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Calcium hydroxide as "limewater" for CIELO tek
- Thread starter trazerz
- Start date
I've moved away from cielo BUT when making my extract alkaline to pull I tried using lime. It was nice that it didn't foam HOWEVER the pH behaved strangely leading to the need of a great excess of lime. Due to low solubility in water it was a pain to process in my seperatory funnel. It works but you need to check pH.
Drying like you did was a better choice.
Drying like you did was a better choice.
So, you had an essentially opaque paste, and you've dried it out? That sounds like the usual form of lime stored for use in lime plastering and similar traditional building methods. Limewater would be a clear(ish) liquid, which goes milky upon reacting with carbon dioxide in the air. Its classic use in science education is demonstrating the carbon dioxide content of breath by blowing exhaled air through it, whereupon it turns milky as calcium carbonate precipitates out.
Sorry not to have seen your question sooner, but if you had lime paste and knew its water content you would have been able to mix in finely powdered, dried cactus, along with a little water to adjust the consistency, before proceeding with the rest of the CIELO method. In drying, your lime will have absorbed a fair amount of CO2 from the air, turning it into largely useless calcium carbonate. Preventing this from happening is one of the main reasons for storing it as a paste, by the way.
(Evaporating down actual limewater would leave you with a comparatively tiny quantity of calcium carbonate (and practically no hydroxide).)
Interesting, so this is actually very dissapointing. My only source of CaHO2 is this limewater paste in a bucket mixed with water, and you are right, drying it turns it into carbonate.
The issue is that since its watery paste there is no way of knowing the water content as it changes constantly because CaOH2 is not very soluble in water and because its as a paste it depends on how much water is actually in the container or how long the paste has been dying. This will without a doubt lead to too much water in the salting step because I have no way of knowing the water content.
Unfortunately since its the only way for me to do the CIELO tek I will do a couple of test runs and report them on a thread here. Is there any way that I could use Calcium Carbonate instead of Hydroxide?
Well, this is actually good news to a large extent; I would suggest that you can probably decant off the water from the surface and reserve it in a separate bucket. This will allow you to easily scoop out a portion of ready made lime paste, after which the water can be returned - it helps to preserve the paste below by absorbing CO2. If you approximate the amount of lime paste as the sum of the amount of lime and the amount of water suggested in the CIELO recipe, this should be sufficient for mixing in the appropriate amount of cactus powder. If the dough seems too stiff you can thin it down with a little of the limewater from the bucket.
Fortunately, too, the calcium carbonate you've made can still be used to thicken up a paste that's too thin.
If the paste itself as encountered in the bucket is too thin, and if it doesn't thicken up enough on the addition of cactus powder, it's still worth seeing whether some amount of it settles out more thickly at the bottom of the bucket. Sometimes gentle vibration can help with processes like that.
But again, I don't think it would have particularly much of a negative effect if you were to use your calcium carbonate for thickening up runny lime paste.
Try a small-scale experiment this way and let us know how it goes.
Thanks, good to know. It's relieving knowing that I can still use what I have.
I will measure the amount of limepaste that would equal to the same weight of CaOH2 and water combined used in the recipe and use half dry limepaste to help make a good consistency cactus-lime paste, and some carbonate (if needed).
Also the steps of freezer rest will be preformed and all water removed, afterwards 1% water will be added and salting will be started. This seems very reliable to make crystals rather than the fridge or no rest.
I do still have some questions about ethyl acetate and storing it, I have it in a sealed tin can, but upon opening and then closing with the cap it still smells of fumes. Can ethyl acetate be stored in a mason jar or other pickeling jars with rubber seals? I know plastic can degrade to a degree but I need to have this stored somehow. Im guessing containers with plastic seals or other plastic is not okay.
Glad to be of service.
Ethyl acetate will degrade most rubber very rapidly - it's literally used for dissolving plastic. Silicone rubber is fairly resistant, otherwise seals ought to be of HDPE. Search for "materials compatibility chart" here or on a search engine of your choice.
Thus, given its plastic-penetrating capabilities, EA will tend to diffuse through the plastic cap of a jerrycan once any seal has been broken. One common practice to at least hinder this diffusion is to wrap a piece of aluminium foil over the cap and neck of the container. Using stout foil to line the inside of the cap also works if done sufficiently carefully.
Ethyl acetate will degrade most rubber very rapidly - it's literally used for dissolving plastic. Silicone rubber is fairly resistant, otherwise seals ought to be of HDPE. Search for "materials compatibility chart" here or on a search engine of your choice.
Thus, given its plastic-penetrating capabilities, EA will tend to diffuse through the plastic cap of a jerrycan once any seal has been broken. One common practice to at least hinder this diffusion is to wrap a piece of aluminium foil over the cap and neck of the container. Using stout foil to line the inside of the cap also works if done sufficiently carefully.