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Maybe I should briefly describe the local state of the art. This may be of interest for you.
You run with either 5 or 10 mA . Don´t know which and when. Heat pure DW to the boiling point but then no more. If possible, brew in a double walled glas to keep the heat. There is a magic ppm formula but this falls flat, because it assumes full current. Unfortunately current rises slowly until the current reduction kicks in, which may take several minutes. Sometimes cut-off is never reached even after hours. No stirring, no additives. There is some who use pulsed dc (a la zapper), some single polarity (which sometimes produces a yellow result), some switching polarity. It is left totally unclear which is better. Devices go up to 60V (which is the maximum allowable voltage for home use) to get things going at all. Single polarity produces black or grey sludge on the anode. Some devices use a cathode different than silver, but in this case it is not a bad thing to stay with both silver because people are bound to switch to alternating polarity without taking care of that.
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Thats not the state of the art, its more the state of ignorance. The plethora of disinformation simply astounds me.
Its normal for the anode to turn black. Its just silver oxide, and is easily converted back into pure elemental silver just by heating it up in a blue flame until the black turns white.
Without the sodium carbonate in the water, the silver that comes off the anode just plates onto the cathode as sludge. The sodium carbonate stops that and keeps the silver in solution. The corn syrup, or other glucose based sugars convert silver ions into silver metal which forms the nanoparticles, and also stabilizes their size. The end result is silver nanoparticles suspended in alkaline water. Just about all the initial lab testing which showed silver nanoparticles were an effective antibiotic used silver reduced with glucose.
By the way, corn syrup is glucose and maltose. There is no fructose in corn syrup unless it was added to it, then it is called high fructose corn syrup. Fructose can be made from corn starch but it is a different process.
You asked about maltodextrin. The DE number is the number of glucose molecules in the chain. Maltodextrin is chains of 3 to 17 glucose molecules (some sources say 20 molecules). Above that is dextrin and starch. Lower DE numbers are better reducing agents, and higher DE numbers are better stabilizers due to their bigger molecular size.
As a reducing agent, maltodextrin has only 1 active binding site, so for DE 3, it takes 3 times as much to reduce silver as the weight of pure glucose would. The good thing is that while there is a bottom limit to how much you need, there is no upper limit. So its best to use more. For this reason, I don't bother to weight it when I use it. I just use 1/2 teaspoon per liter for 40ppm Colloidal Silver.
There is another DE number used, called %DE which is the reducing power of the molecule compared to glucose.
DE3 equals approximately a %DE of 33% to 39% depending on how the measurement was done.
DE6 equals approximately a %DE of 16% to 20% depending on how the measurement was done.
Normally the measurement is done by titrating a copper sulfate solution and the number depends on how pure the maltodextrin is (is it 100% the specified DE?)