Deionised water?

[tritiated]

I have recently aquired a pair of developing tanks, dark bag etc. and am looking forward to starting some home development. Will probably get some ID11 to use to begin with.

The question being - does anyone make up their solutions with deionised water? If so are there any noticable differences in the results compared to using tap water?

Of course any effect depends on which tap - and then the effect of the choice of water is probably insignificant next to the other variables - boring question - but I'm curious, new to this and there is a vast collective knowledge out there..

 

[bean_counter]

I use deionzed water (sometimes called distilled water in the US), as I live out in the country and we have our own well for water supply.

My tap water isn't very good, nor is my old water softener very consistent. I find the ioized water is fairly cheap, and consistent. Two good attributes for home development.

 

[wintoid]

As part of the war on particles, I make up my solutions with deionised water, and also use it for the final wash with Photoflo. The only bit I don't use it for is the regular wash.

Here in West Wickham, my kettle has lots of scale floating around in it, even after 1 or 2 boils from clean, so I think the deionised water is a necessity. There's a shop at the end of my road that sells 5 litres for £2 so it hasn't been too expensive. Halfords round here was £7 for the same size bottle, which is ridiculous.

 

[Roger Hicks]

I live in a hard water area, but I use a twofold approach.

Most solutions are mixed up in tap water that has been strained through a Paterson water filter: http://www.rogerandfrances.com/photoschool/mt paterson water filter.html

Hard water washes more effectively than soft, so I use the Ilford wash sequence with strained tap water, followed by another 2o inversions in de-ionized water followed by a 30-second soak in de-ionized water + wetting agent at half (but no less than half) the recommended quantity: this speeds drying as compared with plain water, by reducxing beading. Too much wetting agent, I find, can leave drying marks in its own right; too little, and there's no point in using it at all.

The price of distilled /de-ionized water in the UK is absurdly higher than in the USA (or at least California, where I used to live), and in France (as so often) the price range is enormous: the cheapest is a fifth of the price of the most expensive. At the moment I'm paying about 1.30 euros (a pound, a couple of bucks) fot 5 litres.

Cheers,

Roger