I've recently started getting into chemistry a bit as a hobby. Nothing serious, just amateur level stuff mostly, primarily just to educate myself.
Whenever I need to determine the pH level of a solution, I typically use either a pH meter I have, or sometimes the pH test strips. And while I do have a "universal indicator" solution, I've never used it before. Mainly because it seems to me that adding an additional chemical to the solution you're working with just to determine the pH seems a bit counter intuitive to me.
A couple of reasons I can think of off the top of my head:
- Even if the indicator seems somewhat benign, you've now added some extra volume that isn't essential to the reaction or solution.
- Some pH indicators use chemicals that are somewhat hazardous or carcinogenic.
Any time I've seen someone use a pH indicator reagent, it's always been in some type of demonstration of a reaction, where the yield or result of the reaction is just discarded in the end. This gives me the impression that pH indicator reagents are useful for neat chemistry tricks (like here, where the chemist uses bromophenol blue to demo dichromatism), but not so much for instances where one plans on utilizing the resulting solution for any reason.
Thanks in advance for any input!