Quote Originally Posted by tdean View Post
I have had an old milk can that was in the barn when I bought the place filled with a blue solution. It doesn't seem to freeze in the winter. Sounds like copper sulfate, might have been used on fruit, fumigating grain? or put in water for chickens( they used to have 10,000 of them here.) I wondered about using electrolysis to get the copper in it to stick to a copper pipe electrode, but was afraid I would be left with a few gallons of sulfuric acid. That's what they use to make the stuff, by dissolving copper metal into acid. Thanks to this forum, I have learned something, and I just put an ad on Craigslist for it. Wish the milk can was worth more but they are kind of hard to sell around here, folks dont seem as interested in them as they used to be.
I'm surprised the copper has not precipitated into its elemental form. According to the electromotive series of metals your copper sulfate coming into contact with iron would have precipitated the copper out of solution back into pure copper as a beautiful red powder.