manchild
plastic is a better stirrer because it is not porous. you simply hook up the multimeter in line with your circuit so you can measure amperage. your water in glass and only silver in contact with the water. the initial reading on the meter should be about half a milliamp with the elctrodes two
inches apart. i have gotten as much as 1.5 and still proceded to make good silver. the meter will go up as the concentration of silver builds up between your silver electrodes in the water. once it reaches and aditional 2ma to your original reading(say 1.5 + 2 = 3.5ma), stir the water and the amperage will drop. build up, stir, drop, build up, stir, drop. each time it drops it will end up a little higher than before. each time it takes less and less time to build up to 3.5. never let it go much above your set limit. once you can not stir it down below your limit, you have achieved about 10-20ppm. the higher you let the amperage get in those cycles, the larger the particles you are making at that specific time. this process takes hours and it soon becomes clear why automated elctronics is better. one way to automate this somewhat is to use a fish aquarium aerator and stone. it must be new, of course and free of any contaminant. rinse the hose and stone completely in distilled water. the pump can be used if necessary, but they are cheap. this allows you to walk away and come back in a couple of hours and check and you are assured of not going over your limit until you have reached that saturation. one could probably double the amperage rise and double the ppm with little loss of effectiveness due to larger particles.
once you have done this a couple of times with a meter it all starts to make sense. if you have an automatic unit already, i would use that and just watch it carefully at first. i put alligator clips on my multimeter for this and i would use silver probes for any testing i did. of course, power must be in line to test current flow anyway. the testers everyone talks about are simple ampmeters that are self powered.
hope that helps.