Good Afternoon
Aunderwood458,
I too am a hobby refiner who is currently specializing in silver purification. While your video's do a good job of showing industrial scale operations, they only touch one two aspects of processing silver. Your first video show an electrolytic cell for growing ultra-pure silver crystal and the second shows a hobby refiner melting that crystal into an ingot. What your videos do not show is all of the chemistry that it takes to get the purified silver nitrate to grow silver crystals, nor the waste management stream, or how they are procuring their raw materials. These are all things that must be considered if you want to pursue hobby refining. If you want to make a business out of this, then I wish you the best of luck. Unless you have a cheap/free source of raw materials, from what I understand it's hard to make a profit. (My wife jokes that while I buy scrap at ~75% of spot price but her cupcakes that she bakes have a 600% profit margin).
As a school educated chemist, I picked this hobby up to dust off my wet-chemistry skills, do some research, and get back into the lab. One question I would have for you is what are your goals? Are you a new to do a new hobby, looking to build a multi-million dollar business (like in your first video).
You mentioned wanting to use Silver Nitrate to grow crystals, but do you know how to make fairly pure silver nitrate? Do you have access to safety equipment, fume hoods, acid protective gear, etc? What is your experience level with chemistry? Ultimately that is what refining is, just simple chemistry. You're trying to concentrate certain elements, while removing others.
As for how much silver you can get out of a silver nitrate solution, it's all about the molarity of the solution (aka the concentration of Silver Nitrate). I can sell you two 1L bottles, each are silver nitrate, one might be 1 molar of silver nitrate, the other might be 2 molar. The math is important here, and I would reference Butcher's brief explanation on it as he sums it up well. I would rather have the 2 molar bottle by the way.
This line here is the important one: "It takes about 1.22ml of 70% Nitric acid diluted with 1,22ml of water to dissolve a gram of silver, it will take about three time that much solution to dissolve a gram of copper."
Regardless, sorry to blast away with some many questions. Welcome to the forum, like everyone else, I recommend reading Hoke, asking questions and doing a lot of reading, there is over 20 years of wisdom here, if you want to dig for it. (a whole different take on gold mining!)