What happened to my stop bath ?

i use kodak stop bath diluted 1:200 as indicated. Sometimes I poor a bit more like 1.5:200 to make it a little stronger but it's always yellow orange. I leave it in the bottle. This time two days later when I used it , It was white clear. No yellow whatsoever. Lost its color out of nowhere, thisnever happened before.


How do I even know still doing the job correctly.

1:200 is the dilution for photo-flo.

The directions on the Kodak Professional Indicator Stop Bath specify 16 ml / litre for general use - that is essentially 1+63 (or if you prefer, 1:64).

Something must be messing w/ the indicator. The stop bath (assuming that it is indicator stop bath) is supposed to turn purple when it has become exhausted, not clear. This may be due to the incorrect dilution the op has been using it at. Maybe at that strength there's not enough indicator in there to turn purple, so it has just gone clear? In any case I would dump it and mix a fresh batch at the correct dilution.

For what it's worth, I always used fresh stop when I was using it for film, not recycled stop. And I stopped using any stop bath w/ film years ago because I don't need it. A fresh water wash works just as well. I only use it when I print w/ fiber paper.

Your dilution is very high and there is an equilibrium point with Bromocresol purple where at high dilution it might look pretty near clear before turning purple. Using such a high dilution is OK, especially for film, but stop bath is cheap, I never reuse it.