I just sent the following e-mail to an off-list inquirer. I thought it'd be a useful primer to post here.
Be well, Mike D. ------- Forwarded Message Follows ------- > Hi Mike, > I have a generater that uses 3 batterys, 9 volts each.. I am looking > for a way to make the best silver water I can make. I use a pint jar > and 2 drops of saline solution and run it for 10 minutes. Is this a > good way to make it or is there a better way? I am also looking for > a good way to test for the proper ppm when it has run long enough. > Please reply . Thank you for your time Greetings Bob, What you will make with saline will generally be of a larger particle size than you could make with other methods. The consensus has generally moved away from using things like saline to speed up the process, towards methods that use only pure water and silver. There is no solid evidence that such a product is harmful -- nobody has turned blue or gotten sick from it if properly made. I started out making it that way myself. But I changed my procedures after I discovered my CS generally settled out in the bottom of the bottle after a few weeks. I will say, however, that it probably works as well as any other, and is certainly worth using if there is no alternative. It's also perfectly good for household use, for animals and plants, and for topical use, as well. What people are doing these days is almost as easy, but takes longer. The basic procedure goes like this... Start with pure distilled water. Immerse the electrodes and wait... and wait... and wait! After a significant amount of time, maybe an hour or more in a pint jar, you'll start to see changes in the appearance of the electrodes. The positive anode will start to appear dull, or maybe black. The cathode will start to appear dull and a lighter grey, and perhaps begin to acquire a "fluffy" appearance, as silver ions and particles are attracted to it and come out of solution/suspension. At this time, carefully remove the electrodes from the water, and wipe them off with a lint-free cloth. (I use paper napkins. They're cheap, and leave less residue than a facial tissue, for instance.) Stir the solution to distribute the ion cloud, then put the electrodes back in. (Folks seem to recommend using a glass or plastic utensil, rather than metal, or just swishing the electrodes around in the jar.) If a little of the fluff shakes loose when you remove the electrodes, don't worry. It will settle out and you'll pour off the liquid. Don't try to stir the big chunks in! You won't really see very much happening, except for the changes at the surface of the electrodes. Very little of the bubbling or visible clouds you're used to. Continue to wipe and stire every half-hour to 15 minutes for the next couple of hours. When it's obvious that you're accumulating a lot of "fluff" on the cathode quickly (10-15 minutes), it's reasonable to assume you're not going to get much more silver into the water, so it's time to quit. By now you might see a pale yellow or slightly golden color to your CS. If not, it's likely such color will develop in the next day or two as the sol stabilizes. This product is less sensitive to light than most folks claim, especially compared to the CS you're making now. It also has a longer shelf life, as you'll not see significant settling as long as you don't let it get contaminated -- keep things clean during production, don't take swigs directly from the bottle, etcetera. It seems to work well. These recipes are so uncontrolled that you must accept that you won't have very reproduceable results from batch to batch. Concentration, ion to particulate ratio, and particle size distribution will vary widely and wildly in response to temperature, variations in procedure and timing, water quality, and ... I'm not making this up... phase of the moon. (Yes, some careful experimentors got a measurable correlation between process variation and the state of the lunar tides! Process rate and particle size seemed to depend on where the moon was at the time of production... <sigh>) Thankfully, all you really need to know is that the stuff is in there, and it works. You don't *have* to know exactly what you have. You can, however, get a little more control over your process by monitoring the current through the electrodes using a simple digital multimeter you can get for as little as $20 (US). Set it to measure milliamps, and put it in series with one of the leads to the electrodes. This will give you a slightly better indication of when it is time to stop the process -- just pick a current level and use it as a cut-off signal for future batches. Also, you can monitor the quality of your distilled water by recording the initial current. If you get a bad jug or pick up some "spring water" by mistake you'll know it in a hurry! Finally, once you have a product you're satisfied with, you can send a sample to a local environmental laboratory and ask them to measure total silver content in pure water. They'll use some method, like atomic absorption spectroscopy, that'll give you an approximate idea what concentration you're getting. It'll turn out to be somewhere between 5 and 20 ppm, I'd bet. <grin> There are a ton of other things you can do as refinements of your process and equipment. The thing to remember is that the simplest methods work very well and anything more is just for convenience, ease of use, or to satisfy your personal obsessiveness! <grin> There are more sophisticated generators available, that incorporate some of the refinements, like current limiting or current control, and mechanical stirring. There are also systems that make CS using high voltage alternating current (HVAC) as opposed to your low voltage direct current (LVDC) process. They're also quite good. If you visit http://www.silverlist.org, you'll find out how to join the Silver List discussion group that I operate. There you'll meet many folks who have experience and can answer your questions. You can also read list messages at the web archives. The link to the archives is also on the web site. I hope this helps. You'll find it's pretty simple stuff to do, but that it is *extremely* hard to do it perfectly. The good news is, you don't have to. Let me know if you need further assistance. I hope we'll see you on the silver list! Be well, Mike Devour owner, [email protected] http://www.silverlist.org [Mike Devour, Citizen, Patriot, Libertarian] [[email protected] ] [Speaking only for myself... ] -- 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]>
