The Glade 4.0

Bleach and ammonia together release Chlorine gas, which is NOT fun times.

Apart maybe. Together...not so much.

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This must be Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays.

I've had chemical irritation in my lungs from mixing bleach and dish soap together and it was not fun....not about to let my kid make chlorine gas.

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"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Jesus of Nazareth

Without a little basis in chemistry this ha the potential to go wrong. Just basic lab safety stuff. Example: do you pour acid into water or water into acid? And why? (just knowing the answer to this can save you injuries)

Nearly all of us have seen college/high school Chem lab accidents. Taught by teachers/professors with years of experience--lack of which could harm you or your son. One thing those classes teach you is just a healthy respect for what you're working with. I've seen people electrocuted, shoes and floors dissolved, people get Chem burns including their lungs, "minor" explosions that blew holes in the suspended ceiling and plenty of burns and foul smells

I don't need a safety lecture, Riov, thanks. No one is going to be dissolving shoes or floors with baking soda and vinegar here.
Just was double checking to make sure I wasn't missing any of the fun stuff on my list.

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"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Jesus of Nazareth

LK: Why not start out here:

http://www.amazon.com/Watch-Mr-Wizard-G ... 895&sr=8-2

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That looks really cool, Hop! Not paying $100 for them though....

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"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Jesus of Nazareth

Actually, you do need a safety lecture. That's the point. You're the adult in the room. If mom blows off proper lab safety, how is your son going to learn it? Most lab accidents happen when someone who is supposed to know better decides that they don't have to pay attention to safety procedure. Now, there's a very real possibility that you actually don't know better based on:



People were **** around with you, and you took them seriously because don't have a firm grounding in the subject. You even misspelled one of the suggestions. You were ready to add a strong acid to your list, possibly a second, until someone stopped you. In other words, you don't know enough to tell the difference between the Fisher Price chemistry experiments that you want to do and the college level experiments that your son isn't quite ready for.

Common household items can be arranged to produce fun experiments for kids. They can also be arranged to produce dangerous hazards. You can not assume that what you are doing is "safe" simply because you're mixing kiddy stuff together. You have to learn proper lab safety, and you also have to learn what to do in case of an accident.

You need to do some reading on safety, and on basic chemistry. You'll want to do some of these experiments on your own, first. Here's something to get you started:

http://chemlabs.uoregon.edu/Safety/GeneralInstructions.html
http://www.science.fau.edu/chemistry/chemlab/General/safety.html

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I'm not a complete idiot, thanks. I'm so sorry I misspelled something in a post, ZOMG! I'm obviously retarded!

I wouldn't buy any chemical for an experiment without researching it beforehand.

Silly me, for responding to a post without googling things first.

You guys can be real pricks sometimes, you know that?

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"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Jesus of Nazareth

I bet your library has the videos or Netflix.

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The Internet brings out the best in people.

You are being incredibly over-sensitive. You created a thread asking for advice regarding chemistry experiments, and were given a recipe for crystal meth. Not only didn't you realize it, but you began asking where you could procure the ingredients. While certainly not indicative of "retardation", it is indicative of a lack of understanding. No one is a prick for pointing that out.

The very best suggestion you received here was that the very first chemistry lesson anyone should get, especially children, is one on proper lab safety; then worry about the fun stuff.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

I don't think people are trying to be mean to you LK. I think they care for you and are concerned for your and your son's safety. If people didn't care they could throw out a lot of stuff regardless of the implications to you if something went wrong, without warning you.

Chemistry can be a tricky thing, even harmless sounding chemicals can and have been lethal if used wrongly. At the very least a large mess can be made (reason 1 why my chemistry set and me were banned from the house when I was a kid).

Really I think people are just trying to look out for you but sometimes that concern comes off weird in the short quick responses online.

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I met this six-year-old child, with this blank, pale, emotionless face and, the blackest eyes... the devil's eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply... evil

I played with potassium nitrate, sulfur and charcoal when I was 10.

I think it's actually a great lesson. Most of the time my stuff didn't blow up at all, half the time it wouldn't even catch fire. I had to learn all sorts of stuff to get satisfying results.

Luckily, my parents never knew I was doing it.

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In time, this too shall pass.

Sometimes yes, but this is not one of those times. Coro is expressing genuine concern. This is not a matter of you being "retard" because you misspelled something in your post; it's a matter of you demonstrating unfamiliarity with potentially dangerous chemicals by means of misspelling the names. People are suggesting things like gunpowder and crystal meth and you've taken them seriously. I wouldn't be surprised if some joker provides a recipe for homemade napalm before the thread is over.

