Ask a Prepper
  • DIY |
  • Terms of Use |
  • Privacy Policy |
  • Contact
ask a prepper survival every day
Generic selectors
Exact matches only
Search in title
Search in content
Post Type Selectors
  • Home
  • All Articles
  • Editor’s Pick
  • Survival Knowledge
  • How To’s
  • Store
  • About Claude Davis
  • Home
  • All Articles
  • Editor’s Pick
  • Survival Knowledge
  • How To’s
  • Store
  • About Claude Davis
No Result
View All Result
Menu
Ask a Prepper
Search
No Result
View All Result
Print Friendly, PDF & Email
Home All Articles
how-to-make-to-a-storm-glass

How to Make a Storm Glass To Predict the Weather

Susan Morrow by Susan Morrow
November 11, 2016
15

In this article I’m going to show you how to make a quick and pretty simple storm glass. The ingredients are not something that you’d normally have lying around the house. But, they are all easy to buy now, from places like eBay and Amazon, so get some in to prepare for when the SHTF.

Ingredients:

  • 2.5g Potassium nitrate solid. Sometimes called saltpeter and you can buy it for preserving meats. You can also buy a product called Spectracide Stump Remover which is around 99.5% potassium nitrate. You can make a smoke grenade using this product.
  • 2.5g Ammonium chloride solid. You can buy a solution of this from fish tank supplies, but it’s the solid you need, not a solution
  • 33 ml distilled water. 
  • 40 ml of alcohol. This can be ethanol or methanol (I used methanol) and you could experiment with 100 proof vodka and grain spirit if you’ve no other available. Also, if you’re distilling your own alcohol you can try that
  • 10g Camphor solid. This is useful to have in your store for other uses, including medicinal
  • A long thin stoppered glass jar or tube. I happened to have a Quick Fit glass tube and stopper in my home from my old chemistry days, but you could use anything, including jars, as long as they are very clean and dry

How It’s Made: Creating the Crystal Solution

Weigh out / measure your ingredients in preparation. Try to be as accurate as possible. You’ll be making two separate solutions that you’ll mix together.

Step 1
Ingredients, weighed and measured, in preparation for making the storm glass

Making Solution 1:

Place the potassium nitrate and ammonium chloride and stir until dissolved. Put this to one side.

Step 2
Place potassium nitrate and ammonium chloride into a clean beaker or similar

 

Step 3
Add 33 ml of distilled water
Step 4
Mix until dissolved – the salts are very soluble so this should happen quite quickly

Making Solution 2:

Add the Camphor solid to a beaker or similar, and stir in the 40 ml of alcohol until dissolved.

Step 5
Camphor being added to the beaker

 

Step 6
Add the 40 ml of alcohol to the camphor and stir
Step 7
Camphor is soluble in alcohol, but may need to be warned up to dissolve – this is usually only a case of holding it in your warm hand as you stir
Step 8
Dissolved camphor

Mixed Solution:

Now take solution 1 and solution 2, and mix them together by stirring. Alcohol and water should mix well as they have a similar chemistry, but camphor doesn’t like water. It’s likely you’ll need to warm them up a little and stir to mix.

Step 9
Mix the two solutions by pouring one into the other. At this point you’ll see the camphor solution come out of solution, forming the solid. You will likely need to gently warm the solution mixture up on a stove
Step 10
Warm the mixed solution up on a stove and mix to dissolve (gentle heat)
Step 11
Mixed solution dissolved after warming

How It’s Made: Making the Storm Glass

Take your mixed solution and slowly pour it into the thin-stoppered glass tube.

If you’re a crafty person, who knows how to work glass, you could create a sealed unit.

Keep your storm glass outside or in a porch.

Step 12
Pour the dissolved solution into your prepared glass tube and stopper it.
Step 13
Completed storm glass placed in my porch, showing large crystals throughout the liquid – it quickly showed that the weather would continue to be very cold, sleet like, rain – in contrast to my iPhone app which said it would stop at 11am. It didn’t, it continued to rain all day, the storm glass winning out over the iPhone.

How to Read Your Storm GlassstormglassWhy Does The Storm Glass Work?

There are a few theories about how a Storm Glass works. The most likely is that the solubility of the crystals in the solution is affected by the temperature and pressure of the outside. This then allows the crystals to either stay in solution, or crystallize out to varying degrees.

