From lewrockwell.com
Throughout the history of alternative medicine, few remedies have had the staying power of colloidal silver. No matter how much the medical establishment tries to ignore and ridicule it, somehow its practice has never been forgotten. And for every person who claims it is harmful snake oil, there is another who has been using it for years without any ill effects.
That’s because, despite what the media will tell you, colloidal silver isn’t as dangerous as you might think. There are only a handful of people who have been afflicted with the famous “blue man” disease known as Argyria. Typically these are caused by silver chloride or silver proteins, though the media tends to lump them all together with colloidal silver. In other cases the afflicted was taking extremely large doses over many years.
Whatever the case may be, it is possible to make your own colloidal silver, and do so cheaply and safely. As antibiotics begin to breed superbugs, and viral outbreaks continue to make headlines, more and more people are looking towards alternative remedies like colloidal silver. Since Ebola has reached American shores, and with no real cure in sight, the attention towards colloidal silver has been making a comeback
This of course means that a lot of people will be making their own colloidal silver (CS) machines, because most of the devices you can buy online don’t come cheap. Which is unfortunate, because the materials required to make your own CS machine aren’t that expensive.
Below is an example of a pretty simple method of making your own CS without breaking the bank. It should look pretty familiar to those of you who’ve been making their own CS for a long time, but with some slight changes. It involves connecting two pieces of silver to a battery source, and setting them rest in a container of water. As the electricity tries to run between the pieces, particles of silver will be shed from the source, and will be suspended in the water. Viola! Colloidal Silver.
Of course, it’s a little more complicated than that, especially if you want to do this safely. I prefer this method because it’s so cheap and so widely known. If it were harmful, there would be a lot more cases of Argyria. Since I can count with my fingers how many people have gotten sick from silver, I trust this method over the rest. So without further ado, let me show you how to make your own colloidal silver.
First thing’s first though, you’re going to need to gather your materials
Power Source
You’ll need 3-4 9 volt batteries. If you only plan on using only small amounts of CS, then the cheaper disposable batteries will last you a long time. If however, you plan on administering CS to your family on a regular basis, or perhaps you’re going to be using it for housecleaning (it is after all, antibacterial), then you might want to invest in some lithium batteries and a charger.
Leads
The simplest way to connect your batteries to the silver, is by connecting them to alligator clips. In this particular design, you’ll need three pairs of clips. Unfortunately it’s pretty hard to find alligator clips that aren’t sold in bulk, so you’ll probably have to buy a set of 10. Fortunately, even in bulk they’re pretty cheap.
Silver
There’s a wide variety of opinions on what you should use as your source of silver. What is agreed upon, is that you should have two separate pieces, that contain a minimum of 99.9% silver or .999. Silver plated or sterling silver will not do. These materials contain other elements like copper or nickel (which is toxic).
Most CS machines take silver wire. You’ll have to shop around and avoid most of the jewelry grade wire, which is usually just sterling silver. A lot of people buy 99.99% for CS as opposed to just 99.9%. It’s probably safer, but it’s also a lot more expensive. I personally wouldn’t mind the extra cost since this material will last you a long time, but it’s often way overpriced when it comes from certain CS vendors. Fortunately there are some cheaper listings out there
Some people don’t trust the quality of silver wire though, since a lot of it is made in China. I can’t say I blame them. Those folks usually prefer to buy 1 ounce silver bullion
Distilled Water
It’s vitally important that you use only the cleanest sources of water. There should be almost no particulate matter of any kind in your water. You can usually find relatively cheap distilled water at any grocery store. Although, if you don’t trust store bought water you can make your own. Some of you may already have a Berkey water filter, which should be more than sufficient. Most CS websites also recommend distilling the water by boiling it and collecting the steam. You can either buy a water distiller
Current Regulator Diode
This is where this design will differ from most DIY colloidal silver machines. You’re going to need a way to regulate the current that is running between the two pieces of silver. When the silver first goes into the water, there will be very little current, because distilled water isn’t very conductive. Silver however, is the most conductive element on the periodic table. So as those particles separate from your silver wire, the water will become more conductive.
It’s widely believed among CS enthusiasts, that as the current grows, it begins to strip larger and larger pieces of silver. This is bad. Those larger particles aren’t as effective at eliminating bacteria and viruses, and they’re more likely to accumulate in your body over time. This means you run the risk of getting Argyria.
A current regulator diode should rectify this problem. It’ll keep the current from increasing beyond a certain point, so your CS machine will continue to produce high quality silver ions. You’ll want a diode that keeps the current at around 1 milliamp, though if it goes slightly over or under it shouldn’t be a big deal.
There’s so much wrong with what thee author(s) of this article suggest, that’ I will begin with the simple things.
As an electronics engineer, I’m unclear what alternative-Americans mean by a “current regulator diode”. This may be an N-JFeT with a source-gate short-circuit, but these might not work at the low voltages in this circuit. If you want to regulate the current, you can use the right resistor for your DC voltage providing system, so as to keep the current to 1mA (that’s what I think this article says.) If, furthermore, there was such a thing as a “CRD” (I’m aware of Zener diodes, which regulate _voltage_ across the output of a DC power supply like a battery or other kind, but it doesn’t say that this is one of these, or what voltage rating to use) and also it doesn’t say which way round to connect your diode!
“Colloidal silver” suggests that there are actual solid silver-metal particles in suspension. This could in theory be the case if they were small enough (less than a few thousand atoms) and there were few enough of them. If this was not the case, then the system here described might, possibly, produce a very dilute solution of silver hydroxide, which is insoluble and would precipitate as a beige-brown solid.
Silver _ions_ have been shown before the 1940s to be bioactive _in vitro_ against many types of bacteria (but not viruses, so there goes the potential Ebola case).
The problme with ingesting silver (either ions or small particles a few nanometers across = “colloidal”) is that once absorebed, it cannot be reomoved by the body’s systems. Additionally, being an oxidizing-metal, it tends to precipitate in vivo in all sorts of places wherever the Ag+ ions will have ended up, as silver metal in larger amounts or as silver sulphide, which is black. The condition dscribed as Argyria is a real one.
The next problem centres on the fact that to discharge say 1 mole (= about 108 grams) of silver, as actual sulver atoms, whether from an ionic solution or taking it off an electrode, requires 96,350 Coulombs of charge (=1 Faraday.) therefore silver is discharged – or moved into solution – at the rate of 892 coulombs per gram. At 1 milliamp (0.001 Coulomb of charge per second) of current, that would need about 247 hours or 10.5 days roughly. If your solution was say one litre volume, then you _might possibly_ have a suspension of silver metal particles at 1 gram/Litre, or 0.1%, and I would say that was if you were lucky, for of course almost all the silver will have actually moved from the (+) anode to the (-) cathode, leaving almost nothing in solution unless you were lucky and there were negative ions in the water (but there can’t be for you distilled it!) like nitrate (all metal nitrates are water-soluble including silver nitrate, which is part of how you analyse for silver or not.) The other complication is that merely filtering your water will _not_ remove ions like chloride, bromide or iodide, or chromate etc, which will automaticall precipitate any silver and take it out of the water!
I would say that this is all Greek to me – only I do understand Greek….