Blank Titration for Making Biodiesel

"GRAYDON BLAIR: My name is Graydon Blair from Utah Biodiesel Supply and on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to show you how to do a blank titration to get ready to titrate your oil. First of all, safety gloves on, safety goggles on. Yes, you look like a dork but you won't hurt your eyes. First thing we do is we're going to go into alcohol and we're going to pull up 10 milliliters of isopropyl alcohol. We're going to place that into a little dish, being careful not to splash it. We're then going to take couple drops of phenolphthalein, I'm going to put it in there. We're then going to use some of our titrating solution which we've added and pour a little bit of that in a cup over here. We're going to suck some up with a separate syringe. And now, what we're after is just starting to turn this pink by adding just a touch of this. So, I'm going to squirt just a few and you'll see they just barely turned pink. I hope you see that in there but it's just barely pink. What that means is by adding a basic solution to alcohol like this pH solution indicated that this alcohol is not acidic. It means it's perfect for making biodiesel. So now, we've done that, we can move on to titrating the oil. So, to recap, 10 milliliters of this in there, couple drops of phenolphthalein in there and then we added a little bit of our 1% titration solution. Once we're done, now we can move on to titration."