Potassium Permanganate????

R

RickJ

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Mar 2, 2003
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I got some of this in a couple of Kits I bought a few years ago from David Alloway (God Bless his Soul).

What is the shelf life of Potassium Permanganate? And where can I buy some , if it needs replaced?

The stuff I have is still in the little viles that it came in.

Rickj
 
Pretty reactive stuff, keep in the bottles.

Loads of uses too.

Know your dilutions for individual uses or youl cause harm.

Can buy it on ebay even at least you could one time. Chemical supply stores carry it etc.... Legal to own and have.

A little goes a long way.

Skammer
 
Permanganate is highly toxic and highly carcinogenic. Oh, can be used to purify water. You'll get a purple water with awful taste. Gives you motivation to find clear water. Efficiency is somewhat questionable. For this reasons it's no longer used in "modern" survival kits. One good point: color helps you to get right dosage: train at home with well made proportions and the water container you intend to use in the field and try to memorize colors. Can help for proportions.

Side uses:
Mixed with glycerin (certain soaps...) it will spontaneously burn, but if proportion are not good you'll only get a crappy fire (about 9 glycein-1 permanganate). Can also be used for feet cleaning (dark purple), mostly in jungle, the only use it's really recommanded for.

Permanganate used to be unregulated but as it can be used to make explosive buying some might raise some questions.

If you intend to use it for water purification you'd better use iodine (side use: antiseptic, taste can be reduced by adding vitamin C) or chlorine (less effective, swimming pool water taste). If you intend to use chemicals for a long period, you'd better have several different ones: all are quite toxic on extensive use.
 
I use KMnO4 in my kits and as a back-up water purifier. It is sold here in Brazil in foil flats divided into 10, ten mg blisters. It is very convienent to carry in a PSK in that form.

I did some research on KmnO4 toxicity. Apparently in order to kill yourself you need to ingest quite a bit of it. There were a few case studies I found, one was a suicide, one a long term ingestion of an overdosed solution, and one accidental ingestion by a child. This is no way to die.

It would be very hard to get those dosages if you were just trying to purify water. To purify water you only use a few individual grains of the stuff in a liter of water. This makes a very watery pink solution. Toxic solutions are measured in spoonfulls and will produce a dark, dark purple solution.

As far as how long it lasts, it doesn't evaporate like iodine crystals but it does react to just about everything. As long as the container is closed I would say it sould last a very long time. Mac
 
It is still widely used as an antii-fungal in, among other things, aquarium chemistry.
 
Try getting some from a pharmacy. That's where I got my last batch. I asked them to order their smallest quantity - not expensive at all!

A little goes a long way for dissinfecting

ljg
 
I don't plan to use this stuff in my drinking water, more for disinfectant type stuff!

If any of you know the shelf life of this stuff please let me know! It is still sealed in the little viles it came in so I think it will be OK! If not I guess I would have to suck up the Jock Itch and Athletes Foot until the Rescue Bird arrives.

Rickj
 
There was a report in an old UK survival magazine (Survival Weaponry & Techniques - great mag) from a chemist about the efficiency of Potassium Permagernate as a water purifier. Its efficiency is greatly reduced by any kind of suspended organic matter in the water so I wouldn't recommend it for cruddy stuff!

Mark
 
If air tight, shelf life should be infinite. There is nothing left in the pure chemical to self-react.
 
Well! To tell you the truth, I don't plan on blowing stuff up! Just Survival! But thinks for the info, You can never have enough info!
 
From what i heard Potassium Permagernate can purify water for drinking by putting very little amount and let it to stand for around 20 mintues, the colour should be light pink. It is also use to disinfect water for washing wounds.
 
Old thread, Eh? I carry pot perm in a small vial in my PSK and in the smallest nalgene bottle I could find, about 1/2 oz. I bought mine from a local company that services water softeners and filtration systems. I think it is a 1 pound container, enough to last till the end of time.

I've only used it a couple times to treat water. The first time I was completely caught off guard when I added it to water in smoke colored Nalgene bottle. I couldn't tell what the color was like. Now I just measure out a few grains and check the color as best I can. There is nothing better for foot fungus.
 
Please don't use that junk in your drinking water.

It is used sometimes in some stages of drinking water treatment, but it is not a good drinking water disinfectant, and as mentioned, is somewhat dangerous.

Its efficacy as a disinfectant is highly dependent upon pH, something which is not normally measurable in the backcountry. But if you must, use this:

Dose: 16 mg/L for 2 hours in *clear* water.

Even at that dose, some tests proved disinfection was ineffective at higher pH ("Chemistry of Water Treatment" by Foust and Aly, 2nd ed., p. 530).

Don't expect any disinfectant to work in cloudy water. The bugs will hide in the microscopic particles that make the water cloudy. Then you drink the particles in the water and infect yourself. No amount of disinfectant will help that.

Filter your water first, or do whatever it takes to get it clear (you can throw in a pinch of alum, shake, and let it sit too), then disinfect with bleach or some other normal chemical. There are also effective UV light disinfectors that work in a dedicated poly bottle.

A few drops of unscented household bleach in a quart does the job nicely after 10 minutes, and you can barely taste it. That is what I use. Just be sure to change your bleach every 6 months.

Scott
 
My father works in the water treatment business in South Florida and his company gets the stuff in 5 gallon buckets. Stains your skin a nice shade of brownish purple. It is used in the water treatment industry so it does have it's place there, but I'm not convinced that it would be useful to carry around with you.
 
It is mostly used as an oxidant to remove dissolved iron and/or manganese. It is quite effective in that role. It *can* be effective as a disinfectant, but only when the water's pH is below about 7.5. There are a few treatment plants that do use it for disinfection, but I suspect that is because they are already using it for iron/manganese removal. Increasing the dose of something you are already using is much simpler and cheaper than adding another treatment stage, like chlorination.

My house water, for example, has a pH of 8.4 usually. Permanganate would not be an effective disinfectant for that water without adjusting the pH first.

I don't use it in my treatment plant designs because the operators in my area have safety concerns so don't want to work with it. That is their perception, not necessarily fact. Since I don't use it, I haven't looked into its hazards in detail. I am not adverse to using it in the setting of a public water system with trained operators. One of their major concerns which apparently has some veracity is the idea of equipment malfunction: if you release a slug of grossly overdosed water into your system, you can have some health concerns with water customers.

I would not recommend it in a wildland setting, however, because 1) you don't have the fine controls in the backwoods that you do in a treatment plant, and 2) you never know what kind of water you'll be dipping in the woods whereas you have a pretty good idea with a fixed source, even one with seasonal variations like a river.

In a nutshell, it is not reliable enough for my tastes. Bleach is pretty reliable.

Scott
 
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