Distilled water -- finding it? Making your own?

DREW WILEY · Oct 9, 2022

All the big tech and pharma industries in this area have their own in-house distillation systems, and in those cases, distilled and RO are certainly NOT functionally synonymous. Same goes for most medical and medical appliance applications. Even minor lime build up is unacceptable in some devices. There are even certain "alt" photo processes which are highly pH sensitive and require substantial amounts of true distilled. I always keep at least three gallons on hand, just so I don't have to run around if there is a temporary shortage. But since I generally use distilled only for final film rinsing, even a single gallon lasts me several months.

runswithsizzers · Oct 9, 2022

If you want to make your own (and live in the USA) take a look at the stills made by this company: <Aqua Clean>

Yes, they are expensive, but I am amazed that this company still makes such a high quality product in the USA. A friend gave me a small table top model that was several decades old (now discontinued). Not only does it still work, but the company still stocks replaceable parts for it!

Where I live I can usually find di (deionized)/distilled water for about a dollar a gallon (last time I checked) - and I use only a few gallons per year. So I am not going to live long enough to break even on the purchase of a $600-700 still. But if you need several gallons per week, it might make more sense(?)

About all I use di water for is to make up ascorbic acid type film developers and for dilutions of those developers. And also as a final rinse for film. (We have hard water here where I live - plenty of calcium to form spots, and maybe enough iron to worry about killing XTOL?)

When you buy water in the store, be sure to read the label carefully. Some companies use spring water or tap water which still has minerals in it - not what you want!

"Deionized" and "distilled" should be pretty much the same thing for photography purposes. I worked in a clinical laboratory for 22 years and all of our lab water was deionized rather than actually distilled. Of course, we monitored our lab water for purity to be sure our deionizer was working properly. The few times our water got out of spec, some of our chemistry results got very ugly.

guangong · Oct 9, 2022

Never a shortage of distilled water at supermarket. For film I usually use water from my well, which passes though a filter which removes iron, sediment, etc. Never noticed a problem.
However, being a belt+suspenders man, for movies, doing whatever I can to maintain consistency, I do use supermarket distilled water.

guangong · Oct 9, 2022

Where I grew up, home distillery was used for making certain beverages.

cmacd123 · Oct 9, 2022

The local supermarket here normally has 4 liter jugs of distilled water for a "regualr price of CDN$1.99, although every few weeks it drops to 99 cents. the Canadian regualtions do require that bottled water show the source. and the disolved mineral content. I only use Distilled for my CPAP machine.

i remember trying to use dehumidifier water one time, but it contained all the dust from the air.

I will admit to being spoiled as Ottawa City Water is one of the Top ten for quality in North America (and I understand that LA is also Highly rated.)

Ottawa among cities with highest quality, safest drinking water in the world: report

Despite COVID-19, Ottawa has been able to deliver consistantly clean tap water.

ottawa.citynews.ca

xkaes · Oct 9, 2022

Paul Howell said:
Depends on where you live and how hard your water is.

Exactly. There can be a lot of "stuff" in your water, and a micron filter won't remove all of it. If you are concerned about it talk to/get a report from your water department.

I've always had a 0.5 micron filter for the darkroom -- to get out the grit of all the darkroom water -- but for the developer and the photo-flo, I used distilled water because the water here is hard -- spots will form from regular water when dried, even after a micron filter.

I use a Corning MP-1 (Mega-Pure 1 liter) Still. It makes 1 liter/quart of distilled water per hour, using eight liters / two gallons for cooling (which can be captured and used for any other purpose).

But store-bought distilled / de-mineralized water is the best way to go -- unless you use a lot -- AND assuming you need to use it.

JerseyDoug · Oct 9, 2022

Both of my local grocery stores sell Poland Spring and their own store brand of distilled water and even during the lockdowns there were no stock issues. The big pharmacy here sells a product labeled "Distilled Water" in large print but the small print says it is "suitable for applications that require distilled water." I assumed that it was actually just demineralized water and gave it a pass.

bags27 · Oct 9, 2022

There was a real shortage in southern New England (I had been told it was somehow contaminated and recalled, but who knows?), and I bought one of those distilling machines on Amazon (~$100 US). Before I even could use it, suddenly the stores had water in stock and I bought around 50 gallons of it.

