I still can't believe that Epsom Salt is mostly water

this video has been sponsored by audible for a long time now i've been kind of fascinated by bath salts maybe surprisingly though i'm not talking about the drug that's commonly known as bath salts and i actually just mean the salt that you can get at the pharmacy to make a relaxing bath at least here in montreal the most common one is epsom salt and this is specifically the one that i'm interested in in stores they sell it in huge bags or containers and it's usually just a bunch of white crystals however what has always kind of blown my mind is that despite being completely dry a huge portion of it is actually water in fact it's not even just a huge portion and it's technically mostly water at around 53 by weight all this water though isn't just absorbed on the epsom salt like a sponge or something and it's actually chemically part of it this is why the proper chemical name for epsom salt is magnesium sulfate heptahydrate where hydrate is referring to water the core compound is magnesium sulfate but it has seven water molecules that are chemically bound to it in this form the water is no longer a liquid and it's part of the solid crystal structure what i've always found really interesting though is that this water is only loosely bound with just a bit of heating the bonds should break and the water should fall off also as i mentioned before 53 of it is supposed to be water so from this 4 kilo container there's at least in theory over 2 liters of pure water that's almost enough to fill about half of it to me this all made sense on paper and the science behind it appeared to be relatively simple however i still had a really hard time believing that there could actually be that much water so i decided that i had to try it myself and to see if i got anything close to 2 liters to make this happen the plan that i came up with was relatively simple i first had to heat up the epsom salt to release the water and then i had to distill off the water to separate it from the salt to get this whole thing started i pulled out the biggest flask that i had and i filled it with as much epsom salt as i could at most though it would probably only hold about a kilo and a half and i figured that to do all of it i'd have to do a few separate batches when it looked pretty full i took it off the stand and i dropped it into a big heating mantle after that i added a stopper a short path condenser and another stopper i also had to add a thermometer as well as the tubing that would be feeding the condenser with cold water the last thing that i still needed was something to collect the water and i just went with a one liter beaker now in theory i was good to go and i turned on the heating at first it didn't really seem like much was happening and that's because there really wasn't the water was only supposed to start coming off at around 150 c and it was gonna take a while for it all to heat up after about 10 minutes i noticed that the salt had sunk down a bit which told me that something was happening what was much more exciting though was the small amount of water that had condensed at the top of the flask it wasn't anything even close to 2 liters but it was definitely a good sign over another 10 minutes it sank down even more and there was a lot more water on the flask this was kind of how i thought it was going to be the whole time and i figured that the salt would just keep shrinking and slowly giving off water however barely a few minutes later a small hole opened up in the corner and i saw some boiling water so apparently there was a lot more water than i thought and there was actually a huge pool that was hidden underneath after this it only took about five minutes for it to almost completely liquefy at this point i don't know exactly what form the magnesium sulfate was in but i think it had given off most of its water so now instead of being the heptahydrate with seven waters it was probably the dye or the monohydrate with only two or one after seeing this i got pretty excited and i really started to believe that getting two liters was actually gonna be possible around the same time the water vapor started slowly climbing the column and it eventually made it to the cold condenser this was turning all the vapor back into a liquid and a small amount was building up when there was eventually enough it was able to make it out of the condenser and i got my first drop of beautiful bath salt water it was also coming over at a surprisingly decent rate and within 10 minutes i already had quite a bit now going back to the flask it looked like there was even more water and it was all fully boiling now it also looked like it was barely half full which gave me an idea my original plan was to keep heating it until there was absolutely no water left and then to process the rest of the salt in a few separate batches however i started thinking that it might be possible to just keep topping up what i had here and to do it all in one shot so i pulled off the stopper added a funnel and started pouring in some fresh bath salt i filled it up with what i felt was a decent amount and i sealed it again i then waited for it all to heat up and for the water to fall off it all eventually completely liquefied and about 10 minutes after that it was back to a boil from this little test run it definitely seemed that adding more was gonna be a viable method i wanted to maximize the space before the next addition though