Distilled / Purified / Battery Top Up Water

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jimmymcfarrell

Anyone fancy a pint?
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This follows on from the record cleaning machine thread that has been running: -

Can anyone tell me the difference between distilled or purified water and battery top up or standard de-ionised water. Ive just wasted a £30 bottle of L'art du Son record cleaner by diluting it with battery top up as thats what they gave me in halfords when i asked for distilled water and i didnt read the label. It says on the VPI cleaning fluid instructions that only distilled or purified water can be used, but doesnt say anything on the L'Art du Son. Is it worth using this or am I going to ruin the machine???

Please Help
 
Deionised water just has the chemically active parts removed, other non reactive elements are still be present.

A good cheap source for Highley purified water is your local tropical fish shop. Find one that sells salt water fish and they will almost cirtainly also sell reverse osmosis purified water, cost is about £10 for £5 gallons! they will probably sell you a smaller amount if you ask nicely. RO water is nomally better than 99% pure.

NB: It also makes a good cup of tea !!!!

HTH Chris
 
Nah,
in fact most bottled water has (comparatively) loads of minerals in it, and I wouldn't drink fridge water myself, never mind puttting it near anything delicate :D Chris is right about RO water, it is probably the cleanest stuff you can get. I did a quick test of my six stage RO filter at home (for tropical marine fish) and it contains 0.5 - 1ppm of dissolved solids, battery water from Halfords was 60ppm, filtered water (through a Britta) was up at about 250ppm, and tap water was about 360ppm.


The Moog
 
so drinking water from a fish tank, even allowing for what fish do to it, may be safer than doing so from the tap?
 
Hi Jimmy,

tap water is made up of Hydrogen, Oxygen plus cholrine + metals other chemicals & tiny dead animals. Cholrine is added to kill off microbes. The stuff in water is safe for most people.

Bottled water has even more chemicals in it. Loads of metals & salts + other stuff that gives it it's taste.

Deionised water has all the ions removed. These ions give water it's conductive properties & strong electrostatic forces. As mentioned, non ionic materials may not be removed.

Distilled water is usually better but more expensive to make.


Distilled & quality deionised water will give you ultra pure, pure & purified water.

I used to work in a science department in an university. We used pure water for making semiconductors & for chemistry & biology work/experiments. Great for cleaning my records.

Get the purist water you can.


SCIDB
 
Yes, Dasani is pure bottled water. Don't know if it's available in the UK though, I've only ever seen it in the US. It's also made by the evil empire that is the Coca Cola corporation :D

Michael.
 
Art du Son

I'm using the Art du Son with deionized water and am getting pretty much CD-level silence between tracks on many of my cleaned records. Thus I don't think you've completely wasted your bottle. I even remember reading a review of the stuff which suggested tap water was OK to use with it. Not sure I'd recommend that, but maybe it contains something which softens water?

In any case, thanks to Chris' post, I'm off to see if I can find a helpful local tropical fish shop!

As soon as I've located some, I'll make up some fresh fluid and post the results.

Watch this space!

Toby

Edit - the review I remembered is here
 
That Dasani is basically RO water with minerals added back into it, so pure RO will be much better (and no doubt loads cheaper).


The Moog
 
michaelab said:
It's also made by the evil empire that is the Coca Cola corporation :D.
Click to expand...
That's Coca-Cola *with* a hyphen. Thank you.
 
I had difficulty in getting hold of distilled water too. From a chemist, when asked, they offered 'injectable' sterile water. This is not the same, it is only guaranteeing to be sterile. I had quite an argument with an assistant about it. (What is education coming to these days?) One could probably achieve this by running water through ultraviolet light or gamma radiation, and there'd still be loads of dead and mineral crud in it. Deionised is the other way round - ions are removed, but this says nothing about living microorganisms. In the end, I get mine from a chemist that I know has a lab attached. They give me water that truly has been distilled.
 
Interim results

Having managed to acquire a 5 gallon container containing reverse-osmosis purified water for the princely sum of £7.50 - £5.00 for the container, and £2.50 for the 5(!) gallons or water, I thought I'd do a little boil-away test.

1 Stainless steel saucepan, freshly cleaned using stainless cleaner, and 50ml of the watery contestants: Tap water, Comma de-ionized (local car accessory shop), and my newly acquired reverse osmosis stuff. The same saucepan was carefully cleaned between the samples.

Results as jpg images attached! If you can't download them, the bottom line is that tap water is a definite no-no, and the reverse-osmosis is more or less as good as the Comma deionized. Anyone who's got access to better water fancy doing something similar?

I'll try to get around to making some cleaning fluid in a while, but I need to (ahem) tidy up the kitchen before anyone notices!

Toby
 

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Erm, I did mate (see earlier post).
I used a calibrated TDM meter and used several samples of each fluid for comparison. There are two things you have to be careful about, the first is the cleanliness of your container. You can have perfect RO water, but if there is any crap in your container it will pollute it (RO water can be quite aggressive and will dissolve in any salts and minerals it can find!). The second is that RO membranes will only last a finite length of time, and the newer the membrane is (after a run-in period) and the better it has been looked after (regularly flushed to clean it) the better the water coming out the system will be. Usually the guys there should have a TDS meter (you need to keep an eye on the water so that you know when your filters or membrane is buggered) so you should be able to get them to give you a reading.


The Moog
 
I've got some water thats been filtered, twice, through a really long filter (dunno what the filter was made of though) from a garage. They said its good enough to use in car batteries and as it is filtered not just deionised Im guessing it'll be good enough for the record cleaner. Also ordered some "pure" water from my local chemist. Whats this likely to be?????

Does using the "wrong" water in a record cleaner damage the machine or the record. Im guessing unpure water would leave crud in it???

Cheers for all the info everyone!!!
 

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