Distilled water, how many of you distill your own?

[barryjyoung]

Hello Friends:

I recently completed construction of my fifth darkroom after moving everything we own from Near Seattle to South of St. Louis. Here we have well water which is pretty heavy in Magnesium, Calcium and has trace amounts of other elements as well. "No problem" sez I, "I will JUST use distilled water". Out here in the country literally 35 miles from the nearest small town, that turned out to be more difficult than it seemed. It is an expensive proposition to purchase and transport large amounts of distilled water. So, I bought a still to distill my own water for photo chemicals. It is an 8 gallon electrically heated one which will almost certainly need a much better condenser to be made from scratch by me. It was surprisingly cheap compared to the cost of hauling water from town if I could find enough there. How many of you photographers use distilled water and how many of you distill your own?

Barry

[paulbarden]

Barry, I live on a well and we have a lot of iron in the water, so we set up a Reverse Osmosis unit years ago to tame our water supply. for household use, the water gets Calcium put back into it, but I have a bypass in the system that lets me take out RO water which has only 5 ppm TDS. I've never had reason to buy distilled water for film/darkroom chemistry when 5 ppm RO water is more than satisfactory. These days you can buy an inexpensive RO unit to install under the sink.

[ethics_gradient]

Curious what you need so much distilled water for? I use it for mixing chemistry as a "just in case" to maintain consistency, and for a quick final rinse of prints or plates (I do a lot more wet plate collodion than film), but that's about it. A couple gallons lasts me quite a while.

Water with minerals in it actually works better as rinse/wash than distilled, the extra ions pull fix molecules off the film/paper better. In WW2, USN photogs used seawater when underway.

In many jurisdictions, owning a still that large isn't legal. Authorities are generally not kicking in doors looking for them (even from those who do spirits/moonshine), unless you start trying to sell it though.

edit: nm, saw you're in Missouri. You and New Zealand are about the only places that don't care!

[tundra]

I have whole house water filtration installed but even that showed significant variability in developer action over the course of a year, at least when the home was first new. So, I use distilled to make stock solutions and working developer, fix, and toner. Everything else is tap water.

[domaz]

I saw someone selling a distilling unit at an estate sale once (an older Aqua-Clean unit I think). It was pretty tempting but it was covered in scale I started to picture all the work it would take to keep it clean and running and decided it wasn't worth it...

[Ron McElroy]

Before retirement I would get distilled water from our distiller at work. We have to have lots there for the printing presses. Now I just buy it for mixing chemicals as our city water is very good.

[xkaes]

I have a Corning Mega-Pure MP-1. It does a great job, but I only use distilled water for select purposes -- for example, photo developers & other non-photographic uses. All other darkroom water is simply filtered. For a normal darkroom, small amounts of distilled water for developers, and filtered water for everything else should be adequate.

[darr]

I had a complete house reverse osmosis (RO) system in my previous home. It was a necessity due to the well water's high sulfur content. If the washing machine and dishwasher were used simultaneously, the house would sometimes have an unpleasant odor. In my current home, which has city water, I've been using a Berkey system for drinking water and mixing photo chemicals for 10+ years, and it's been working well with changing filters every other year. I wish you the best of luck in addressing your water supply issue.

[Vaughn]

How about the water created by a dehumidifier? I am thinking of getting one as winters can be very damp here. Distilled water would only be a bonus. Tap water here is fine for just about everything. I use distilled water for just a few mixed chemicals related to platinum printing and carbon printing (only to make the sensitizers).

I know that some folks like a final rinse in distilled water -- esp. for film.

[Jason Greenberg Motamedi]

I have a 5 gallon still I found at a second-hand store years ago that works perfectly. I use distilled water for mixing developer, sensitizer, and toner. I use tap water for everything else. The dehumidifier water we get tends to get a bit dirty (the bucket is hard to clean) so I don't use it for photography. I just dump into our clothswasher for the first rinse.