and i decided to wait until there was almost no water left so i patiently waited and it ended up taking about five hours i also kept collecting the water and it was slowly adding up to a decent amount when it eventually started slowing down it was already up at around 900 mils looking back at the salt it still seemed a bit wet but i didn't see any actual liquid water i then popped out the stopper again and this time i really tried to load it up however i kind of overestimated things and i added way too much i tried jamming it in and it didn't work at all and for a second i was worried that i had messed up but then i realized that all i had to do was wait for the stuff in the flask to liquefy and to make more space after that i was easily able to shove in everything and there was still a whole bunch of space left so i decided to just keep adding more i forced in as much as i could and when it was completely full again i waited about 15 minutes even after this it was still barely over half full and it definitely seemed like it was possible to add everything it took a bit of effort and like five minutes of mixing things around but i was eventually able to completely empty the container i then waited for it all to melt again shoved in everything that was in the funnel and dropped in the stopper a few minutes later the water started coming over again i let this beaker fill until it was around a liter and then i swapped it out for a new one at this point i had one liter out of the theoretical two and i assumed that it would take about the same amount of time to get the other leader like before the amount of water in the flask slowly decreased and i collected more and more in the beaker it seemed to be going just like it did before and after around 5 hours it looked like all the water in the flask was gone this time though over in the beaker there was only about 600 mils and it wasn't even close to the leader i was hoping for i think this is because the last bit of water is just a lot more stubborn i imagine that most of the stuff here was now the monohydrate and this had a much stronger bond with the water to break it apart it was going to take a much higher temperature and unfortunately probably a lot more time right now it was at around 250c and i tried pushing it all the way up to around 350. over the next two hours i was able to squeeze out another 100 mils but it was insanely slow it was also getting really late and i was now stuck with a problem i could leave it overnight and let it finish but i was worried about leaving something that hot completely unattended on the other hand though i was really scared that if i turned it off now that the flask would break this is because in general it never ends well when you have to cool down a flask that has a huge chunk in it when i started this i kind of knew that the flask would die and i was willing to sacrifice it however i only wanted it to die when i was actually done with it and there was still a whole bunch of water that i had to get out ultimately i decided to avoid the fire risk and to take my chances letting it cool down so i took away the beaker and i turned off the heating mantle it all initially seemed okay but as i was getting ready to leave i heard a pop from the other room so i ran over and checked on it hoping that it was just something else that was sadly not the case though and there was a huge crack in the back of it i wanted to take it all apart and to get a closer look at it but it was still way too hot to touch and i just left it overnight to cool the next day i took out all the pieces and i poked at the magnesium sulfate i was expecting it to be tough and probably hard to break apart but i was hoping that it wouldn't be too bad however what i had here felt like a block of cement now at this point i basically had two options i could keep going and get out the rest of the water or i could just give up i honestly did kind of just want to quit but i decided to at least try to do this i had to move all this magnesium sulfate into a new and unbroken flask so the first step was to get it out of this one this left me with a solid brick of magnesium sulfate which i now had to crush into a powder to do this i figured i'd start by just dropping it and letting it break itself if anything it sounded like my table was the only thing that broke it was apparently even stronger than i thought and to destroy it i was gonna have to use a bit more force i expected one hit to easily split it and the fact that it took three kind of scared me this was because it meant that this whole part was gonna be an absolute nightmare the sharp end of the hammer didn't really work and it still took way too many hits to break it it really felt like i was trying to break apart a rock and i had no idea how i was gonna turn this all into a powder doing it manually like this seemed like it was gonna be way too much work and i decided to try and automate it so i went online and i found a random comment that said an electric food grinder worked well for chalk i of course didn't actually have chalk but i felt that it was similar enough that it might work in my mind i was hoping that it would just get shredded like a piece of cheese at first it actually seemed like it was working but it quickly stopped doing much of anything the magnesium sulfate was just way too hard and it had already dulled out the blade just for the fun of it i swapped the blade out for a fresh one and this one failed even worse