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Sodium metaborate - availability UK?

Sim2

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Hi there,

Quick question - does anyone know where I can buy sodium metaborate in the UK? I have bought this from Silverprint in the past but it is no longer listed on their site. Looking for small quantities 500g - 1Kg not industrial quantities! does any other photo retailer sell raw chems?

Thanks in advance,
Sim2.
 
nope. Not. A. Chance.

You can get it from Moersch in Germany if you're willing to pay hefty shipping, or combine with other materials.

or you can substitute Sodium hydroxide and Borax in the correct proportion, which can be found by searching APUG. Ian Grant has given the correct ratio a few times but I can't be bothered to look myself I've got it written down somewhere but I'm not at home to find it, sorry
 
Ah found one here you go, from (there was a url link here which no longer exists)

Ian Grant said:
A better method is use:

Borax (decahydrate) 45.4 g
Sodium Hydroxide 9.5 g
Water to 1 litre

This gives the equivalent of a 10% Solution of Sodium Metaborate (Kodalk)


Ian
Click to expand...
or
 
Mike Wilde posted a nice procedure for reliably making Sodium Metaborate from Borax and Lye (there was a url link here which no longer exists).
 
ho ho ho Rudeofus, you and Gerald CK will have to disagree about the reliability of the Mike Wilde method

FWIW I ended up with a couple of batches of unusably basic "metaborate" using the Wilde method, so now if I need metaborate I weigh out hydroxide and borax as per Ian Grant, and haven't had any problems since
 
Cheers guys - I had found the posts about making it from other ingredients, just would prefer to use it as a native powder. I can see a headache arriving as I try to work out substituting x grammes of metaborate with a % solution.

Btw, if it is "so easy" to make from other common ingredients, why is it not available anymore?
 
demand, i expect.
But making it commercially isn;t just a question of mixing hydroxide and borax i presume either.

you don't have to worry about solution substitution if you use the weights in the second of Ian's posts I quoted, by the way: that's a substitution for 10g by weight of metaborate
 
try that well known auction site. I know it's probably against all sorts of regs to get this stuff posted, but.......................I bought 100g potassium dichromate not so long ago to stash away for future use, because at some point I want to have a go at bromoil. Read the safety data sheets on any chems you buy.
 
I think that may be a route to go down - had a look for borax and that "can't be sold to the public" anymore! Just when I get into mixing my chems from raw, the ingredients cant be bought!! Thanks for all the inputs.
 
A friend of mine in the UK was also very surprised that he couldn't get it from a shop - a real bummer if you mix your own two-bath developer.

Ron found a supplier on the auction site called Fast Chem Chemical supplies or something very similar.

The other option would be to order it from Suvatlar in Hamburg. The German for Sodium Metaborate is Natriummetaborat.

Full contact details are: Fototechnik Suvatlar, Simrockstr.178a, 22589 Hamburg. Tel: 0049 40 39 57 09.

Bests,

David.
www.dsallen.de
 
mr rusty said:
I know it's probably against all sorts of regs to get this stuff posted, but.......................I bought 100g potassium dichromate not so long ago.
Click to expand...

It is indeed in breach of a number of regulations if sent by post, but it is the sender that would get in to trouble. I also stocked up on potassium dichromate before the ban on sales to the general public. 500g should last me a long time.

Sim2 said:
had a look for borax and that "can't be sold to the public" anymore!
Click to expand...

Initial reaction was "a load of bol..." then googled for an online UK supplier: Dead Link Removed

Please Note: This product has been reclassified by the ECHA as Reprotoxic Category 2 and as such is not available to the general public. This change does not affect availability for business users or scientific research.
Click to expand...

Going to have to draw up a "trade" order for a few kilos....
 

Do you have a product for dishwasher named "Calgon"? It is sodium metaborate. Read some labels in the dishwashing section of the grocery, you may find what you need.
 
Jim Noel said:
Do you have a product for dishwasher named "Calgon"? It is sodium metaborate. Read some labels in the dishwashing section of the grocery, you may find what you need.
Click to expand...

Calcon is sodium hexametaphosphate which is something entirely different from sodium metaborate. Chemical names are highly specific and differences in spelling ARE important. Even if by chance the dishwashing product should contain a metaborate it probably would contain other ingredients.
 
Hello,
here in Germany the time when Calgon was sodiumhexametaphosphate (the type which is sold to the public, not the industrial types!) is gone over since some decades because the heavy problems with too much phosphate from detergents in the environment. Today Calgon is based on Sasil = sodiumaluminiumsilicate, a zeolith type.
 
While some products sold under the name Calgon may no longer contain sodium hexametaphosphte, the original water softening agent is still available under the name Calgon T.

Many years ago someone bought the Calgoc bath additive in the supermarket instead of the plain water softener. His developers worked and also smelled divine.
 

