Thank you so much!jazzy009 wrote:I think you may need to be a little more patient with your flame tests; boric acid and potassium chloride are extremely distinguishable! Those, combined with lithium chloride, make for an easy test!personasaurus rex wrote: the worst ones are like potassium chloride, because the color is a faint purple that 1) blends in with the bunsen burner blue and 2) it's so faint that I can never see it. Sometimes boric acid is pretty bad too because the green shows up not regularly.
Also (reading earlier posts), all sodiums will burn orange. Not only that, but the sodium stains your loop (what fun!). So if you're getting a constant orange and can tell it's a sodium, you definitely need to clean your loop with acid before running another test with it.
and what "loop" are you talking about? o_O