CHEMICAL BALANCING EQUATION BASIC INFORMATION AND TUTORIALS

Basic chemical equation balancing.

If you carry out a chemical reaction and carefully sum up the masses of all the reactants, and then you compare the sum to the sum of the masses of all the products, you see that they’re the same.

In fact, a law in chemistry, the law of conservation of mass, states, “In an ordinary chemical reaction, matter is neither created nor destroyed.” This means that you neither gain nor lose any atoms during the reaction.

They may be combined differently, but they’re still there.

A chemical equation represents the reaction, and that chemical equation needs to obey the law of conservation of mass. You use that chemical equation to calculate how much of each element you need and how much of each element will be produced.

You need to have the same number of each kind of element on both sides of the equation. The equation should balance.

Before you start balancing an equation, you need to know the reactants and the products for that reaction. You can’t change the compounds, and you can’t change the subscripts, because that would change the compounds.

So the only thing you can do to balance the equation is put in coefficients, whole numbers in front of the compounds or elements in the equation.

Coefficients tell you how many atoms or molecules you have. For example, if you write 2 H2O, it means you have two water molecules:
2 H2O = H2O + H2O

Each water molecule is composed of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. So with 2 H2O, you have a total of four hydrogen atoms and two oxygen atoms. In this section, I show you how to balance equations using a method called balancing by inspection (or as I call it, “fiddling with coefficients”).

You take each atom in turn and balance it by inserting appropriate coefficients on one side or the other. You can balance most simple reactions in this fashion, but one class of reactions is so complex that this method doesn’t work well for them: redox reactions.