i’m saying i don’t understand the reply in the context of what i wrote. it may be a difference in terminology, but when i said “balance reactions” i was talking purely about on paper. we got a bunch of formulas and were to fill in the result like a multiplication table. i don’t know if i’ve ever had to do that in practice. labs were always just “n moles of chemical a, n moles of chemical b, observe the precipitation” over and over again. it was only years after school that i realized that precipitation occurs when a solution is saturated.