# is there any silver in acid peroxide leftovers?



## ryan6342 (Feb 26, 2012)

just wondering, i added a copper pipe to it and it ate it and gave back a dark grey powdery substance. is this silver?


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## Harold_V (Feb 26, 2012)

ryan6342 said:


> just wondering, i added a copper pipe to it and it ate it and gave back a dark grey powdery substance. is this silver?


I have a strong hunch Steve is going to tell you that it's not silver---but copper chloride. 

Why would you expect silver to be in solution with HCl? It's not known as a solvent for silver, aside for minute traces. 

Harold


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## ryan6342 (Feb 26, 2012)

the first batches i ran had a lot of silver also
they all went to the same plastic paint bucket, and the leftovers at one point did in fact turn blue before going green. so i stuck in a few copper pipes and it yielded about 2 grams of a whitish grey powder, and the solution has become a dark green non translucent kinda color.


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## butcher (Feb 26, 2012)

ryan6342, 
Your description sounds like copper powders to me, although depending on what you have been doing it could be a combination of salt, copper, lead, and silver, and even gold chlorides.

You can try this.

Salt NaCl crystals dissolve in water.

Add HCl, if it is copper it will dissolve, it can turn from light blue (very little copper dilute), to dark green (much more copper in solution and more concentrated acid), to so dark green it almost looks black this is normally what it will look like.
Let settle well decant solution, rinse powder, and try more HCl, repeat until you get copper out (light blue color in dilute HCL).


if it is silver it will stay white salt (HCl will not dissolve silver), washing well with boiling hot water will remove any lead chloride (decant the clear-ish liquid of lead chloride solution while solution is hot, but also you must let any fluffy silver chloride settle first), after you wash out lead if the remaining powder is silver chloride it will darken in the sunlight after sitting a while.

The jar of water you washed the lead with, when cold will precipitate out the lead chloride again as white to gray powders.


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## ryan6342 (Feb 27, 2012)

allready boiled in water, thank you very much, yes hcl did remove some more copper from this. its starting to look cleaner, lotta gold and silver im guessing this looks like white gold when melted. i dont have nitric but no copper in the mix is a good idea


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## butcher (Feb 28, 2012)

If this was mostly gold, and very little silver, after you got rid of most of the copper With HCl, and any lead chloride with hot water, the small amount of silver could be washed out with ammonia, or household ammonia (ammonium hydroxide), but if there was very much silver this would not be a good idea, as it takes a lot of ammonia to wash very little silver.

The ammonia dissolves silver chlorides, making a complex with silver, silver diammine Ag (NH3) 2,
If you do use this be sure to add acid to the solution with HCl (about neutral pH), your silver will precipitate back out of the solution, and then the solution will be safe. 
Never let silver diammine dry, always acidify, or it can form a shock sensitive compound (explosive).

If you cannot get nitric and you do have quite a bit of silver and gold in these powders maybe try HCl and bleach to dissolve gold after you have washed the powders from base metals as much as possible (you will probably find they still have more base metals after doing this than you thought (color of your solution will be a clue), but you can always re-refine the gold a second time.


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## dtectr (Feb 28, 2012)

Don't mean to double post - just so happens same comment / different threads! 

According to Ammen, the silver ion is clear. This is noteworthy as I also considered blue solution to indicate silver. Really just different concentrations of copper.


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