Re: H2O: distilled vs deionized

Sil Horwitz ()
Mon, 13 January 1997 10:32 PM

At 01:42 PM 970114 +1100, Greg wrote:
>
>I have lost my source for distilled water. This summer The Biology
>Department here decided to shut down the old still that supplied

For uniformity, I use distilled water for all critical solutions; the water
here in Florida has a lot of organic material in addition to calcium salts,
and is almost unusable for photochemistry.

Most supermarkets here (don't know about where you are) sell gallons of
distilled water at prices much lower than the cost to make it yourself. As
to deionized (British: deionised) water, there are still salts in the water,
albeit soluble ones SCHRAMMR@WLSVAX.WVNET.EDU (usually sodium) and even that adds some uncertainty to
the activity of the solutions. I use, and recommend, fully distilled water.
Incidently, old stills used copper piping that added a bit of copper to the
water; newer ones are glass-lined and the water is quite pure.

Sil Horwitz, FPSA
Technical Editor, PSA Journal
silh@iag.net

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