Well water for film & print

[CG]

This has been a good discussion here.

The concerns expressed about selenium toner disposal could be addressed to a very large extent by how one uses selenium toner. I'm mostly referring to Kodak Rapid Selenium Toner (KRST) here, so other variant toners might need other procedures. I'm no chemist, so the chemists out there could clarify and correct me on this, but my understanding on the use of selenium toner is that if you keep your toner alkaline and keep it clean and filtered, it should last a very very long time. If I get it right, selenium toner degrades quite fast when allowed to become acidic.

How you keep KRST alkaline is to get acid fix out of your system entirely, or to wash your prints far enough to neutralize them before putting them into the toner, or to neutralize the acid fix by bathing the prints in sulfite based hypo clearing agents before toning. I wash and dry my prints before deciding which I want to tone, so they are pretty neutral. Regardless, I first bathe them in a sulfite bath before toning. The sulfite renders them mildly alkaline. My toner stays very clean without even needing filtration.

The idea that one should add HCA to toner has been said to have the weakness that the sulfite will get old before the selenium toner, and that it's better to pre-treat than to mix KRST and HCA together.

[Henry Ambrose]

You can eliminate some chemicals. I use developer, plain water stop and an alkaline fix. I rarely use toners of any kind. I think selenium may be a fetish left over from practices that were the standard 40 years ago. That's just my opinion.

I'm not saying you should alter your creative process by eliminating some chemicals but rather minimize your use to that which is needed. If you need it to get the look you want then go for it.

You can test your wash to see if you really need 10 minutes running water for film or an hour for fiber paper. (likely not) There is no point in washing longer than is needed to do the job. Wash just enough to do what needs to happen with your materials.

[Darryl Baird]

Our well water is HARD, with more than the EPA limits on arsenic, so we installed a reverse osmosis under the kitchen counter from Sears. (mine is smaller @ 2 gallon capacity)

It's a gem, saves trips to the store (and money) for distilled water. The filters are a little expensive, but need to be changed only once a year... for the main filter and every six months or so for the sediment filters. Ice cubes are clear, pets are healthy, and I always have good water for developing, and drop film into a RO water bath after washing with the regular well water.

[rdenney]

Our well-water is moderately hard, and also includes dissolved iron and a bit of sulphur along with the usual grit and bacteria. Unlike yours, it is acidic. Our first treatment is an acid neutralizer--acidic water will damage the ion-exchange bed of the water softener. For a while we used a manganese green-sand iron remover, but that system failed (plus the potassium permanganate used for regeneration was expensive and nasty if spilled), so we are just using a regular consumer-grade water softener. The final step in our system is a large activated carbon filter. The water softener addresses both the hardness and the iron. I do not know what it would do to reduce the alkalinity of your water, but that doesn't seem to be much of an issue.

Water softeners work by ion exchange, and use salt only to refresh the ion bed. The salt used during regeneration is mostly discarded, but there will be a little residual salt put into the water system. So, if salt is an issue, consider a softener technology that doesn't use it. An air-injection system might be an option.

If you use an air conditioner, the condensate from the evaporator is reasonably well-distilled. But if you have a high-efficiency gas furnace, do not use the moisture that drains when the furnace is in use. That moisture is corrosive.

If I were to build a darkroom, I would do it in my basement where the drains feed to a dry well rather than to my septic system.

My basement looks like a water-treatment plant, except for the (usual, but not always) lack of settling ponds.

Rick "whose Epson 3800 does not challenge the water treatment and septic systems" Denney

[SeanEsopenko]

wow lots of discussion on this. So we've established working with the well water won't be a large issue and the chemicals going in the septic probably won't be much trouble.

I've started working on converting an old storage shack on the acreage to a dark room. It's about 15'x20'. I'll be redoing the shingles Sunday and re-painting/light sealing it over the next week. Then I'll have to build the apparatus to store the water and maintain it's temperature. I'll probably wrap a large rubbermaid trash bin in insulation and use an aquarium heater/pump to maintain the temperture. I'll use a garden hose to fill it in the summer and haul 5 gallon pails manually in the winter. Hooking it directly to the house's water is logistically out of the question.

I have an RO unit from before I moved to the acreage but I discovered long ago the water pressure's not high enough. Our pressure's between 17-25psi when it needs 40psi+ to work properly. We don't have that large of a pressure tank and the inlaws are worried increasing it's pressure might cause the piping in the house to burst. Not something I want to try to convince them otherwise of. We have a distiller, however (father-in-law makes moonshine haha). The idea of running the water through a whole house filter is a good one, too. I think I have one sitting around. I can't really plumb it into the house but I could hook it to a garden hose adapter.

One issue I'm trying to figure out is light sealing the door. I don't really have room to build a second door so I've been trying to figure out how to light seal it well enough to handle film sheets. Any advice?

[Harold_4074]

One issue I'm trying to figure out is light sealing the door. I don't really have room to build a second door so I've been trying to figure out how to light seal it well enough to handle film sheets. Any advice?

Sure. Assuming that you have walled off a portion of the building, use two curtains, preferably inside and outside the doorway, with no conventional door at all. A double curtain on one side of the doorway is almost as good. Weight (such as a length of chain sewn into the hem of each curtain) will help with the sealing. The curtains have to be long enough to pile up a bit at the bottom. Attach both curtains to the top of the doorway by clamping behind a strip of wood that is screwed on. However, attach only the left side of one curtain and the right side of the other, so that they stay overlapped when you are not going through. (You might want to do this after you move in large objects like sinks, enlargers and such.)