You admitted you've never taken any chemistry, but you want to introduce a 10-year-old to it?

It seem to me that you think there's a wall of some sort between "dangerous" chemistry and "not dangerous" that you can avoid if you buy only "safe" chemicals. The fact is, however, that some chemicals that are quite safe in and of themselves can become dangerous when mixed. The bleach and ammonia thing is the most obvious; while I wouldn't let a 10 year old handle either, they're still considered safe for normal household use, but mixed they produce chlorine gas which is lethal enough that it has been used as an improvised gas weapon in battle.

I really think you may want to consider exactly what you're trying to do here. It seems obvious that you're trying to find activities for your son that are both educational and something doable on a fairly shoestring budget. That's laudable, but it might behoove you to learn something about chemistry yourself first. Not only will it contribute to safety, but your son will learn a lot more than he would from just mixing up chemicals.

If you don't teach him anything about the reason that you can make a volcano from baking soda and vinegar, that's all he learns; "you can mix these thing and get a cool volcano!" That isn't really chemistry. Chemistry class in high school or college is mostly about things like ionic and covalent bonding, molarity, molality, titration, and so forth just to name things off the top of my head. Mixing stuff together is a relatively minor part of it.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I'm the mean ******* that ruined her fun by telling her not to run with scissors, and I will sleep just fine tonight for having done so.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Heh, this is the one (1) time I thought Coro wasn't being a prick.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Ya know without thinking about it I had the following in my car at the same time:
methanol
pseudonephrine or whatever (and a case of it)
iodine crystals
and acetone
a carton of matches

I opened the trunk to put groceries in and thought I may wanna move some of this to the shed in case I am pulled over.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

LK, your supplies are going to depend on the experiments that you are doing. Looking at your list, it looks like you already have some things planned out. Let those experiments be your guide. At this level, you're not going to want completely free exploration. I think you might get better results if you asked about experiments that would be fun and appropriate for your son, and not about supplies.

One thing you might want to look into is testing pH levels using Red Cabbage Indicator. It's easy to make (boil red cabbage, use the liquid) and changes colors depending on how acidic or basic the test solution is. It was a fun little thing from my online chemistry class over the summer.

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Women are from Hoboken, men are from Trenton. ~ Jimmy Kimmel

One of the reasons for my post. I gave the link to a channel with lots of easy "experiments" that should fit her needs. LK should be able to gather a list of things from watching those YT's she wishes to try with her son, and it should be a safe endeavor.

LK, do some research on YT, and you should be able to find lots of help. Here's another channel that may be of use.... http://www.youtube.com/user/TheQuirkles#g/u

Really depends on what you want to teach him about science. I would suggest staying away from anything that goes fizzle or boom for now and go more for the making your own stuff.

To explain liquid saturation, you can always try growing your own crystal garden using food coloring and salt/sugar.

Or create invisible ink using baking soda… http://chemistry.about.com/cs/howtos/ht ... leink2.htm

Make your own chromatography to explain size of molecules… http://chemistry.about.com/cs/howtos/ht/paperchroma.htm

And if he’s ever naughty, you could always burn his allowance… http://chemistry.about.com/od/demonstra ... nmoney.htm

Yes, but you CAN with acetone. (nail polish remover) In fact this is exactly the substance that did.

Just so we're clear some very very common 'household chemical experiments' can yield some fairly nasty stuff.

People have already mentioned chlorine gas. Napalm isn't that much more complicated than Gasoline+Vasoline. Thermite is aluminum+rust. You can get hydrogen gas explosions from running electric current through water.


The explosion that blew a hole in the drop celilng was because of sealed calorimeter. Closing a lid at the wrong time if you don't know you're releasing copious quantities of gas cancause injuries.


As I said before, we've had basic chemistry and seen some of what can go wrong, in a 'safe' lab environment, with easy access to an eye-wash, a chemical shower, vapor-hood, tables with surfaces chosen because they're unreactive, etc. You've got none of those available available to you. And we STILL managed to have the above accidents.

This isn't assuming you're an idiot. This is "We think we're perfectly intelligent too, and we've blown stuff up--and we had supervision of a specialized professional, we're concerned about your safety"

Diet Coke & Mentos (on your list) can do exactly what TheRiov is saying here.

Basically what everyone else is saying. No one is calling you names, just pointing out the even mundane things can end up causing injury if not handled/mixed/experimented with properly.

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This must be Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays.