (12ppm or less?) the calculator can hopefully get you to within 10-20% accuracy. Not perfect, but remember, its free. I am gratified to see that folks still find the PPM calculator worth using. I toyed with another formula posted by Ivan Anderson in January 2002 http://escribe.com/health/thesilverlist/m45077.html but found that in my tests, it often predicted concentrations of CS greater than what Faradays law predicted to be possible. I had worked it into an update of the spreadsheet ppm calculator, but never distributed it to the rest of you because it didnt seem consistent enough in practice. If anyone knows of any other formulas worth trying, let me know. If I find anything that seems useful, Ill contact Jason/AVRA about posting an update. Im grateful to Jason for continuing to make the calculator available to the CS community. Now that Yahoo no longer allows public access to individual accounts file sharing (Briefcase) Jasons site is the only place I know of where folks can download the calculator. And the rest of his site is OUTSTANDING! I'm honored to be included in it. http://www.silvermedicine.org/ http://www.silvermedicine.org/faradaycalculator.html __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Sign up for SBC Yahoo! Dial - First Month Free http://sbc.yahoo.com -- The silver-list is a moderated forum for discussion of colloidal silver. Instructions for unsubscribing may be found at: http://silverlist.org To post, address your message to: [email protected] Silver-list archive: http://escribe.com/health/thesilverlist/index.html List maintainer: Mike Devour <[email protected]>