it kind of caught an edge and there was way too much force on it and part of it snapped this was unfortunate but to be fair i have no idea how i thought it would actually work it was way too ambitious to try basically grinding a rock using something that's meant for carrots and cheese i was gonna have to use something a little more heavy duty and a blender was the only other thing that i could think of i was too afraid to use my good and expensive one though and i got this one on sale for twenty dollars unlike before it actually seemed to work and it was making some powder however it wasn't very efficient and it was mostly just bouncing the chunks around i then tried it with just one piece and it still had the same issue it didn't have the power to break it and it was just slowly shaving off small bits of it this was really inefficient to say the least and it would take forever to process everything like this assuming the blender would even survive so unfortunately the power tools weren't working for me and it was looking like i was gonna have to do things manually i definitely wasn't going back to just trying to use a hammer though and i instead used this pipe with a cap on it i dropped in one of the pieces that failed to blend and then i smashed it with a smaller pipe this is a method that's commonly used to crush rocks and it seemed to work pretty well there were still some chunks left in it but it was mostly destroyed in this dry powdered form the magnesium sulfate really likes to pull moisture from the air so it was important to transfer it all to a sealed container after that i continued smashing the rest of it at first it seemed like it was gonna be okay but it was honestly kind of a nightmare and i spent the next five hours just smashing two pipes together it was also a bit messy and it was impossible to not lose some of the powder when i was eventually done there were still some pieces that i felt were too big so i put everything through the blender which actually worked for these smaller pieces this left me with a decent and very dry powder and it really didn't look like it had any water in it again in theory though i knew that there had to be but i had that same doubtful feeling that i had with the original stuff but either way i now had to do pretty much the exact same thing that i did before the only difference was that this time i was going to crank the heat up a lot higher and bring it to around 400c when it got to around 350 i started to see some water vapor condensing on the sides shortly after that i got some water drops coming over the raid was much slower than before but it still seemed to be decent so it was looking like that last bit of water was breaking off and i was really hoping that i'd be able to get everything that i was missing of course this decent rate didn't last for long though and it really started to slow down to squeeze out the last bit i was gonna have to insulate it with aluminum foil and wait for it to get to 400c it actually started coming over again at a decent rate but it had a slight murkiness to it which slowly got worse and worse it also had a really strong sulfur smell and it made the room smell like i just set off some fireworks at first i thought that it might have been from the magnesium sulfate breaking down under the high heat however i don't actually think that's the reason because magnesium sulfate only starts decomposing around a thousand c i think it was just from some sulfur contamination and maybe some other impurities that were in the bath salt when it got to around 100 mils it got insanely slow i was really hoping to get the full amount that i was missing which was about 394 mils but at this rate it would take days so i ended up quitting when it got to around 240 mils which took almost 10 hours after this i slowly ramped down the temperature of the heating mantle and i kept the flask covered i was hoping that this would reduce the shock on the flask and prevent it from cracking i came back to it a few hours later and it had actually survived i then took everything apart and i emptied out the now super dry magnesium sulfate it was still not completely water free but it was very close so now coming back to the water from the last run i was actually able to get quite a bit however it was also way nastier than i expected so i decided to try and clean it up i initially planned to just pour it through a brita filter but i didn't think that it would be powerful enough so instead i made my own industrial strength one to do this i filled a funnel with some activated charcoal that i got from the pet store i then poured all my gross water through it and it looked just as bad on the other side however i wasn't surprised by this and the charcoal was mostly to get rid of the smell one pass wouldn't work though so i swapped it with a clean beaker and i poured it all through again i then did this three more times and it got rid of most of the smell and it cleared up slightly after that i tested the ph and it was decently acidic which wasn't good so i set up another filter using something called a mixed ion exchange resin this can sometimes also be found at the pet store because it can be used to clean aquarium water along with the charcoal this is the other main part of a typical brita filter and it pulls out dissolved ions from just the first pass it already looked a lot less cloudy i also repeated it three times and it looked significantly better each time now when i tested