Australia's Science Forum

Hi All,

I wanted to know how to best store dilute quantities of solutions in dropper bottles. At the moment they are in tubs on a side bench in the prep room which is kept locked at all times. Is this sufficient or do they need to be in a cupboard as well? Most of them are 1M or less.

hi Anastasia

I have my droppers in ice cream containers on a trolley and lock them in the chem store .

Hi Anastasia,

I store my droppers on reagent racks on the bench in the prep rooms, which are kept locked like yours.

I have six labs with four prep rooms over three levels. It is simply not practical to lock these droppers away in the chem store, and being dilute solution they are relatively safe stored this way.

My prep rooms also store volumes of stronger reagents (eg HCl up to 5M) and a variety of solutions of various concentrations, not to mention all the solid chemicals. We keep the prep rooms locked and there are signs posted on the access doors warning students not to enter without teacher supervision.

Carol

We now have all our dropper bottles stored in Unitrays which are small white trays with 10 compartments which will take 10 dropper bottles of 25 ml or 50 ml size. These are then stored in these trays in alphabetical order on shelves, similar to bookshelves in the prep room. They are excellent. Neat and tidy and with the appropriate label on each end (as well as on each bottle). We purchase the trays from Haines Education in Victoria and they are great.

Hi Guys
We store all ours in the uni trays and in alpha order as well It is a neat and tidy way of storage
Sandy

Thanks to everyone for their replies, we were told after a Board inspection we needed "better" storage even for dilute chemicals. Although they didn't clarify what this meant. I will show our Science HOD all your posts.

We have our "green" code solutions in amber dropper bottles in Uni trays.
The Uni trays are labelled on the end.. as well as the actual bottles.

We keep them out in the lab, in glass fronted wall cupboards. ("orange" code are stored in prep room)
That way.. senior students can choose their own solutions as they require them. They can access the key from the teacher.
Cupboards kept locked while junior classes are in... they mustnt access....and I get out the Uni tray required for any experiment that they need on the day.

I have the bottles in sections A-Z, and lowest conc first,
acids
bases
indicators

This prevents the acids & base vapours reacting in the cbd etc