There is a lot of confusion about the difference between ionic silver and true colloidal silver. The bottom is line the method used to create the silver. All ionic silver is made by electrolysis and is not true colloidal silver.

TRUE COLLOIDAL SILVER

True colloidal silver takes industrial and laboratory grade techniques to produce. The process is scientific, complicated and precise. It is not something you can do at home. A true colloidal silver has a complete outer electron shell and is so stable that it can be frozen and still retain it’s concentration and remain in suspension indefinitely.
True colloidal silver is not made with electrolysis, it is a proprietary chemical process that produces true, shelf stable colloidal silver with a complete valence electron shell. That’s why we can produce 10000 ppm TRUE colloidal silver with an indefinite shelf life if kept out of direct sunlight.

IONIC SILVER

Ionic silver is produced using electrolysis with water, some wire and a battery. Many products being sold as colloidal silver are actually ionic silver. There are some benefits to ionic silver, but it is not the same as colloidal silver. You would be able to make your own ionic silver at home with a colloidal silver generator which is nothing more than an electrolysis machine.

WHAT IS ELECTROLYSIS?

Using two silver rods, an electrical current is passed from the cathode (-) to the anode (+), through a medium of distilled water which is mineral free. The silver particle size varies with the current, temperature and purity of the water.

Remember the old days in chemistry class where you put two rods in a beaker of water and hooked a battery up to them? That electrical process produces oxygen at one terminal and hydrogen at the other. Pure distilled water is not a very good conductor of electricity. Salt (or other ingredients) may be added to increase the conductivity of the water and increase the electrical activity. Remember, electricity is able to flow through the water only because there are ions present (like salt which is Na+ and Cl−). These charged ions allow the electrical current to be conducted through otherwise neutral water.
This produces ionic silver, which is a silver molecule striped of an electron on the outer shell thereby making it very reactive and will now react with the sodium chloride (salt) producing silver chloride and other undesirable silver compounds. The concentration of ionic silver is normally less than 50 parts per million, it is not stable and will clump together over time and precipitate out and fall to the bottom of the container as black silver rust.