Sodium Acetate

Sodium Acetate has a wide range of uses.  It is often used to give potato chips a salt and vinegar flavour (Note: ours is not to be used as food!).  Sodium acetate is also used in heating pads, hand warmers, and "hot ice".  Check out the videos below for some great demonstrations.

You can easily create your own by reacting vinegar with sodium bicarbonate ("baking soda").  For reference, you could alternatively use sodium carbonate ("washing soda") or sodium hydroxide ("lye") in place of the baking soda.  Any of these reactions produce Sodium Acetate and water.  However, it often does not turn out well enough to be used as Hot Ice (or other applications).

Save yourself some time and buy our lab-grade ready-to-use Sodium Acetate!

Recommended for Age 8 & Up (with adult supervision)

EXTRA CONTENT

A quick story for you.  So we loved the show "Lost", and the show's reference to Michael Faraday.  Inspired by the show, we also had the good fortune to visit the Royal Institution in London, England, in early March 2019, and the free-to-all Faraday Museum in their gorgeous facility there.   And cognizant of the wealth of information freely offered to everyone, we took lots of photos, including this one:

(Hint:  the author distinctly remembered Theo Gray's writing concerning Benzene and its remarkable molecular structure, and so the idea of observing molecule-level  sizes in 1914 seemed obviously remarkable and quite worthy of a digital photo and a mental note!)

What does WG Bragg's X-ray spectrometer have to do with Sodium Acetate you ask?  Well, on Father's Day in 2019, the author was remembering the above discovery from the museum and decided to explore the subject further using Youtube - and found the below (first hit! - around 4:35).

As you'll find if you watch the video, it turns out that the topic of "X-ray Crystallography (at around 4:35) references none other than... Sodium Acetate!

If you'd like to learn more about how to "drill" into and more closely examine the topic of X-ray crystallography, please also check out the sequel video that continues the above one (especially starting around 4:12):

BONUS (SAFETY) CONTENT

We are also fans of YouTuber "L.A. Beast" (aka Kevin Straley, aka Skippy62able, and multiple Guinness World Record holder), and definitely, do NOT recommend that you try this at home: