Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Chloroform and HCl

bigtrevs98 - 30-6-2015 at 14:40

So one day I was kinda curious. I know chloroform is a solvent so I was wondering if chloroform could absorb the HClast from my works toilet cleaner roughly 10% the chloroform over time started turning blue and there was a layer of whitish fog over the chloroform under a dark blue haze. On top of the haze is where it looks like the chloroform absorbed something. What happened here? By the way this is like the 4th time I've doNE this to this same batch of chloroform. It seems to KEEP absorbing.

Texium - 30-6-2015 at 14:46

Assuming that your toilet cleaner was blue to begin with, the blue dye is likely moving into the chloroform phase that it is probably more soluble in, while the HCl and other things that are more water soluble are staying in the aqueous layer. This doesn't seem like a good way to extract HCl at all, but if you're just curious about what's happening, how about posting a list of all of the ingredients in the toilet bowl cleaner, which you can find on the MSDS for it? Otherwise, it's impossible to know what's going on.

bigtrevs98 - 30-6-2015 at 15:09

Yes mainly just curious just got a batch of chloroform sitting around and started doing stuff with it...
would you be able to tell me what would haopen if I was to shoot chloroform with a syringe down into 3% hydrogen peroxide. Also 5% ammonia I think it is. Like I said I'm just curious and I don't wanna do something that will have a violent reaction or anything because I know mixing acetone with h2o2 makes tatp. But chloroform isn't straught acetone tho. But idk. That's why I'm asking. Any help would be apprecoated :D (btw I'm waiting to get into collage as we speak so I'm just very curious)

Edit: and the cleaner msds only shows 9.5% HCL but that's it.

[Edited on 30-6-2015 by bigtrevs98]

macckone - 30-6-2015 at 19:59

In science you should have some idea of what should happen
before performing a reaction. This idea is called a hypothesis.
If you hypothesis is correct then the reaction proceeds as planned.
If your hypothesis is incorrect then you may have other problems.
Like explosions. Go on youtube and watch what others are doing.
Get a chemistry text book or two and start reading.
Some are freely available on the internet.

Also look around the site for good starting points for beginners.
Chloroform can produce nasty byproducts if used incorrectly.
Phosgene being the worst one. Look it up if you don't know
what it is. Randomly mixing chemicals is unlikely to end well.

annaandherdad - 1-7-2015 at 08:52

Instead of buying toilet bowl cleaner in the grocery store it's a lot cheaper to buy a gallon of muriatic acid at the hardware store.

More exactly, since I have the muriatic acid anyway, I skip the toilet bowl cleaner. It works great.