Help Prices of SN are too different from seller to seller

[ElVato]

Hello!

So, I was about to order my SN today when I decided to go really in deep into the available suppliers (local). I investigated the suppliers I found, as best I could anyways, and came down to 4 suppliers that seem to be legit (they are either franchise chemical suppliers or well stablished producers with trackable history). However, their prices for SN are wildly different. They all vary between 95 and 98% purity, but there is a ridiculous increase in price between them, most notably between a producer with 97% purity and one with 98.7% purity: the one with 97% purity is about 5 times more expensive than the 98.7% purity, which seems very, very ridiculous.

I reached out to all these suppliers and my take is that the price difference comes from importing vs locally synthesizing. That is, the expensive one is supposedly imported from a different country and, as such, is more expensive "because it's much higher quality", whereas all the others are produced on site by the the supplier. Of course, all the more reason to go through the testing process but… Is this legit? Are differences in purity of just a couple numbers enough to cause the price to double or triple in some cases?

Also, at least two suppliers label their SN as "technic grade", which they claim "is the opposite of food grade". Does this matter?

Thank you in advance!

 

[lifelite]

I noticed this too. Oh and I found 100g for like few euros. The heck? Can it really be so low price? And bigger amounts where the shipping is still more expensive than the product

 

[lifelite]

About the grades by the way, I found this:

Purified grade, also called pure or practical grade, meets no official standard; it is not pure enough to be offered for food, drug, or medicinal use of any kind.

And the SN I found says Pure grade. Yet is also says that cleanliness is min. 99%. Yet it's only pure grade? Now I'm worried because I can't find anything that says Food grade. But if it's 99% clean I guess it should be good to use?

 

[ElVato]

About the grades by the way, I found this:

And the SN I found says Pure grade. Yet is also says that cleanliness is min. 99%. Yet it's only pure grade? Now I'm worried because I can't find anything that says Food grade. But if it's 99% clean I guess it should be good to use?

Well, this is by no means comparable, but could be close:

When I studied resin and silicone casting (for movie props, sfx makeup, etc), there was the problem of "medical and food grade silicone". If you wanted to make a mold for, say, chocolates, you had to make sure the silicone was food grade. This meant that the curing process used platinum instead of tin, as tin is highly toxic. Of course, this makes food grade silicone way more expensive.

My hypothesis is that food grade SN is synthesized with chemicals that are tolerable for humans in trace amounts. If you read the tag or technical sheet on the SN (usually on the package or provided by the supplier on their website), you will see that there are a lot of substances and elements listed with very small percentages (like 0.0003%). Some of these substances, I'd assume, are very toxic even in such small amount, and so food grade SN would not have this stuff.

In other words, and this is just an absurd example, it's as if you had two bottles of water and one was 99.99% H20 and 00.01% NaCl while the other was 99.99% H20 and 00.01% Uranium. Surely both are almost pure water, but you'd definitely wouldn't use the one with uranium for drinking or cooking.

I suppose that, due to the use we will give SN, these trace substances are irrelevant. My only worry is that there is some sort of inner agreement among chemists that makes "technical grade" SN a completely different thing.

Again, I'm not a chemist tho.