ive have utfse, but i havent found anything pertaining to my question on iodine.  i usually use a 2%tincture of iodine from my neighborhood pharmacy for my crystals, but i was in my local feed store and noticed 1% tincture at a fraction of the cost of the pharmacy.  im sure anything under 5% will work, but the bottle says "gentle iodine". what the hell does that mean?  active ingrediant is 1% titratable iodine.  am i correct to think this will give me what i need?  i really hate throwing away a lot of time, energy, and product!  please steer me in the right direction!!

I know what kind you are talking about and this is not what you want.

That has all the iodine of teat dip... used in dairies to dip teats. Not your choice of sources for I2.

ok, so stay with 2%from my local pharmacy, but what is the difference? will my feed store have what i need?  those 16oz bottles sure seem nice compared to what im getting now!!  any advice would be greatly appreciated.

They may also have pints of 9.4% there which is good I think. About $4.

You need to go to the feed store and look for strong iodine tincture. It will have 7% iodine. Gentle iodine has about 1%. As to whether your feed store has it, there is one way to find out. Go see.

Way back when, when nothing else was available someone I don't know tried to extract the gentle I2 you talk about and man did he get pissed off...see he knew how to get I2 out of store bought 2% and 7% strong and he knew the basics behind what needed to be done under most circumstances to be successful in his extractions...but to his dismay he was unable to recover anything worth mentioning....after trying everything he could think of he came to the conclusion that there were additives in the mixture that prevented successful extraction of gentle iodine.  Everytime he felt he was close to a extraction solution of the mixture it appeared to foam up like soap instead of I2 falling out of solution and since the supplier stopped carrying the strong stuff he assumed that this was 'their' solution to prevent 'us' from aquiring I2 via this route anymore.  Long story short, find a different solution for extraction other then the gentle junk.  Pyrex out of extraction methods ;-)

in a case of real desperation I2 could be seperated from the worst solutions by allowing it to react with spongy lead(in car battery) or finely divided copper(radiator fix) to precipitate insoluable PbI2 or CuI leaving all the unknown garbage in the solution.

the I2 could then be regenerated from the precipitate by reacting it with a oxidizer.

probably need to start oxidation first with some H2O2, HCL, Sodium Hypochlorite(bleach).SWIM has had nice returns from amimal iodine feed supplement(looks like salt) in fact it is salt, OK check your feed store for the 5% or 7% they usually have that.

thanks! went back to feed store and sure enough 7% was available.  was able to come out with beautiful I2 crystals at a very lovely cost