I've got the hospital tank at about 85 F, and I added some salt. The water here is very soft, but as for acid... I've used 4 different pH tests in the last couple of days, and I get results that range from 6.2 to 7.6. Deeply annoying. As they say, a man with one watch always knows what time it is, but a man with two watches never knows what time it is.
Frankly, water chemistry confuses me all the way to the bone. I know all the different characteristics influence each other, pH, hardness, temperature, carbon content, etc. etc. Damned if I can understand the explanations, though. It doesn't help that I didn't get any chemistry in high school. I took chemistry, you understand, and I even got an A, but the teacher was quite literally senile, and I never learned anything except how to clean glassware. We spent the first two weeks of class inventorying and cleaning glassware. Here's how crazy she was: she was teaching us how to read graduated cylinders. This doesn't seem like it would require a lot of explanation, does it? After explaining how to view the cylinder, and to use the bottom of the bubble to determine the measurement, she started discussing significant digits. Significant digits, easy. If you have a measurement of, say, 9.8445728 but you only want 2 significant digits, then you take the third digit from the right of the decimal, use it to round it the second digit, and you're done.
That wasn't what she wanted us to do, though. In a flight of illogic, she insisted that you start at the end of the string of numbers. Use the last number to round the next one up or down as appropriate. Then, use the result to round the next one, and so on. I spent an entire lunch hour trying to get her to explain this. She handed me graduated cylinder after graduated cylinder and had me read them. After each time, she would say, "You see, you see?" No, actually, I didn't. What reading a graduated cylinder had to do with this novel approach to rounding numbers was utterly opaque to me. I finally burst into tears and fled.
At any rate, perhaps you can see why it is that I didn't learn any chemistry in high school. There were other impediments, like her collecting assignments she'd never made, and refusing to collect homework she had assigned. I flunked a test because I mis-capitalized pH. Come to think of it, I don't think I passed a single test in that class. How I got an A isn't really any more mysterious than anything else that she did, I suppose.
no subject
Frankly, water chemistry confuses me all the way to the bone. I know all the different characteristics influence each other, pH, hardness, temperature, carbon content, etc. etc. Damned if I can understand the explanations, though. It doesn't help that I didn't get any chemistry in high school. I took chemistry, you understand, and I even got an A, but the teacher was quite literally senile, and I never learned anything except how to clean glassware. We spent the first two weeks of class inventorying and cleaning glassware. Here's how crazy she was: she was teaching us how to read graduated cylinders. This doesn't seem like it would require a lot of explanation, does it? After explaining how to view the cylinder, and to use the bottom of the bubble to determine the measurement, she started discussing significant digits. Significant digits, easy. If you have a measurement of, say, 9.8445728 but you only want 2 significant digits, then you take the third digit from the right of the decimal, use it to round it the second digit, and you're done.
That wasn't what she wanted us to do, though. In a flight of illogic, she insisted that you start at the end of the string of numbers. Use the last number to round the next one up or down as appropriate. Then, use the result to round the next one, and so on. I spent an entire lunch hour trying to get her to explain this. She handed me graduated cylinder after graduated cylinder and had me read them. After each time, she would say, "You see, you see?" No, actually, I didn't. What reading a graduated cylinder had to do with this novel approach to rounding numbers was utterly opaque to me. I finally burst into tears and fled.
At any rate, perhaps you can see why it is that I didn't learn any chemistry in high school. There were other impediments, like her collecting assignments she'd never made, and refusing to collect homework she had assigned. I flunked a test because I mis-capitalized pH. Come to think of it, I don't think I passed a single test in that class. How I got an A isn't really any more mysterious than anything else that she did, I suppose.