When you buy magnesium sulfate, it should look sort of like white crystal chips (SWIM's epsom salts looked almost like white steel-cut oats)... After baking it, the anhydrous magnesium sulfate will sort of congeal into these big white sheets that easily break apart. To get it to absorb water SWIM had to crush up the white sheets into powder.
Also, when SWIM was adding the AMS, he could simply not tell if it had absorbed all the possible water. SWIM's only choice was to add AMS to excess, until there couldn't possibly be any more water to absorb.
benzyme wrote:
i'm tellin ya, one day i'll interface a mass spec and uv-vis spectrophotometer to a modular synthesizer