Using distilled water in mixing chemistry

[sevo]

Completely false. I have been developing film for almost 30 years now and have never seen 'excess frothing' from using distilled water.

YMMV - it may depend on the film and developer. I certainly had issues with Fuji Neopan 120 in Xtol (the only developer I use reverse osmosis water for), but none with the 35mm version of the same film.

 

[andybrown]

I've been developing negs and prints for over 40 years, using water from whatever tap I'm next to in different houses all over Britain. I waste my money on lots of things, but distilled water wouldn't be one of them.

 

[Freakscene]

Distilled water, or pure water, or H2O, or better H.OH, should not contain any minerals on it. It is obtained by distillation (100 percent water). If done with reverse osmosis (RO) membranes, they can only get to about 50 parts per million of total dissolved solids. I cannot get pure H.OH the way I used to. The only place I find "distilled water" is at Walmart, and it is done with RO.

The purpose of these comments is to find out where do you get your pure water (H.OH)? The water I buy at Walmart is placed on the same shelf as the mountain pure water from springs, and others that people drink. I suspect it is not pure water, but they have added some minerals to keep the pH at 7.

So, where can I get pure water?

There is more than 50 ppm of contaminating Ca and Mg in the 'photo grade' chemicals your developers are made from. The sequestering agents included in commercial developers are there to neutralise them. Up to a point (where chemical processes start to fail) the main need in water for photography is consistency rather than a particular quality. Variability is problematic, and dissolved material is generally problematic in the final rinse because of deposition on evaporation.

I use one of these:https://www.emdmillipore.com/CA/en/...ation-System-for-Ultrapure-Water,MM_NF-C72876
For my photo water. It produces water with an electrical resistance of >18 million ohms/cm. Close enough to pure.

You can still get heat distilled water from Sigma or other scientific suppliers. It is very expensive. You can buy a clothes dryer that condenses the water it evapourates from the clothes it dries. That is cheap.

Pure water (H.OH) is corrosive, it has been deprived of its minerals and tends to take minerals from whatever it can, such as pipes, glass from the bottle that holds it, etc. If drunk, it can kill you by dehydration (it will take all minerals from your body organs to balance itself.

If you drink too much water too fast you die of hyponatremia - a lack of sodium, not dehydration.

Water with a lot of salts, particularly if these make it very alkaline or acidic, are much more corrosive.

Marty

 

[pepeguitarra]

...
If you drink too much water too fast you die of hyponatremia - a lack of sodium, not dehydration.

Water with a lot of salts, particularly if these make it very alkaline or acidic, are much more corrosive.

Marty

Thanks for the clarification.

 

[willie_901]

Anecdotal responses to your post will be confusing. People will authentically share rather different experiences.

The added inconvenience and cost of distilled water affords one advantage.

If one has any issues with consistency, puzzling or intermittent problems, distilled water eliminates several unknowns.

 

[Calzone]

Distilled water, or pure water, or H2O, or better H.OH, should not contain any minerals on it. It is obtained by distillation (100 percent water). If done with reverse osmosis (RO) membranes, they can only get to about 50 parts per million of total dissolved solids. I cannot get pure H.OH the way I used to. The only place I find "distilled water" is at Walmart, and it is done with RO.

Pure water (H.OH) is corrosive, it has been deprived of its minerals and tends to take minerals from whatever it can, such as pipes, glass from the bottle that holds it, etc. If drunk, it can kill you by dehydration (it will take all minerals from your body organs to balance itself.

The purpose of these comments is to find out where do you get your pure water (H.OH)? The water I buy at Walmart is placed on the same shelf as the mountain pure water from springs, and others that people drink. I suspect it is not pure water, but they have added some minerals to keep the pH at 7.

So, where can I get pure water?

I work in a nuclear lab that supports two hospitals and we have a reverse osmosis water system in our lab. Know that we make radiopharmacueticals that are injected into humans as well as animals. The resistivity is 18 megaohms.

