Sciencemadness Discussion Board

What are the useful chemicals every home chemists should have??

Darth-Vang - 4-7-2022 at 02:06

As the title says. What chemicals should I have on hand as a home chemists? And where would I get them???

Sulaiman - 4-7-2022 at 02:42

Quote: Originally posted by Darth-Vang  
As the title says. What chemicals should I have on hand as a home chemists? And where would I get them???

It depends upon what chemistry you hope to do.
Supermarkets, hardware, pool, art, horticulture shops
... Read through some of the posts in "Reagents and equipment"

A great deal of chemistry can be performed with kitchen equipment,
"scientific" glassware is recommended to reduce the risks of contamination and poisoning.


Plan a few experiments and buy what you need

teodor - 4-7-2022 at 03:48

I think there are 2 main activities possible in a home lab:
1. Studying chemical compounds surrounding you and those you bought.
2. Planning experiments based on your interests.

When you do 2 you know what you need. So I suppose you are talking about making yourself familiar with different types of compounds you can buy or find in nature.
If you plan to buy something you can publish the list of compounds available to you and ask here which types of experiments you can do with them.
The second way is to get some books with experiments, read them, find for which experiments you can get compounds, and start building your chemical collection as well as getting glassware and experience in different lab operations.
There are a lot of sites and videos available but the most useful guides covering everything from the beginning are still only in form of books. Most of them you can download from the Internet.

Morgan - 4-7-2022 at 08:40

I find I've been using acetone a lot to remove gummy labels off plastics and metals. It's so helpful for cleaning certain things.

clearly_not_atara - 4-7-2022 at 13:54

The reactants in most processes are dependent on the process. However, extraction and cleanup often depends on the same things.

For this, having alkanes, toluene, methanol, citric acid, sodium carbonate, sodium bisulfite, and hydrogen peroxide can be quite helpful.

EDIT: Oh, yeah, and nitrogen gas.

[Edited on 4-7-2022 by clearly_not_atara]