If Gerald Koch says something different from what I write, it is a safe bet that you can follow Gerald's advice, especially given his training and experience. Evidently there are arguments for both procedures, and both methods will likely give you good results:

  • Since Metaborate is frequently used together with more acidic compounds to form a buffer at pH 8-10, a bit of excess Hydroxide won't matter nearly as much as the initial pH difference suggests.
  • Likewise, if some Carbon Dioxide or water vapor reduces the actual amount of Sodium Hydroxide added to the mix, the effect on final developer pH may be minor.
  • The biggest advantage of Metaborate over Borax/Boric Acid is that the Metaborate is well soluble unlike the latter two. If you need minimal amounts of Metaborate in your developer, you may as well ditch the Metaborate step and use properly weighed amounts of Borax/Hydroxide straight in your developer. If you need higher amounts (>30 g/l), a 25% Metaborate solution is preferable to a 10% Metaborate solution.
 

Calgon is no longer Sodium hexametaphosphate, it's just a trade name for water softener.

Ian
 
Oooh that's new, they weren't selling that a year ago, or if they were I didn't find it.
Excellent
 
The problem with Mike Wilde's method of preparing a sodium netaborate solution from borax and lye is that it does not take into consideation the solubility of the borax which is ~60 g/l at room temperature. Consider the following thought experiment. Take 100 g of borax and add it to 1 l of water to make a saturated solution (60 g will dissolve leaving 40g undissolved). Now add lye until the remaining borax just dissolves. At this point you can consider the remaining 40 g of borax as being converted into metaborate. This is what caused the remaining borax to dissolve. However the 60 g of borax in the original saturated solution has not been changed. So what you get is a solution which contains both borax and metaborate. This solution wil not have the same alkalinity as a metaborate solution. His method of decanting off portions of the solution does not change the outcome. It was a interesting idea that just doesn't work. It would only work if borax was insoluble in water.

In reality commercial brands of lye are quite pure ~98% with the remainder being sodium chloride. So there is no good argument to npt just weighing out the required amounts of borax and lye as Ian states.
 
  • Mike Wilde's procedure starts with the molecular weight ratio of NaOH and Borax, which means with pure NaOH and proper care he ends up with the same mix as yours. If he deviates from your procedure, and he does that only if the Borax won't dissolve, then by adding more NaOH.
  • According to this pdf Borax will dissolve only up to 47 g/l at 20°C, not 60 g/l. And from my own experience, none of us here will live to see these 47 g/l ever dissolved, it takes quite a bit of patience to see 30 g/l actually go into solution.
  • The above point also shows why pdeeh reported higher than expected pH: if he ended up with a Borax/Metaborate mix as predicted, he should have had lower pH! Most likely he was a bit impatient and poured in NaOH too quickly, which dissolved the Borax quickly but gave him a mix of Metaborate with excess NaOH.
 
Its fascinating to learn that someone's state of mind can be extrapolated so precisely from the pH of a solution ...
 
Rudeofus said:
According to this pdf Borax will dissolve only up to 47 g/l at 20°C, not 60 g/l. And from my own experience, none of us here will live to see these 47 g/l ever dissolved, it takes quite a bit of patience to see 30 g/l actually go into solution.
Click to expand...

There is a lower figure sometimes quoted for anhydrous borax. With the decahydrate, the usual form, the solubility is ~60 g/l at practical room temperatures. The actual amount used in my thought experiment really does not matter. I picked values to make the point more obvious. MW considers his method to be more accurate than the weight method but it is not.

Considering the purity of both available borax and lye products it makes more sense just to measure out the needed amounts.

My point is that MW talks abour tritrating the borax mixture with lye and indeed this is how I understood his method. This will not work as I pointed out. The disappearence of all the solid is not a reliable measure that all the borax is converted. There is also the problem of overshooting the mark and adding more lye than is needed. Classical tatration methods rely of the first appearence of a solid rather the disappearence of one. Why, because the latter effect is just not accurate.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Gerald C Koch said:
My point is that MW talks abour tritrating the borax mixture with lye and indeed this is how I understood his method. This will not work as I pointed out.
Click to expand...

His posting starts with the "correct" amounts of Borax and Lye (90g vs. 90.8g/88.7g Borax with 19g Lye, close enough IMHO), and adds extra Lye only, if, for whatever reason, the Borax wouldn't dissolve. We both know that all the Borax should dissolve even if the Lye is slightly impure, as it takes a Lye impurity above 10% before some Borax remains undissolved. BTW I'm not sure whether you can dissolve all that much Borax in a fairly concentrated Metaborate solution as in plain water, so neither the 60g/l, nor the 47g/l number may hold in a setup as the one described by Mike.
 
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