Processing: What About Water?

**mrred** · 5-Jan-2019, 16:30

Manually operated....lol

**Luis-F-S** · 5-Jan-2019, 19:31

I've always just used tap water, chilled or warmed to 68 Deg F. I have a filter on the incoming line which does nothing since our potable water has no suspended matter for the filter to take out. L

**mrred** · 5-Jan-2019, 19:41

It's not really suspended matter that is the evil. I think Iron is the #1 cause for developers to crash, especially Vit C based ones. A while back I had Iron issues with my Foma. It would cause deposits on the film.

**Two23** · 5-Jan-2019, 21:19

Originally Posted by mrred

It's not really suspended matter that is the evil. I think Iron is the #1 cause for developers to crash, especially Vit C based ones. A while back I had Iron issues with my Foma. It would cause deposits on the film.

My water has very little iron in it, but hardness of 19 grains. Maybe I could get away with tap water?

Kent in SD

**mrred** · 6-Jan-2019, 06:28

My guess it would depend on your film/developer combination. You should also measure your PH of the water. Distilled ideal is 7.0. You would never see that, in the wild. Some developers are buffered and would not react either way.

Give it a try.

**Tin Can** · 6-Jan-2019, 06:36

Photography Formularily specifies distilled water for mixing TF5

Less smell

Work great

**mrred** · 6-Jan-2019, 06:39

The PH shift would be causing that.

**Luis-F-S** · 6-Jan-2019, 08:41

Originally Posted by Two23

My water has very little iron in it, but hardness of 19 grains. Maybe I could get away with tap water?
Kent in SD

Have you had trouble with the water? If not, don't create problems that don't exist. If you have, then deal with the specific problem. Filters do not remove iron, just suspended matter.

**Two23** · 6-Jan-2019, 10:14

Water Ph is 8.71. I'm using HC-110, PF tf4. SO, I will definitely used distilled for fixer and final rinse. Room temperature is 72, so it might be easiest to simply adjust time since four degrees isn't that great.

Kent in SD

**Doremus Scudder** · 6-Jan-2019, 13:20

Originally Posted by Two23

Water Ph is 8.71. I'm using HC-110, PF tf4. SO, I will definitely used distilled for fixer and final rinse. Room temperature is 72, so it might be easiest to simply adjust time since four degrees isn't that great.
Kent in SD

Kent,

A pH difference from neutral in your tap water will affect the activity of the developers you mix with it. Take this into account (I had to reduce my USA developing times by about 10% or a little more for my water in Vienna, Austria due to the harder water there).

Keep in mind also that distilled water is needed for some purposes and not others. Use it for pH sensitive things (like TF-5 and maybe TF4 if it really reduces the odor compared to mixing in tap water) and for making stock solutions, especially saturated solutions like the solution B for PMK/Pyrocat (if you mix those with tap water, you'll end up with a precipitate and a weaker solution).

Distilled is also a good idea when you are mixing developers/fixers from scratch and have hard water or water with other dissolved minerals. Prepackaged chemicals (e.g., from Kodak or Ilford) include sequestering agents and buffering to compensate for a range of water qualities. These can usually be mixed with tap water with no problems. Of course, there's nothing wrong with using distilled water for everything, but it can be unnecessarily expensive/inconvenient if you don't really need it.

Distilled for the final rinse (+wetting agent to save time) is highly recommendable regardless of your water quality. Soak longer if you have lots of dissolved minerals in your water. Don't keep the solution too long (i.e., only one session or so) since dissolved minerals build up in the rinse and the wetting agent will degrade over time.

Best,

Doremus