My darkroom, such as it is, occupies part of a horse-tack building, and because of earthquake safety I don't want to put in a proper door that could become jammed. So I use an army-surplus olive-drab wool blanket and a second curtain of black Oxford cloth (the flame-retardant stuff used in theatrical sets). There is a flimsy plywood outside door to the building which faces west, so the area outside the darkroom is pretty bright, but the curtain setup is perfectly adequate for film handling and tray developing.

A suitable black cloth for these purposes is called duvetyne, or commando cloth; if you can't get it in Canada, it is available from filmtools.com in the Los Angeles CA area. Black velvet sounds great, but is expensive, attractive to lint and other trash, and difficult to sew. I suspect that the blackout cloth used in draperies would also work; like my blanket, it will be too wide for the doorway, so just fold the edges in before installing, and let the extra bulk at the sides help to trap light.

Good luck!

[SeanEsopenko]

Does anybody know if running a booster pump for an RO system would affect the well-pump and/or pressure-tank in a negative manner? I could source out a diaphragm pump for the aquarium RO/DI system I have and that could solve most of the issue of water purity for photo-flo and developer.

I decided to solve one logistic at a time and now that the leaking roof has been reshingled I'm concentrating on water supply/drainage. I'm picking up a double laundry sink in about an hour for $35 from the used classifieds

It's easy to put a barrel of water up in the air on a rack or the likes, but getting the water IN the barrel has been a real brainstorm. So far it seems a 250 foot garden hose out to the shack to fill the barrel is the simplest solution next to manually hauling 5 gallon pails.

[Harold_4074]

You could certainly feed a booster pump from your low-pressure well water, but then you would need either a pressure tank for the high-pressure supply or a booster pump exactly matched to the RO throughput (which varies as the membranes age). Otherwise, the booster pump will either run continuously against a large backpressure or cycle rapidly as water passes through the RO membranes.

Before making this investment, perhaps you should consider the local price of DI water (where I am, it is less than a dollar a gallon in the grocery store) and multiply this by the rate at which you will use water for developer and Photo-Flo. Electricity is probably cheaper for you than it would be for me (in California), but even so, if you include it and amortize the pump/tank system over a reasonable lifetime you may find that it is cheaper to just buy the water as you need it.

Similar considerations apply to electric water distillers. I haven't looked at operating costs in several years, but when I first built my darkroom I found that a $300 tabletop distiller could give me water that was just slightly more expensive than I could buy it at retail! Considering that commercial DI water is just as good for darkroom purposes, it was a no-brainer decision.

[Henry Ambrose]

Buying distilled water is the easy and cheap solution in most locales. Go buy 20-30 gallons and your problem is instantly solved for not much money.

In the meantime, keep thinking about the RO filter and a brilliant solution may pop up in front of you.

[rdenney]

I gather from your question that your darkroom is in a shed or outbuilding 250 feet from the house.

A booster pump to fill a 50-gallon tank at the darkroom may well exhaust your pressure tank in your home. You would then be depending on the well pump to keep up with the booster pump. You will avoid a problem as long as you limit the flow to something well under what the well pump can handle, either by using a small booster pump or by running it through a constriction.

But I'm not sure you need a booster pump to fill a storage tank. 250 feet of garden hose is a long run, but not that long, unless it's significantly uphill. Your well pump should be able to handle it. (My well pump is 275 feet down in the well, and has to push the water straight up and still achieve 50 psi a ground level, after a 175-foot horizontal run.) You shouldn't need a booster pump just to fill that tank. But you may need more pressure at the darkroom to drive your reverse-osmosis filter, if that's where you put it. For that, you'll need a complete pump and pressure system in the darkroom, including a pressure tank. Harbor freight gets about $40 for a 10-gpm clear water pump (it is not self-priming, so mount it under your storage tank), and a five-gallon pressure tank should be fine (given that you'll be draining that pressure tank regularly, you can just use a five-gallon tank fed from the bottom and pushing against the air in the top of the tank. That air has to be replaced from time to time as it gets absorbed into the water. If you will not be draining the system regularly, get a pressure tank with a bladder.) You'll also need a pressure switch, a gauge, and the necessary plumbing. Plus the filter, of course.

You could actually keep your storage tank filled during operation using a plain toilet valve with a float. A toilet valve would provide enough constriction to keep from overworking your well pump.

With that setup, you would not be using the house well pump to keep up with flow requirements in your darkroom, except to (much more slowly) fill a storage tank. The pump system in your darkroom would provide sufficient head to push the water through the filter, and you would not be depending on your well pump for that, either.

You could also mount the filter in the house and then run the 250-foot hose to a storage tank mounted above your plumbing, and then feed your darkroom using gravity.

Of course, you'll have to drain everything that is out in the weather when there is a freezing potential.

Is that easier than buying gallon jugs of distilled water? That depends on your volume, and the distance to the nearest grocery store. Of course, you could always pour those gallon jugs into your storage tank and bypass your filter.

Rick "who has spent more at times to achieve less improvement in convenience" Denney