Although the synthesis requires ideally high purity water, lower grade alcohols are suitable to obtain the Au NPs . We showed the benefits of using mono-alcohol versus polyols to develop electrocatalysts 5/29 , leading to Au NCs with relatively high activities, due to the low viscosity of mono-alcohol and a lower boiling point that facilitates the deposition of the NPs on surfaces at RT. The NPs also show promisingly higher catalytic activities than Au NPs prepared using additives such as sodium citrate or polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) .