I use this water for my B&W development. I too have heard that pure H2O is very reactive and should not be consumed because it will damage living tissue. I was also told that using this chemically pure water will make a better cup of coffee, and because when brewed with coffee because it is no longer chemically pure it then is safe to drink (less chemically active).

When I mix developers it does seem like the solids dissolve more readily. Also trace elements like iron that can effect a developer is not present.

I use this chemically pure water as my stop bath, and I do think it does a good job because it is chemically so reactive. I also believe it is better than regular water as a rinse to get rid of the residual developer before fixing.

This water I also think removes the variable of mixed water supply where from the tap we blend hot and cold water supplies. Water that passes through a heating system tends to have more mineral content and is not recommended for cooking.

Cal

 

[Solinar]

.....I was also told that using this chemically pure water will make a better cup of coffee, and because when brewed with coffee because it is no longer chemically pure it then is safe to drink (less chemically active).

Cal

Off topic here: Here in Central Texas because of the amount of dissolved Ca/Mg in the local water supply, I use demineralized water from a vending machine in my coffee brewer to prevent calcium build-up on the heat elements.

I have access to distilled water at work - but @ 35 to 40 cents a gallon the demineralized water from the neighborhood vending machine is good enough for both coffee and my final film washes.

P.S. - I prefer weak coffee versus espresso.

 

[Phil_F_NM]

We use distilled water for all mixed chemistry and photoflo. Rinses are tap. I'd be hesitant to use Philadelphia's "city gin" from the tap for photo chemistry. This is supposedly a "safe" municipal water supply but water here has significant amounts of heavy metals from the former industrial plants that are now superfund sites here. The Frankford Arsenal, up the Delaware River, developed the depleted uranium round for the US military. There are also pharma plants and the Limerick power generation station upriver from the city and upriver from where it derives its supply. Who knows what is in the water here and what may precipitate out in our photo chemistry or on our film.

Phil Forrest

 

[bhop73]

I mix my chemcals with distilled water, and us distilled water for the final rinse. But that's mainly because my local tap water is pretty hard, and leaves spots on the negs after drying. Distilled water eliminates that.

I have had the same experiences in the past and distilled water cured the issue for me as well.

 

[Freakscene]

Distilled water does not make film grainier with any developer. If the tap water you're using is acidic in PH, that would reduce the strength of the developer, giving finer grain than the distilled gave, but would also give lower contrast.

The mineral content is much more likely to have a substantial effect on development than indirectly by pH effects. If your tapwater has cations in excess of the capacity of any sequestering agents in the developer to neutralise them, that water will decrease the activity of your developer because if left in the solution they interact with developing agents. If you use tapwater you can decrease the activity by 5-20%. Increasing activity by that much by using distilled water will increase activity, density and grain. It depends on your tapwater, and again, the issue is consistency, rather than having water of a specific quality.

If you mix your own developer from scratch without any chelating/sequestering agents, consistency of your water supply is more important. Any fluctuations will exacerbate existing contaminant Ca and Mg in the photo grade chemicals and have a greater effect on your results.

I use deionised water for consistency, and because Adelaide tap water is hard and variable. At my house it has a lot of oxidised iron and at the lab I used to help out at it had a lot of very fine suspended solids.

Completely false. I have been developing film for almost 30 years now and have never seen 'excess frothing' from using distilled water.

Within a specific pH range a number of films froth excessively, sometimes sufficiently to pop the top off a metal developing tank or to break a Paterson tank during agitation. It happened to Tom A with Ilford Delta in Vancouver tap water http://leica-users.org/v27/msg10887.html and it happened to me with RO treated seawater with Delta films (mostly Delta 100) and Neopan 400 120, which had PFOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanesulfonic_acid as a component of the anti-static layer on the base side of the film (between the film and the backing paper). The froth was caused by formation of a polymerised complex of the wetting and antistatic agents from the film and components of the water. The froth I saw was incredible. The circumstances that cause it to form are rare (Ilford, for example, were "unable to replicate" what we saw), but it can happen. My guess is that using tapwater makes it more likely, rather than distilled water, but I don't have any data to support that.

