water filters

[peter brooks]

I can control every step by using distilled water and by filtering. Everything that is, except the rinsing inbetween the fix and the photoflo. Does anyone actually use distilled water for this rinse? You would need gallons of distilled water, surely?

Again possibly veering a bit off-topic but I work in a school and our science department constantly make their own distilled water - automatically, in a thing that looks a bit like one of those old hot water cylinders.

There will be plenty of scientific folk on this forum who will know how this is done and what is required. The cost to purchase and run such a thing may be prohibitive, I have no idea.

As I mentioned above I sometimes use distilled water for the penultimate rinse as well (the one before the Photo-Flo, which I see as a kind of 'bonus' last rinse, although it is more of a dunk!)

[Drew Wiley]

Your own distiller might prove energy intensive and costly; plus you have to clean them out a lot as calcium scum builds up. Best to use it for making moonshine instead, which at least one can sell, probably better than photographs! I'm in a quandary over that very question right now. If I ever have enough block of time to get past the kindergarten level of dye transfer printing, I'll need a very large quantity of distilled water on hand, because the whole printing workflow is extremely pH sensitive. But for ordinary photographic printing, just going to the supermarket and picking up a few gallon jugs at a time for 75 cents apiece does the trick.

[Ron McElroy]

Again possibly veering a bit off-topic but I work in a school and our science department constantly make their own distilled water - automatically, in a thing that looks a bit like one of those old hot water cylinders.

There will be plenty of scientific folk on this forum who will know how this is done and what is required. The cost to purchase and run such a thing may be prohibitive, I have no idea.

As I mentioned above I sometimes use distilled water for the penultimate rinse as well (the one before the Photo-Flo, which I see as a kind of 'bonus' last rinse, although it is more of a dunk!)

Where I used to work we had water distiller that looked similar to this one.

https://www.purewaterinc.com/DP850-D...ater-Distiller

We had a large offset printing press that needed lots of distilled water in mixing fountain solution. Since retirement I now buy distilled water at the store as I had done in the past.

[Drew Wiley]

Let's see - 9 hours at 1100 watts to produce 7 gallons maximum distilled water, whereas one can buy that amount at the store for 7 dollars or less. Which would be more economical these days? And smaller home-use 115V distillers would be even more expensive to operate. But another relevant question would be, what do you do when the store runs out?

[Mark Kononczuk]

So, if the pre-photoflo rinse has to be running water, how do you get your distilled water to be 'running' for half an hour?

[Tin Can]

I don't flow distilled, but use it at every step

I buy 4 gallons from Kroger delivered every week

I make coffee and food with it too

I can process film and food for 6 months right now

IF Kroger fails, we are all goners

I almost never use any type of Photo Flo, don't need it

4 more gallons coming today

and my local Farm Share today also delivered

[Drew Wiley]

Right around here our water is mainly Sierra snowmelt brought in by aqueduct, so is of very high quality. I only use distilled sparingly, like for final rinse with Photoflo. But it's a different story in a number of peripheral coastal and inland counties, where tap water is synonymous with barely diluted Clorox plus pesticide residue. That's on good years. This year it's more like mud combined with decaying fish guts. Drove past a reservoir yesterday where the pelicans were just sitting around the rim of rapidly of an evaporating mudhole for the easy pickings. And the endangered Coho salmon runs are really going to have a tough time surviving. Too little running water, and even if they manage to get upstream, if the water is too warm, they're unable to spawn.

[LabRat]

I can control every step by using distilled water and by filtering. Everything that is, except the rinsing inbetween the fix and the photoflo. Does anyone actually use distilled water for this rinse? You would need gallons of distilled water, surely?

There's a famous story from a photo rep about when AA invested big bucks in a water purification system for final washing of prints, but started getting staining and early decay of prints... He called the paper mfg (Ansco?) to give 'em hell about their "defective" paper product several times, and finally a rep was sent out to survey the issue...

The rep saw everything was ok, but then noticed the water purification system, and said he knew what the problem was...

The system was so efficent, that it removed all the minerals from the wash water, but those minerals were also needed to aid the washing process, but now the water was just naked and devoid of minerals, so the solution was to turn off the system and bypass it...

It worked, and the prints were washing normal again...

That rep became a legend among reps...

Steve K

[Mark Kononczuk]

Yeah, well, where do you go from there?

[Mark Kononczuk]

So you don"t need to flow the wash?