You may also like:

emp stikeHow to Find the North Star in Less Than One Minute

H2O Dynamo – The DIY Device That Turns Air Into Fresh Water! (Video)

Identifying Animal Tracks

DIY SHTF Healing Salve

How To Make Beef Jerky

Tags: DIYHow toself-sufficiency
Print Friendly, PDF & Email
ShareTweetPin79

Comments 15

  1. Rick says:
    7 years ago

    Would procuring these materials get you on a WATCH LIST?

    Did you like this comment? 1
    Reply
    • E.T. says:
      7 years ago

      Only if your purchasing very large quantities….

      Did you like this comment?
      Reply
    • left coast chuck says:
      7 years ago

      You can buy stump remover at any garden shop. You don’t need 50 pounds of it, just a small can should do. Moth balls are camphor. I think you can buy them at Wally World. Shouldn’t put you on the watch list. Denatured alcohol is available in big box hardware stores or paint stores.Ammonium chloride is an unknown to me, but the quantity you would be buying for this project shouldn’t trigger any alarms. Obviously you won’t go shopping for 500 pounds of it. That might get a visit from the ATF.

      Did you like this comment?
      Reply
  2. Dave says:
    7 years ago

    how does the outside pressure create at change when the glass is stoppered?

    Did you like this comment?
    Reply
    • left coast chuck says:
      7 years ago

      The glass column will reflect atmospheric changes even if you can’t perceive them. A stoppered glass will contract or expand depending upon high or low atmospheric pressure. You may not see it actually expand and you may not be able to measure the expansion or contraction without very precise instrumentation, but it will be there. Pressure change activates the chemical reaction. Probably won’t work in a very thick glass column, depends upon test tube thickness glass. Might even work without a stopper but the chemical proportions will change as the alcohol and water ratios change from evaporation and that will affect the reaction..

      Did you like this comment?
      Reply
      • Dave says:
        7 years ago

        Thoughtful comments, LC Chuck.
        I think a direct refutation of your statements would not be possible without precise measurements, but let me throw in a few ideas, despite this area of science is 50 years behind me.
        The “thin glass tube” pictured in the article appears to be a Pyrex or Kimax glass stoppered round bottom test tube, far from being thin walled and being Pyrex or Kimax, it has a very low coefficient of thermal expansion.

        According to Young, the ambient pressure on solids and liquids is not a significant factor affecting the coefficient of expansion, especially within the expected change of barometric pressure experienced on the Earth’s surface. What might be possible is physical distortion of the tube due to pressure which point I think you did mention, but again, round tubes have amazing resistance to deformation, regardless of thickness, and considering the very low changes in pressure observed.

        Now, even if there are pressure changes in the tube, they are possibly due totally to a change in temperature. And again, small pressure changes on solids and liquids are insignificant on internal stress, expansion phenomena, and possibly chemical changes.
        As for chemical changes, no mention of the purities of some the chemicals mentioned are specific. Be it “stump killers” or moth balls, impurities may be present which might have a profound affect on the solution’s behavior

        A very fun topic! maybe I will build one of these.

        Did you like this comment?
      • left coast chuck says:
        7 years ago

        Dave: A very well-thought out thesis. You raise very valid points. Perhaps it is just one of those things that there is no logical explanation why it works, it just does.

        There is absolutely no scientific support for a “witching stick.” To the best of my knowledge, it absolutely defies any scientific explanation yet, more times than not it seems to work. It is just an absolutely ridiculous notion that the stick somehow detects water and moves toward the ground where water is located. I haven’t explored the most recent musing on water witching, but the last I looked most folks just scratched their heads and said, I dunno, but he found a great spot for a well.”

        I must admit I had truly overlooked the very likely possibility of moth balls and stump remover not being laboratory quality chemicals containing varying amounts of contaminant. I am confident that there is no certification on a package of moth balls that they are 100% pure camphor. In fact I have never examined the label of a package of moth balls to see exactly what they do contain, just relying on my olfactory nerve to verify that, indeed, they sure smelled like moth balls. I am going to have to make a trip to Wally World now just to satisfy my curiosity as to what “moth balls” actually are made from.

        I have a can of stump remover in my garage and I have examined the label to see what it contained and while I can’t recite its contents from memory, I know it has at least three ingredients. I don’t recall if my brand is 95% potassium nitrate.

        Thanks for your post. It really raises some interesting questions. Maybe it is just, “I dunno but it works.”

        Did you like this comment?
  3. left coast chuck says:
    7 years ago

    A useful post. Thank you, Mr. Davis.

