Hydraulic house magical solution

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ericc

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I watched the following video


and it showed making and using a rust removing solution which seemed to work. I usually use some sort of acid, for example, muriatic, which seems to work pretty well, but acids do remove metal. I have also tried electrolysis, which also works well. But, his formula seems to be not quite an acid. It is hard to figure out exactly what is in the formula. The ingredients are three white powders: carbonato, lemon salt, and ammonia. I think that it is clear that the first two are sodium carbonate and citric acid. That causes the bubbling. But, the powdered ammonia is strange. I searched up ammonia powder, and it is ammonium carbonate. I have not heard of this in any rust remover solution. What part might it play? Would it be reasonable to substitute liquid ammonia? A web search says that ammonia will remove rust, but I don't know the chemistry. Does anyone have any insight on the chemistry involved?
 
He de-rusted something that wasn't very rusty, and put plenty of elbow grease into it with a wire brush and scotch-brite. A "magical solution" in my book would be expected to eat the rust with no scrubbing required; just rinse, if necessary.

If you were keen to use wire brush and scotch-brite like he did, I think you could get the same result with WD40 or even tap water, if you dry it off right away.
 
I live in an area with a lot of iron in the water. So much so that a tee shirt will turn orange after five washings and you can watch well water turn orange just sitting in sunlight due to oxidation from ferrous iron to insoluble ferric iron.

There is a product called Iron Out which will reduce the ferric iron back to the soluble ferrous iron. It is simply sodium sulfite which is a fairly good reducing agent. I would think that a "magic" rust removal solution would consist of sodium sulfite along with a chelating agent such as ED TA, essentially making home brewed EvapoRust. It would be slightly alkaline and not attack metallic iron.
 
Ammonium carbonate is a way of storing ammonium (and by extension ammonia gas) in a solid form. As soon as you drop it in water, it is an ammonium solution. Ammonium/ammonia is a strong nucleophile. All paint strippers work on this nucleophilic attack principle, as do activators and catalysts. Some of the rust passivators like evaporust (tannic acid) also work on this principle (tannins are also chelates, and they get complicated because there are other mechanisms at play such as bay region selectivity, dipole interactions, steric interference). Most other passivators use redox chemistry.

Oh, one advantage of the ammonium carbonate trick is you can cook up one hell of a strong solution... not recommended, but possible.
 
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