So Sodium Carbonate washes are good for cleaning extracted spice.
Soda Ash is available in the form of 'Sodium Carbonate Decahydrate' in alot of stores, under the name Soda crystals, and its rather cheap, 2 dollars per kg.
Soda Ash is available from textiles dye suppliers & is 16 dollars per kg

My question is, Is Sodium Carbonate Decahydrate suitable for washes, or should one stick to Soda Ash?
My limited understanding of chemistry tells me that a decahydrate contains ten molecules of water, (as washing soda, Na2CO3·10H2O).

Is this going to make any difference during the wash... having a bunch more H2O molecules floating about...
Is dmt freebase soluble in water? If so will it migrate into the sodium carbonate decahydrate during the wash. Im not sure how the water might pull the DMT over from the solvent... something to do with the polar conditions?

Chemists, step forth and annihilate this confusion!

isit it so that u use d-h2o with Sodium Carbonate so if u use Sodium Carbonate Decahydrate (=10h2o) wil this not just bind with th d-h2o becouse ist soleble in h2o this is my logic so i do not know

(double post )

[quote=xtechre]I only use distilled water for extractions anyway. Regardless of which Na2CO3 i use, decahydrate or not.
Oh wait...

‹panoramix› Na2CO3·10H2O is soluble in the d-H2O so will the 10h2o not be added to the d-h2o
‹panoramix› wouldnt it just be Sodium Carbonate then
‹panoramix› or after a quick boil

&

‹shoe› the dot notation (in the Na2CO3·10H2O) means those water molecules are "water of crystallization"
‹shoe› you won't notice 10 molecules in 1 drop
‹shoe› since there are avegadros number molecules(6.0221415 × 1023)
‹shoe› in one mol

...so if i make a 1mol solution of Na2CO3·10H2O in distilled water... the decahydrate part of the soda crystals is not going to make any difference (6.0221415 × 1023 Plus ten H2o molecules)

Anyone got anything to add?

I would recommend buying food grade sodium carbonate, and not messing with anything else. If you can't get food grade sodium carbonate, get food grade sodium bicarbonate at a grocery store and make food grade sodium carbonate from it yourself at home.

question
can u tel me way this is so then way onley food grade. this proces is for cleaning dmt so when cleant with the solution woldent it be clean then, so woldent it mater if u use food grade?

If the sodium carbonate/water solution is used to wash then disgarded, any impuritys in the soda crystals will be disgarded with the soloution... so why is food grade Na2CO3 necessary?

Might soda crystals contain other junk that could possibly with the DMT/Naptha solution?
Ive noticed my Soda crystals (Na2CO3·10H2O) says "contains grater then 30% Sodium Carbonate Decahydrate"
So im not sure what else it contains... im not going to use this stuff.

What about the Na2CO3 that i got from a textiles dye's supplier? Its 99% pure.

You should never use non-food grade chemicals. That's a good way to get all sorts of crap in your body. If you value your health, food grade is essential.

If you didn't know, non-food grade chemicals are banned for consumption becaues they contain things that are unhealthy for you to ingest.

If you want to take your chances, that's fine, but I will recommend to everyone that they use only food grade chemicals.

When pharmaceutical companies make drugs, they are banned from using anything accept USP grade, which is a higher form of food grade. The reason is that people can get ill from trace elements in technical grade chemicals, even 99.9% pure technical grade (the proper term is ACS grade) is banned for use in drug manufacture.

Be safe. Use food grade or USP grade only.

Point made 69ron. But just out of curiosity, i have found a supplier of "99.6% pure lab grade" sodium carbonate. How much impuritys is a pinch of this stuff going to contain and how much of that impurity is going to migrate from the aqueous solotion into the napth when doing a wash? Im betting not much.

This is mu tho because i have read what you have said and have decided to do as you say and cook up my own Sodium Carbonate from Bicarbonate.
I just chuckled a bit when i started to look for food grade light naptha.

Thanks 69ron for making this clear and minimizing risk.

Hmm, SWIM found something called pHplus that claims to be 99.8% sodium carbonate (MSDS) and SWIM reasons, if one was to cook sodium bicarbonate, there's an equal danger of 0.2% impurity (from the pan, from the oven, etc) as from the non-food grade chemical. So SWIM is having trouble deciding whether it's worth the trouble of baking his sodium carbonate.

If baked in a glass cake or bread pan there shouldn't be any significant impurities added.

elphologist

Does anyone know what the actual reaction is when cooking bicarbonate into carbonate?
Ill check the make your own carbonate thread anyway.

What is the Bi bit about? I check wiki but it is unclear to me.
Ive never looked at bicarbonate Ions before.

From drytek https://wiki.dmt-nexus.me/Dry_Technique_Extraction



SWIM thinks you mean sodium bicarbonate and sodium carbonate respectively.

reaction



SWIM read somewhere that you should have 37% of the mass of the original as your product.

SWIM was thinking about oils from the bread pan, etc. Anyway, clean equipment should ensure a clean product. SWIM will do the baking.

All this decahydrate means is that the sodium carbonate is attached to some water molecules deca = (10 I think)/molecule of sodium carbonate. Some sodium carbonate is available as anhydrous which means there is no water molecules. All this changes is the weight or if you are doing chemistry in water free conditions you obviously want anhydrous. So if you want to calculate molarity you need to take into consideration the water molecules when weighing the powder. Thats it.



Not much at all. Food grade materials are obviously better because the impurities are known. But still worrying about this in this particular case for this particular purpose is trivial. In other situations where you are concentrating the solvent impurities become way more important because they are being concentrated. Or if you were using the sodium carbonate as a paste and ingesting it then obviously go for food grade. Or if you were concentrating acids that contain impurities (like HCl from hardware store could be contaminated with iron). But if you are just rinsing your non polar solvent it doesn't matter.



The pharmacuetical industry needs to meet purity standards that most of us can't even imagine. If you made a drug it needs to be >99.9% pure and you need to know what the 0.1 and 0.01% impurities are. You also need to prove that they are safe if its a new compound or unknown pharmacology. This is one reason prescription medicine isn't cheap. Also the USP grade is basically to ensure that nothing funny gets into final product. It all has to do with tracability and garuntees of safety. If some company used AR grade to do some experiment then they would have to prove that in the end the impurities are not present which would cost money and be difficult to keep track of. Its a cost / safety balance. However in order to garuntee that everything use in the pharmaceutical and medical world is super pure the US has the USP system. Its over all a very good thing for the consumer.

I wonder if in some cases food grade material is not any different then lab grade the only difference is that the supplier checked the batch and could therefore sell it as food grade. But yes there is a reason all lab grade chemicals say "Not for human or drug consumption"! So yes food grade is always better especially compared to hardware brands. However I think in this particular case the sodium carbonate is not being used for human consumption and won't contaminate the naptha so I think its fine.