Marty

 

[Corran]

I use only distilled water for mixing color chemistry and making espresso in a high-end machine.

B&W is so forgiving I don't think it matters. I've had plenty of hard water in various homes but never had any sort of issues. The only reason I use it for color chemicals is because they seem to last longer stored.

 

[maddoc]

Interesting observation. I can tell after developing a roll of film (135-36) in HC-110 (dil "B") if it was a roll of Ilford film by looking at the amount of froth. From my experience DELTA400 > HP5. I have never observed this with any other BW film.

We have two Millipore-Q water systems at the lab (18 MOhm/cm, <3 ppm organic contamination) but I have never considered using distilled water for mixing chemicals to develop films because there are to many other sources of contamination.

The mineral content is much more likely to have a substantial effect on development than indirectly by pH effects. If your tapwater has cations in excess of the capacity of any sequestering agents in the developer to neutralise them, that water will decrease the activity of your developer because if left in the solution they interact with developing agents. If you use tapwater you can decrease the activity by 5-20%. Increasing activity by that much by using distilled water will increase activity, density and grain. It depends on your tapwater, and again, the issue is consistency, rather than having water of a specific quality.

If you mix your own developer from scratch without any chelating/sequestering agents, consistency of your water supply is more important. Any fluctuations will exacerbate existing contaminant Ca and Mg in the photo grade chemicals and have a greater effect on your results.

I use deionised water for consistency, and because Adelaide tap water is hard and variable. At my house it has a lot of oxidised iron and at the lab I used to help out at it had a lot of very fine suspended solids.



Within a specific pH range a number of films froth excessively, sometimes sufficiently to pop the top off a metal developing tank or to break a Paterson tank during agitation. It happened to Tom A with Ilford Delta in Vancouver tap water http://leica-users.org/v27/msg10887.html and it happened to me with RO treated seawater with Delta films (mostly Delta 100) and Neopan 400 120, which had PFOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfluorooctanesulfonic_acid as a component of the anti-static layer on the base side of the film (between the film and the backing paper). The froth was caused by formation of a polymerised complex of the wetting and antistatic agents from the film and components of the water. The froth I saw was incredible. The circumstances that cause it to form are rare (Ilford, for example, were "unable to replicate" what we saw), but it can happen. My guess is that using tapwater makes it more likely, rather than distilled water, but I don't have any data to support that.

Marty

 

[willie_901]

I too have heard that pure H2O is very reactive and should not be consumed because it will damage living tissue.

Cal

Cal,

Pure water's reactivity is essentially identical to normal distilled water.

In a prior life I was involved with analytical chemistry of natural products. Natural products are typically a single molecule from plants with a specific, beneficial biochemical mode of action. Typically chemists would for for 3 to 12 moths to isolate and purify a bioactive molecule. The goal was to elucidate the chemical structure to understand the cellular biochemistry of disease states.

Often the final sample would be dissolved in ultra-pure water for analysis. I can state with certainty no chemist would invest a up to a year's worth of work and the have their sample destroyed by very reactive water.

 

[Calzone]

Cal,

Pure water's reactivity is essentially identical to normal distilled water.

In a prior life I was involved with analytical chemistry of natural products. Natural products are typically a single molecule from plants with a specific, beneficial biochemical mode of action. Typically chemists would for for 3 to 12 moths to isolate and purify a bioactive molecule. The goal was to elucidate the chemical structure to understand the cellular biochemistry of disease states.

Often the final sample would be dissolved in ultra-pure water for analysis. I can state with certainty no chemist would invest a up to a year's worth of work and the have their sample destroyed by very reactive water.

Willie,

I am not a chemist, but I do understand that chemically pure water is more chemically reactive than less pure water. Distilled water ideally is just H2O so I agree with you, and understand that both ideally should be chemically pure water, but while the primary system for our water is a distillation system, the secondary is a RO system that is used to "scrub and polish" the water to the next level of purity.