I never buy the last ones from a drug store, because parents might need it for the infants.

runswithsizzers · Oct 9, 2022

JerseyDoug said:
Both of my local grocery stores sell Poland Spring and their own store brand of distilled water and even during the lockdowns there were no stock issues. The big pharmacy here sells a product labeled "Distilled Water" in large print but the small print says it is "suitable for applications that require distilled water." I assumed that it was actually just demineralized water and gave it a pass.

I'm not sure we can assume "demineralized water" is inferior to "distilled" water without comparing quality reports on the finished products.

I worked in a hospital laboratory that used "clinical laboratory grade water, type 1" - which is far more pure than what is needed for photographic purposes. It was not "distilled" but rather purified using several technologies including ultrafiltration, charcoal filtration, reverse osmosis, and ion exchange beds. This water was used to feed a very expensive chemistry analyzer. The well-being of our patients depended on the results from that instrument not being affected by poor quality water. If anyone thought distilled water was better, we would have used distilled water.

mshchem · Oct 9, 2022

I use an RO system, 5 stage, 1 stage being the RO membrane where the demonizing happens. The only issue with making pure, truly pure, water is it's an energy and water intensive process.
Many larger cities, NYC is a famous example, have very good water that rarely needs any further treatment for photography uses.

Really high dissolved solids can be a challenge. Even after softening my tap water is unsuited for making XTOL.

I have taken my RO water then filtered it through a Zero Water cartridge. This has a generous amount of mixed ion exchange resin. It produces "1 million ohm" water.

The Zero Water cartridge lasts forever using RO water. When I used my tap water I got about 2 1/2 gallons of really pure water. The cartridges are very expensive.

mshchem · Oct 9, 2022

runswithsizzers said:
I'm not sure we can assume "demineralized water" is inferior to "distilled" water without comparing quality reports on the finished products.

I worked in a hospital laboratory that used "clinical laboratory grade water, type 1" - which is far more pure than what is needed for photographic purposes. It was not "distilled" but rather purified using several technologies including ultrafiltration, charcoal filtration, reverse osmosis, and ion exchange beds. This water was used to feed a very expensive chemistry analyzer. The well-being of our patients depended on the results from that instrument not being affected by poor quality water. If anyone thought distilled water was better, we would have used distilled water.

Absolutely agree. Culligan manages a lot of business and health care water systems. I worked in a lab early in my career, we had 6 huge DI tanks that contained the mixed bed demonizing resins. We did a lot of atomic absorption, atomic emission spectroscopy, required super pure water.

reddesert · Oct 10, 2022

mshchem said:
we had 6 huge DI tanks that contained the mixed bed demonizing resins.

It's about time someone told the truth about what's in those demonizing resins, it's even worse than the fluoride conspiracy.

As many others have suggested, I think the real question is do you need distilled water (or deionized), how good, and what for. For ex, I always used tap water when I lived on the east coast with soft municipal tap water. Now I live in a dry place with super hard tap water, and further my house pipes occasionally disgorge rust, which makes me concerned about iron (for causing problems with developers). I use distilled water to make developer stock solutions and for a final rinse, but for everything else I use tap water. And I would be content with deionized or similar processed water, as those address the specific issues that are causing me to use distilled water in the first place.

koraks · Oct 10, 2022

reddesert said:
As many others have suggested, I think the real question is do you need distilled water (or deionized), how good, and what for.

Indeed.

Personally, I only use demineralized water for the final wash of developed film, and strictly speaking I only "need" to do this with 35mm film since 120 and sheet film aren't that sensitive to drying marks, and our tap water is perfectly adequate even for a final rinse of those film types. All the other things I do, including mixing developers, alt process printing, color work etc etc do just fine with plain tap water.

If I'm critical, I don't really need demineralized water in the darkroom at all! I only use it sometimes because I stock it anyway, with 98% if it being used in our steam iron and the steam cleaner we use on the floors. Those appliances do actually benefit from water free of any calcium salts. And no, the scale removal function on the iron isn't half as effective as using demineralized water unless I want to spend every ironing session brushing bits of scale from freshly ironed garments!

Some of the demi water I use I take from the dehumidifier which we run occasionally during winter when we've got some clothes drying indoors. No way I'm going to waste any precious energy making distilled water that I don't really need. YMMV. We are blessed with decent tap water, that much is true, and a critical mind that evaluates offhand calls for using "distilled" water does the rest. In reality, virtually no photographic process requires distilled water, and only preciously few require demineralized water.

