Sunday, April 1, 2012

Baking soda and vinegar reaction without the vinegar

We found this reaction by accident. We decided to try to make baking soda crystals. Just like we've done when making salt crystals, we started with dangerously hot water so that we could dissolve a lot of baking soda into the water. To our surprise, when we dropped the first spoonful of baking soda into the water, it fizzed up as if there was vinegar in the solution. Thinking that I had grabbed a container that had a little vinegar residue in it, we marched on with our crystal experiment (standing a little farther back). Every time we added baking soda, we got another fizzy reaction, long past the point where any vinegar residue would have been used up in the reaction. It turns out that mixing baking soda into hot water does create carbon dioxide, just like when mixing vinegar and baking soda. Granted this was (unintentionally) not the safest experiment, but it's always fun to find a new fizzy reaction. Of course, Jr. scientist A had quite a lot of fun repeating this one.

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