So to what degree is one pure, and the other purer? Logic tells me that the RO system is purer and makes more chemically reactive water.

It is known that in chemistry states of equilibrium eventually become the rest state of any chemical reaction, and I guess we are arguing about how and to which degree chemically pure water might negatively effect a living cell not a compound.

Pretty much a big difference between a molecular level and a cellular level, even though we speak in terms of atoms.

Anyways I attributed my comment to a person that knew or knows more than me.

On another note I use a stockpile of enriched water that is known as O18 water that has an extra neutron and a heavier atomic weight. We create a P-N nuclear reaction by bombardment via a proton beam with my Cyclotron to create 18F a short half life nuclide with a 2 hour half life. By substituting a proton for a neutron we transmutate materials.

Physics is more of my background.

Cal

 

[presspass]

Distilled to mix developer and in the final rinse with LFN and 91 percent isopropyl alcohol. Everything else is tap water. This has worked for me for more than 40 years and I see no reason to change.

 

[:: Mark]

From what little that I understand water is not particularly reactive, nor is pure/distilled water in any way dangerous biologically.

However, anything dissolved in the water can affect the chemicals that you mix it with. Fancy bottled waters can contain a lot of carbonates. And if you shake a flask of water vigorously you can dissolve in atmospheric oxygen that might conceivably react with the film processing chemicals and reduce storage life (eg working solutions from powder developers).

Here, the tap water is horrible and leaves deposits on the film when trying. Since it only costs 90c for 5L of distilled water I buy that for both the chemical mixes and the final rinses.

Cal - you have a cylotron at home???!

 

[Calzone]

Cal - you have a cylotron at home???!

Mark,

The only partical beam accelerators I have at home are tube amps (electron). I enjoy a 300B single ended triode stereo and have mucho vintage guitar tube amps.

I worked in a Fortune 500 company doing research, and I worked on two big accelerator projects at two National Labs: one was a Ronald Ray-Gun Star Wars project, a partical beam that was going to be a space based weapon to shoot down Intercontinential Ballistic Missles in their boost phase; the other was a 2.7 mile circumferance superconducting heavy ion collider.

Now I have kind of a boring job. LOL. Kinda funny that my BA, MA and MFA are all art degrees, but creative people end up in funny places because we are great problem solvers and mighty clever.

At the Fortune 500 company I got involved with research, played around with millions of dollars of equiptment, and got an education in science working one-on-one with PhD's. Pretty much I was cherry picked, and I learned from the brightest and the best.

Cal

 

[pepeguitarra]

Early Death Comes from Drinking Distilled Water by Zoltan

Early Death Comes from Drinking Distilled Water by Zoltan

Courtesy of Zoltan:

" Distillation is the process in which water is boiled, evaporated and the vapour condensed. Distilled water is free of dissolved minerals and, because of this, has the special property of being able to actively absorb toxic substances from the body and eliminate them. Studies validate the benefits of drinking distilled water when one is seeking to cleanse or detoxify the system for short periods of time (a few weeks at a time).

Fasting using distilled water can be dangerous because of the rapid loss of electrolytes (sodium, potassium, chloride) and trace minerals like magnesium, deficiencies of which can cause heart beat irregularities and high blood pressure. Cooking foods in distilled water pulls the minerals out of them and lowers their nutrient value.

Distilled water is an active absorber and when it comes into contact with air, it absorbs carbon dioxide, making it acidic. The more distilled water a person drinks, the higher the body acidity becomes.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, "Distilled water, being essentially mineral-free, is very aggressive, in that it tends to dissolve substances with which it is in contact. Notably, carbon dioxide from the air is rapidly absorbed, making the water acidic and even more aggressive. Many metals are dissolved by distilled water."

I have done well over 3000 mineral evaluations using a combination of blood, urine and hair tests in my practice. Almost without exception, people who consume distilled water exclusively, eventually develop multiple mineral deficiencies.