the ph it looked like it was slightly above six which was very close to neutral the water now also had almost no smell and it was definitely way better than before so in the end this was all the water that i was able to get out even though i believed the science and i expected it to work the amount was somehow still surprising in total i was able to get a bit over 1900 mils which wasn't quite the theoretical 2067 but it was extremely close i'm assuming that the missing 151 mils was still just stuck in the salt now to really get an idea of how much water this was i had to pour it all back into the original container [Music] [Music] as i thought from the beginning it was enough water to fill nearly half the container which is kind of crazy but anyway i now had a bunch of bath salt water and i just had to know what it tasted like okay so it's unfortunately time to taste it and uh see how horrible it probably is so the first thing i'll do is smell it and and it doesn't smell very good it smells like a weak version of kind of the nasty sulfur stuff that i just cleaned up it's not horrible just kind of smells a bit like stale old water so i'll get i guess i'll just taste it now it kind of just tastes like bad tap water but not sure why the first taste was much better than the second one the second one was kind of a bit sour and it makes me think that i definitely didn't get out everything from that nasty third run it was still a bit acidic and i think that's what i'm tasting but either way i don't think it was gonna be very good anyway so the taste is kind of horrible but what i do kind of find interesting is that i have no idea where this water really came from i mean i know i took it out of the epsom salt but where the epsom salt picked that water up is kind of a mystery i originally assumed that it was probably from the manufacturing process that's used to make the epsom salt but what it seems to be more likely is that epsom salt is just mined from a natural source and it probably just picked it up from its environment and i guess depending on how old this epsom salt was it could be really old water maybe this is maybe this is ancient water but either way i have a whole bunch of it so i've decided that i'll give away a few bottles of it a few little small bottles of my own bath salt water and if you guys want it there's a link in the description that you can sign up for for a chance to get it i mean i don't know why you want it but in the end this project took way longer than i thought and it was kind of a disaster but i think it was worth it one thing that i did want to mention though was that this video wasn't meant to show that epsom salt is a scam or something i mean it might be but as far as i know there are actually some practical reasons to sell it as the heptahydrate the first is that the dehydrated form reacts strongly with water and it can generate enough heat to cause serious burns it also doesn't dissolve very well and it tends to clump up and form bricks like the one i had to deal with but either way i now just want to thank the sponsor of this video audible for supporting this very important scientific endeavor audible's one of the biggest providers of spoken word content and they have a huge library of audiobooks and podcasts they also offer a lot of other stuff like audible originals and even guided meditation over the years i've been telling myself that i would read more books but i just somehow never feel like i have the time with audible though i can listen to them while i edit or work on a project and i've actually been able to finish a bunch of books a couple years ago i recommended ignition by john clark and it's still one of my favorites right now though i'm about halfway through shoe dog which was written by the founder of nike and it's all about how we started the company the whole journey that he went through has honestly kind of amazed me with all that being said though if you're interested in getting into audiobooks or podcasts audible's definitely the best place to check out right now they're offering a free trial which gives you a free audio book of your choice access to audible originals and access to daily news digests like the new york times you can get started by going to audible.com nile red or by texting nile red to 500 500 but uh with all the being said i don't know i'm done that's it as usual a big thanks goes out to all my supporters on patreon everyone who supports me can see all my new videos at least 24 hours before i post them to youtube you'll also get access to all the older videos that i had to take down and if you support me with five dollars or more you'll get your name at the end like you see here [Music] you

Channel: NileRed

Views: 1,853,868

Rating: 4.9420977 out of 5

Keywords: nilered, nile, red, science, chemistry, epsom, bath, salt, water, magnesium, sulfate, hepta, hydrate, mystery, extraction, drink

Id: 8GVSuKkuLzY

Length: 27min 0sec (1620 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 26 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/punos_de_piedra]

Did not expect to watch that whole thing. Pretty interesting stuff.

[u/Zuggible]

I was really hoping he'd add the water back to the salt at the end.

[u/Bazzatron]

Ten years of public education, only to learn decades later than chemistry is actually interesting.

[u/stochastic_diterd]

I can’t believe I watched a 30min video of guy crashing a magnesium. Yes, that salt is mostly water, save your time.