Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments

Chapter 3. Equipping a Home Chemistry Laboratory

Although it doesn’t take much special equipment to play around with chemistry, if you want to do serious chemistry, you’ll need some real equipment. The essence of chemistry is measuring things—masses, volumes, temperatures, voltages, and so on—and doing that with reasonable accuracy demands equipment designed for the task.

Fortunately, although equipping a professional chemistry lab is very costly indeed, equipping a home chemistry lab is relatively inexpensive. Professional labs may have $10,000 balances and $1,500 pH meters, but we can learn just as much using a $50 or $100 student-grade balance ...