Those who supplement their distilled water intake with trace minerals are not as deficient but still not as adequately nourished in minerals as their non-distilled water drinking counterparts even after several years of mineral supplementation. The ideal water for the human body should be slightly alkaline and this requires the presence of minerals like calcium, magnesium,Distilled water tends to be acidic and can only be recommended as a way of drawing poisons out of the body. Once this is accomplished, the continued drinking of distilled water is a bad idea.

Zoltan P. Rona MD MSc

References

Airola, P. 1974. How To Get Well. Phoenix, AZ: Health Plus Publishers.

Baroody, Dr. Theodore A. Jr. Alkalinize or Die. California😛ortal Books, 1995.

Haas, Elson M. Staying Healthy with Nutrition. The Complete Guide to Diet & Nutritional Medicine. Berkeley, California:Celestial Arts, 1992; p. 22.

Rona, Zoltan P. and Martin, Jeanne Marie. Return to the Joy of Health, Vancouver: Alive Books, 1995.

Rona, Zoltan P. Childhood Illness and The Allergy Connection. Rocklin, California😛rima Books, 1996."

 

[Calzone]

Courtesy of Zoltan:

" Distillation is the process in which water is boiled, evaporated and the vapour condensed. Distilled water is free of dissolved minerals and, because of this, has the special property of being able to actively absorb toxic substances from the body and eliminate them. Studies validate the benefits of drinking distilled water when one is seeking to cleanse or detoxify the system for short periods of time (a few weeks at a time).

Fasting using distilled water can be dangerous because of the rapid loss of electrolytes (sodium, potassium, chloride) and trace minerals like magnesium, deficiencies of which can cause heart beat irregularities and high blood pressure. Cooking foods in distilled water pulls the minerals out of them and lowers their nutrient value.

Distilled water is an active absorber and when it comes into contact with air, it absorbs carbon dioxide, making it acidic. The more distilled water a person drinks, the higher the body acidity becomes.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, "Distilled water, being essentially mineral-free, is very aggressive, in that it tends to dissolve substances with which it is in contact. Notably, carbon dioxide from the air is rapidly absorbed, making the water acidic and even more aggressive. Many metals are dissolved by distilled water."

I have done well over 3000 mineral evaluations using a combination of blood, urine and hair tests in my practice. Almost without exception, people who consume distilled water exclusively, eventually develop multiple mineral deficiencies.

Those who supplement their distilled water intake with trace minerals are not as deficient but still not as adequately nourished in minerals as their non-distilled water drinking counterparts even after several years of mineral supplementation. The ideal water for the human body should be slightly alkaline and this requires the presence of minerals like calcium, magnesium,Distilled water tends to be acidic and can only be recommended as a way of drawing poisons out of the body. Once this is accomplished, the continued drinking of distilled water is a bad idea.

Zoltan P. Rona MD MSc

References

Airola, P. 1974. How To Get Well. Phoenix, AZ: Health Plus Publishers.

Baroody, Dr. Theodore A. Jr. Alkalinize or Die. California😛ortal Books, 1995.

Haas, Elson M. Staying Healthy with Nutrition. The Complete Guide to Diet & Nutritional Medicine. Berkeley, California:Celestial Arts, 1992; p. 22.

Rona, Zoltan P. and Martin, Jeanne Marie. Return to the Joy of Health, Vancouver: Alive Books, 1995.

Rona, Zoltan P. Childhood Illness and The Allergy Connection. Rocklin, California😛rima Books, 1996."

P,

Thank you for this post.

I have to keep in mind that most developers are alkaline and that my water can have a profound effect on the PH.

Also perhaps the acidity is what makes my water such a good stop bath to end development.

Cal

 

[ChrisPlatt]

Cal, your tap water measures acid even after the chlorine has dissipated?
New York City water pH is usually claimed to be neutral to slightly alkaline.

Chris