Electroplating with common household ingredients

[jasonpatterson]

Also, after reading the box and checking their website it appears they recommend using it as a fertilizer. So it's a root killer AND a fertilizer?

It's a matter of quantity, as you say. I've used the copper sulfate root killer (it's really a root growth inhibitor, rather than a killer, but still.) There can be a copper deficiency in poor soil (not likely) so it's the sulfur and pretty color that most people are after, I suspect. You can just as easily use potassium sulfate and get both K and SO₄ in the soil at the same time. I'd be wary of using it as a fertilizer, honestly, the stuff is pretty good at killing roots.

 

[Brian-M]

I've copper-plated a small pewter mug I found at a second-hand store. I even added some copper sulfate to the mix during the process.

It plated very well, except some dark discoloration that tended appear on the side of the mug that was facing downwards (rotating the mug from time to time helped, but didn't solve the problem). It has an interesting look to it, but it's not something I'd want to drink out of.

I think I'm going to give electroplating a rest for now. There's not a whole lot of things that would be worthwhile trying it on.

Try heating the blue crystals with a hot air gun. The blue crystals should turn white as the water is driven off.

Hot air gun wasn't a good idea... the crystals are ground into a fine powder and just blow away. Putting them in a pan on the stove worked better.

I think I might use the rest of the Copper Sulphate to grow crystals with. I remember growing a Copper Sulphate crystal in High School science class, it looked pretty good.

 

[anor277]

..........



Hot air gun wasn't a good idea... the crystals are ground into a fine powder and just blow away. Putting them in a pan on the stove worked better.

I think I might use the rest of the Copper Sulphate to grow crystals with. I remember growing a Copper Sulphate crystal in High School science class, it looked pretty good.

Whoops, my apologies. I tried it myself yesterday on large, macroscopic crystals and it worked quite well. You can grow quite large crystals of CuSO₄ very easily from aqueous solution. If you are careful you can seed the solution with a single crystal of CuSO₄, and the rest of the CuSO₄ in solution precipitates (i.e. deposits) on the surface of that crystal to give a much larger crystal. Of course you can also do this with something as simple as salt or (less simply!) sugar.

 

[ponderingturtle]

It's a matter of quantity, as you say. I've used the copper sulfate root killer (it's really a root growth inhibitor, rather than a killer, but still.) There can be a copper deficiency in poor soil (not likely) so it's the sulfur and pretty color that most people are after, I suspect. You can just as easily use potassium sulfate and get both K and SO₄ in the soil at the same time. I'd be wary of using it as a fertilizer, honestly, the stuff is pretty good at killing roots.

And I see this and think DAMN, at work we do copper electroplating and have stricter controls on the concentration of copper in our output than there is on the tap water coming in.