NYC water

[imush]

New York tap water is known to be unfiltered; it is chlorine-treated but often contains some [dead] organisms of size up to 0.5mm (codepods). Do these ever end up on your negatives?

Or do you use distilled or filtered water for (1) developer solution, (2) final wash, (3) everything in between?

 

[Benjamin Marks]

Unless your darkroom is in a really old building, just use tap water. I love NYC tap water, for drinking, bathing and developing film. Good old Croton-Harmon reservoir. H20 at its finest. I have developed thousands of rolls of film in unfiltered NYC water and never had a problem.

The only caveat is, obviously, if you are noticing some water-related defects in your own film. But I never had a problem. Water quality in a particular place in NYC often depends on the quality of the pipe in the last 100 feet before it gets to your tap.

Sincerely,

Ben Marks

 

[drewbarb]

NYC has very clean tap water. I ran my film in for years with no problems, right up until I moved away a couple of years ago. As Ben says, don't worry about it unless you keep strictly Kosher.

 

[Ororaro]

Does a Rabi really kosherize the NY water?

 

[imush]

Actually, I keep kosher, and that is why I thought about the codepods.

We do keep a filter under the kitchen sink to keep them out of drinking water, although not all rabbinical authorities think it is a problem. For a hundred years nobody noticed.

However, you can actually see lots of them in the water if you look carefully with a magnifying lens (depends on your neighborhood, time of year and distance from Croton).

Since I could actually see these things and they are ~0.5mm long, I wondered what they would look like through an enlarger, should one get stuck on the film 🙂

 

[imush]

Does a Rabi really kosherize the NY water?

Kosher food does not need a rabbi to be kosher. The rabbis sometimes inspect or supervise the production, and this is required for some foods to be fit for a kosher consumer. Clean water obviously does not need anything done to it.

 

[sepiareverb]

I never had any troubles with NYC water while I lived and ran film & prints daily there. This was a while back though...

1984-1990