MattKing · Oct 10, 2022

ic-racer said:
Very few indications for distilled water these days.

The CPAP machines usually require it, and the machine vendors often sell it.
Around here, distilled water sources are common - I can even walk to a few.

250swb · Oct 10, 2022

I guess you could substitute distilled water with deionised water, in which case any decent auto accessory shop would sell it as it's used for topping up lead-acid batteries. It is just another form of purer water and can be used in irons or aircon units.

Nitroplait · Oct 10, 2022

I was tired of buying bottled water for my coffee/tea so I installed a small RO unit 6 years ago, because, while our local tap water is clean and good tasting it has an extremely high mineral content (TDS>400ppm) which buffered the delicate acidity in good quality coffee and tea.
The water that comes out of the system is with a TDS <15ppm effectively demineralised and I use it for mixing photo chemicals as well as the final film rinse.

The total cost of the compact under-the-counter system was around €250-300 - easy to install if you know your way around water pipes.
Maintenance is low - pre-filters needs to be exchanged every 6-8 month (~€15) and the RO membrane can last 3-4 years and cost ~€100.
Get a little TDS meter (~€20) and test the water 6 times a year to check efficiency and determine if it is about time to replace filters - just to make sure you don't replace them unnecessary.

I probably wouldn't buy the system for photo use alone, because the only situation I think it makes a significant difference is in the final photo flo rinse, but since it has many other uses in my family, I am extremely happy and will replace it in a heartbeat if it breaks.

JerseyDoug · Oct 10, 2022

My experiment with using distilled water was conducted in about as unscientific a manner as possible. On a whim I bought a one gallon jug of Poland Spring distilled water and used 200ml of it to mix a liter of fresh fixer. I used 250ml of DW to mix a graduate of Rodinal 1+50, 250ml of DW to fill my stop bath graduate, and 250ml of DFW to fill a graduate for the first fill of my Ilford Method film wash. And I used DW for the remaining two washing fills. Every step of the way I was replacing tap water with distilled water. Otherwise my film developing routine was unchanged.

The result of this pseudo experiment was that my negatives had absolutely no water marks, absolutely no drying marks, and virtually none of what I had been calling dust after my regular squeegee between my fingers and hanging to dry in a recently used shower stall. And each of these observations was a significant improvement on my previous results.

All I can say for certain is that, for my process, entirely replacing tap water with distilled water produced the cleanest negatives I had ever developed. I do not know if I could achieve the same result replacing only some of the tap water with distilled water. And I do not know if using filtered or deionized could have produced the same result.

The last gallon jug of distilled water I bought cost $1.19 US. Assuming that I can fix 20 of my 12-exposure rolls of 35mm film with a liter of fixer, the distilled water to develop and wash one roll of film costs me roughly 45¢ US.

Sirius Glass · Oct 10, 2022

DREW WILEY said:
Here bottled drinking water is often just city tap water with certain minerals removed, and other minerals added to improve taste. Other brands use actual springs closer to snowmelt, but none of it is even remotely as pure as true high-altitude direct snowmelt. Naturally carbonated mineral water is obviously different. Then there's reverse osmosis purified water, but that's not true distilled. Certain of our coastal cities had seawater desalination plants built, but never put them into operation due to the huge energy factor involved.

I don't know why SF would have a paucity of distilled water, except for perhaps the fact truckers hate driving around that city; me too. On this side of the Bay every ordinary Safeway or other grocery chain carries distilled, and especially the "organic" food stores. But since distilling does use a lot of energy, the handful of bottling sources for it might time their production to just huge opportune runs at a time - feast or famine approach. Right across the Bridge, Berkeley Bowl is a good place to look; they never seem to be out of it, one of those "organic" produce and deli places. Worth the drive for the free cheese samples alone, and just across the big parking lot from Looking Glass Photo.

Some minerals may be added to drinking water to improve the taste. Bottom line drinking water is not distilled water.

mshchem · Oct 10, 2022

Nitroplait said:
I was tired of buying bottled water for my coffee/tea so I installed a small RO unit 6 years ago, because, while our local tap water is clean and good tasting it has an extremely high mineral content (TDS>400ppm) which buffered the delicate acidity in good quality coffee and tea.
The water that comes out of the system is with a TDS <15ppm effectively demineralised and I use it for mixing photo chemicals as well as the final film rinse.

