As a kid 30 years ago, I had no difficulty in getting small quantity of nitric acid. My friendly neighborhood store owner did enquire me about the purpose and cautioned me about the hazard. But once he was satisfied that I do intend to use these for my experiment he encouraged me and actively helped me to source many other things that I did not know where to get. But
things have changed. Now, most of those chemicals are not available easily. Even where these are available, there you can only get them in bulk quantity on 1 litre odd pack. For home experiments I need hardly 50ml of these. I understand, keeping even these at home has become a law and order issue in some part of the world. With all these, I thought of writing this blog on doing simple chemistry experiments at home.
You don't need to spend much for doing most chemistry experiments. Only thing you require is to know the chemicals available around you and innovate to use them. In fact you can start a chemistry laboratory with an investment of as little as Rs. 50/-. This is my aim, to help all to learn chemistry by the fun way.
To setup your own small chemistry first think of the space that you can get. You won't need a very big space. A corner of a balcony, a space below staircase is more than sufficient for your purpose. You need a place to keep your things handy. A small rack is excellent for the purpose. A small table will be a luxury. If you are constrained for space, consider a 4inch deep wall mounted rack. At bottom of the rack you can fit a drop down lid that will serve as your work table. Whatever you get, plan where will keep your things and keep things in orderly manner.
"Keep a place for every thing
and keep everything in its place.
That is the road of sure success."
I give my suggested layout for all the three category of setup. This is by no means the ultimate. Use whatever available to you easily and improvise to suit your requirement. To do the experiment that I will describe in this blog later, you will need three wide mouthed jar. Discarded jam or mayonnaise jars will be perfect. You will also need three glass bottle.
100ml medicine bottles will do. You need to keep rather large supply of distilled water. You can buy it from petrol pump or take it from refrigerator or air conditioner. The discharge water during defrosting or from AC outlet is good enough purity level for our experiment. Keep this in
a discarded cold drink bottle. You will also need a supply of glass bottles to keep your chemicals. I prefer, glass bottle with plastic caps for these. I do not have much patient to accumulate them over time and prefer to buy them from junk shop. This way, I can easily get bottles in uniform size and shape easily. You will require about twenty bottle for the chemicals. You will also need a funnel, a plastic one will, a glass one is excellent. If you can get a pack of filter paper. Even newspaper can be used as filter paper but the result may not be consistent.
You will need about 2m of glass tube of 5mm dia. and 1m of rubber tube. Six test tube and about ten rubber stopper will get you started with your own chemistry lab. Rubber stoppers requires some planning. Below, I give bare minimum requirement:
Stopper for test tube
- Without any hole - 3 Nos
- With 1 hole - 1
- With 2 hole - 2
Stopper for 100ml bottle
- with 2 hole - 3
- With 1 hole - 3
- without hole - 2
You will also need a pliers and a battery eliminator for some of the experiments. With these, you are ready to venture into the land of chemicals.
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