Crysalised ASM

[nigelb]

To all those who have bought ASM from whatever source and had a partial crystalisation over the cold winter months and cant get it liquified again no matter how much you warm it up...here's a solution:

add a small amount of methanol to it and stir. It soon returns to a liquid state and is usable again. It's strength in % terms becomes a tad questionable but if you use it in the first stage of a no tit batch it isn't really going to matter.

Here to help

[Julian]

I think there could be a lot of milage in this.  From my experience methanol has an amazing ability to evaporate.

I usually leave my 3/27 tests sitting on the shelf until I need the tube for the next batch.  I plug the neck with a wad of tightly rolled blue paper.  I never expected this to be air tight, but the methanol evaporates surprisingly quickly through the paper wad.

So possibly a poorly fitting lid may allow methanol to evaporate from ASM, producing crystals in the process.

Nige, can you/your supplier confirm that 30% solution is a saturated solution?  (for give any elementry chemistry errors in terminology etc)

[nigelb]

What are you tring to get at with that question Julian? I've not seen any info on any MSDS sheet that refers to saturated. Would you like to clarify before I go back to my supplier to ask the question to the manufacturers.

[nigelb]

As an aside...i dont think that the crystalisation was down to a poor fitting lid...more the cold weather we had in the winter. I have 3 x 10lt containers in the garage that did not suffer from crystals but the 10lt drum I was using in the shed did suffer to a certain degree.

I thought I'd give methanol a go to get it back into solution today. There was 1.5lt of crystals and it tokk about a lt of methanol to make it usable again.

[Julian]

Pretty much as an explanation as to why adding more methanol would redissolve the crystals, or conversely why they may have formed in the first place.

Also this temperature thing ... is it like warm air being able to hold more moisture, and when it cools water condenses out.

[nigelb]

I'll ask the question to my supplier and see what comes back.