    Did you like this comment?
    Reply
  4. Magillicutty says:
    7 years ago

    Must it have a glass stopper or will a screw-on cap do the job? Thanks.

    Did you like this comment?
    Reply
  5. left coast chuck says:
    7 years ago

    Okay, I looked up storm glass on Wikipedia which, as everyone knows, is never wrong. According to Wiki, the storm glass was invented by a British admiral around the 1850s. Also according to Wiki, The Journal of Crystals (Did any of us know there was such a journal?) opined that the change in the appearance of the crystals was due to temperature change.

    You can buy a ready-made one from Russels for Men for only $179.95. Can’t you buy a barometer for less than that?

    Did you like this comment?
    Reply
    • suzieq says:
      4 years ago

      Wow, that’s expensive. I got mine for less than $30. Let me find the link..

      https://www.chapmansupply.co/product/storm-glass

      Did you like this comment?
      Reply
  6. Old Iron says:
    6 years ago

    I don’t use the metric system and I see that it is creeping further into our society. I know this puts me in the fuddy-duddy camp and now I am going to put me in the tin foil brigade but I think the metric system was one of the first alien invasions. Yes I do here different drums and they sound like (call to arms).

    Did you like this comment? 1
    1
    Reply
    • lobotuba says:
      1 year ago

      Base 12 freedom units: good enough for the moon!

      Did you like this comment?
      Reply
  7. Guy says:
    5 years ago

    Where do you put this storm glass?

    Did you like this comment?
    Reply
    • Pints says:
      3 years ago

      ‘Where the sun doesn’t shine’ is what I was told.

      Did you like this comment?
      Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

I agree to the Terms & Conditions Terms & Conditions.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

FOLLOW US ON:

PREPPER RECOMMENDS

YOU WILL NOT SURVIVE AN EMP STRIKE WITHOUT THIS

IF YOU SEE THIS PLANT IN YOUR BACKYARD BURN IT IMMEDIATELY

HOW TO GET 295 POUNDS OF EXTRA FOOD FOR JUST $5 A WEEK

THE AWESOME DIY DEVICE THAT TURNS AIR INTO FRESH WATER

5 INGENIOUS WAYS TO REFRIGERATE YOUR FOOD WITHOUT ELECTRICITY

HOW TO MAKE YOUR HOUSE INVISIBLE TO LOOTERS

Banner Generator

LATEST ARTICLES

Knock Knock! It’s FEMA, We Need Your Stockpile

If You Have Been Storing Meat This Way, Stop Doing It Immediately

America vs Americans

Deinfluencing You: 14 Items You Should Stop Stockpiling Right Now

7 Things That You Should Never Do After An EMP

Don’t Do This

15 Survival Foods That Are Better At Amish Stores

Preppers’ Promised Land (Just Found)

Looter Deterrents You Never Thought Of

This Will Cause The Next American Blackout

10 Myths About Storing Food In 5-Gallon Buckets

How To Start A Prepper Group In Your Community

4 Prepper Mistakes That You Should Actually Make

What Freedoms The Government Is Plotting To Take Away From You By The End Of 2023

25 Survival Items To Hunt For At Flea Markets

How The Native Americans Used To Hide In Plain Sight

15+ Wild Edibles You Should Can This Spring

Combat Boots 101

How Long Can You Store Water Before It Becomes Unsafe To Drink?

Throw It Out!

The First Thing You Need To Do During Civil War

I Visited An Amish Farm And This Happened

Stand Your Ground Law: 5 Things Every Prepper Should Know

Banner Bor

Banner TLW2

Banner NGP

The Lost Ways Claude Davis

HOW TO

How To Start A Prepper Group In Your Community

How To Store Water In Your Car For An Emergency

How To Looter-Proof Your Home

How To Recondition Old Gasoline

How To Remove Radioactive Particles From Water In Case Of A Nuclear Fallout

How To Make Bread Last For Up To 5 Years

How To Prepare Your Car For SHTF

How To Cook Steak On A Stone In The Wilderness

How To Craft A Deadly Slingshot

How To Make Your Chickens Lay More Eggs

Vote for ask a Prepper

YOU CAN ALSO FIND US ON:

Survial Websites Prepper

Banner H20

Banner LSF Hamburger

Copyright © 2014-2023 Ask a Prepper

  • Home
  • All Articles
  • Ask a Prepper
  • About Claude Davis
  • Terms of Use
  • Privacy Policy

Copyright © 2014-2023 Ask a Prepper

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this website you are giving consent to cookies being used. Visit our Privacy and Cookie Policy.