The total cost of the compact under-the-counter system was around €250-300 - easy to install if you know your way around water pipes.
Maintenance is low - pre-filters needs to be exchanged every 6-8 month (~€15) and the RO membrane can last 3-4 years and cost ~€100.
Get a little TDS meter (~€20) and test the water 6 times a year to check efficiency and determine if it is about time to replace filters - just to make sure you don't replace them unnecessary.

I probably wouldn't buy the system for photo use alone, because the only situation I think it makes a significant difference is in the final photo flo rinse, but since it has many other uses in my family, I am extremely happy and will replace it in a heartbeat if it breaks.

JerseyDoug said:
My experiment with using distilled water was conducted in about as unscientific a manner as possible. On a whim I bought a one gallon jug of Poland Spring distilled water and used 200ml of it to mix a liter of fresh fixer. I used 250ml of DW to mix a graduate of Rodinal 1+50, 250ml of DW to fill my stop bath graduate, and 250ml of DFW to fill a graduate for the first fill of my Ilford Method film wash. And I used DW for the remaining two washing fills. Every step of the way I was replacing tap water with distilled water. Otherwise my film developing routine was unchanged.

The result of this pseudo experiment was that my negatives had absolutely no water marks, absolutely no drying marks, and virtually none of what I had been calling dust after my regular squeegee between my fingers and hanging to dry in a recently used shower stall. And each of these observations was a significant improvement on my previous results.

All I can say for certain is that, for my process, entirely replacing tap water with distilled water produced the cleanest negatives I had ever developed. I do not know if I could achieve the same result replacing only some of the tap water with distilled water. And I do not know if using filtered or deionized could have produced the same result.

The last gallon jug of distilled water I bought cost $1.19 US. Assuming that I can fix 20 of my 12-exposure rolls of 35mm film with a liter of fixer, the distilled water to develop and wash one roll of film costs me roughly 45¢ US.

My friend who ran a camera store for 35 years had a Fuji demineralizing system that he used for everything. These machines didn't use any water wash, all done with multiple stabilizer/final rinse baths. No spots at all!

grahamp · Oct 10, 2022

When we moved from the SF East Bay to Vallejo, we changed water suppliers. Vallejo water is hard. I wondered about the water softener that was installed when we bought the house - now I know, and I'm happy to have it.

We have to keep a stock of distilled water for my wife's BiPAP, so adding a litle extra for my needs is easy. I only use distilled for making developer stock/dilution and as a final rinse for film - everything else seems fine on the house supply. Most stores seem to have it, but supply can be uneven.

I used to work in a university geological lab, and there we used distilled for utility jobs, but deionised for analytical work (AA/ICP). Eventually the distillation system was removed in favour of two stage dionisation because the cost of the resin maintenance worked out cheaper than the electricity.

I might look into a solar still. We have a south-facing terrace and no shortage of sunshine, after all.

DREW WILEY · Oct 10, 2022

Sirius Drinking Glass - yeah, true distilled water just doesn't taste right. Nor does deionized. I grew up with well water which was not only quite hard per mineral content, but further flavor-enhanced by the dead squirrels and lizards which fell in from time to time.

Ariston · Oct 10, 2022

Echoing what others have said, I would try your process with tap water.

I used to buy distilled water because google told me to. Then I tried developing without it and it was fine. What a waste of effort.

Your municipal or well water may not be up to the task, though. Just try it on a test roll (or whatever).

Sirius Glass · Oct 10, 2022

Ariston said:
Echoing what others have said, I would try your process with tap water.

I used to buy distilled water because google told me to. Then I tried developing without it and it was fine. What a waste of effort.

Your municipal or well water may not be up to the task, though. Just try it on a test roll (or whatever).

I have used tap water in the Washington DC area and the Los Angeles area for decades, both of which have hard water, and I have never had any photographic problems.

chriscrawfordphoto · Oct 10, 2022

Distilled water is easy to find where I live. Kroger, Walmart, Walgreens, Meijer, and CVS all sell it. Its about a dollar a gallon.

Sal Santamaura · Oct 10, 2022

chriscrawfordphoto said:
Distilled water is easy to find where I live. Kroger, Walmart, Walgreens, Meijer, and CVS all sell it. Its about a dollar a gallon.

The Walmarts around here sell something that's labeled "for distilled water uses." In other words, not actually distilled water. How is yours labeled in IN Walmarts?

Distilled water -- finding it? Making your own?

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