metal-organic papers m1120 Casellas et al.  [Cu(C 10 H 9 N 3 ) 2 (CH 4 O) 2 ](SiF 6 ) doi:10.1107/S1600536805014777 Acta Cryst. (2005). E61, m1120–m1122 Acta Crystallographica Section E Structure Reports Online ISSN 1600-5368 Bis(2,2 0 -dipyridylamine)dimethanolcopper(II) hexafluorosilicate Helene Casellas, a Andrej Pevec, b Bojan Kozlevcar, b Patrick Gamez a and Jan Reedijk a * a Leiden Institute of Chemistry, Gorlaeus Laboratories, Leiden University, PO Box 9502, 2300 RA, Leiden, The Netherlands, and b Faculty of Chemistry and Chemical Technology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia Correspondence e-mail: p.gamez@chem.leidenuniv.nl Key indicators Single-crystal X-ray study T = 150 K Mean (C–C) = 0.004 A ˚ R factor = 0.032 wR factor = 0.074 Data-to-parameter ratio = 14.8 For details of how these key indicators were automatically derived from the article, see http://journals.iucr.org/e. # 2005 International Union of Crystallography Printed in Great Britain – all rights reserved The title compound, [Cu(C 10 H 9 N 3 ) 2 (CH 3 OH) 2 ](SiF 6 ), was obtained in low yield in the reaction of dipyridylamine with Cu(BF 4 ) 2 using thermal conditions in a sealed pressure tube. The Cu-based cation lies at the centre of the triclinic unit cell, the hexafluorosilicate anions lying at the corners. Cations and anions, which are centrosymmetric, are held together by hydrogen bonds. Comment Hexafluorosilicate-containing coordination compounds can be prepared either starting from M II SiF 6 salts (Subramanian & Zaworotko, 1995) or from solutions containing M II (BF 4 ) 2 , where gradual ligand-assisted BF  4 decomposition followed by attack of the fluoride ions on the glass surface of the reaction vessel leads to the slow formation of hexafluorosilicate ions (van Koningsbruggen et al., 1993). The title compound was prepared using the latter procedure by reaction, under thermal conditions in a sealed pressure tube, of dipyr- idylamine and Cu(BF 4 ) 2 . An ORTEPII (Johnson, 1976) drawing of the ion pair of the title compound is depicted in Fig. 1. As shown in Fig. 2, the cationic Cu-based core lies at the centre of the triclinic unit cell, eight hexafluorosilicate dianions being at the corners of a distorted cube. The asym- metric unit contains one-half of the monometallic cation with the inversion centre located at the Cu atom. The copper(II) ion is six-coordinated by four N atoms from two dipyr- idylamine ligands [Cu—N = 2.0061 (17)–2.0165 (17) A ˚ ] and two O atoms from two methanol molecules [Cu—O(MeOH) = 2.4812 (17) A ˚ ]. The Cu II centre is in a Jahn–Teller distorted octahedral environment. The Cu—N bond distances are Received 6 April 2005 Accepted 9 May 2005 Online 14 May 2005 Figure 1 ORTEPII plot (Johnson, 1976) of the structure of the title compound (40% displacement ellipsoids). Unlabelled atoms of the cation are related to labelled atoms by (x, y, z).