Is 80f too warm to develop?

Hi folks. I’ve been developing my B&W film at home again for the past couple months and, for the most part, am enjoying the process along with the cost savings.

The issue:
My “cold” tap water comes out of the faucet at 79.5°f here in Hawaii. I have been using a plastic storage tub to create an ice-water bath to bring everything down to ~68°, which works but it’s a bit of a pain to do so often.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that my tap water is also very hard. (When I tried to do my final wash with it, the negatives came out very spotty even with the use of Photo-Flo.)
I now use distilled water to mix with my developer and to do the final wash and photo-flo.

So that means I have;
A one-gallon bottle of tap water for stop bath and for the first part of the final wash (fill & dump immediately 3 or 4 times),
A one-gallon bottle of distilled water to dilute my Xtol and for the final wash and wetting agent,
A 1-liter bottle for my developer,
A 900ml bottle for my fixer, all sitting in the water bath. Juggling the timing of getting everything to the right temp is taxing. While I don’t get too precise about everything being at the exact same temperature, I do try to keep the water jugs and developer within a degree of each other. The fixer I will allow to be within a few degrees of the rest but since I’m going through all the effort I usually get to about the same temperature anyway.

All that being said, is 80° an acceptable temperature for everything to be at? I know there are time/temp conversion charts but some don’t show 80°. When I googled it, the AI result says it’s not recommended but these new AI search results are often wrong.

So what is your experience? Do any of you live in the tropics and deal with 80° water?

I’m thinking of getting an aquarium chiller so I can let the machine do the work for me so I don’t have to keep screwing around with ice cubes… and hot water when I let certain things get too cold.

Thanks,
José

All of the Ilford developer data sheets recommend no higher than 79f. The Morgan & Morgan Darkroom Book has a recipe for a special tropical developer Kodak D-15. They recommend it for temps as high as 95f

No worries. Way back when a hardening bath was required to prevent damage to the gelatin (emulsion) of the film. Consider the temperatures used for color processing.

Also you can develop at 75°F and wash in warmer temperatures.

Avoid developing times so short (under 4 minutes) that you get frazzled.

Using diluted developers, like D-76 1+1, XTOL 1+1, helps to stretch out the time.

I live in the Southwest US. It is hot in the summer, both the room and my tap water are warm, and my tap water is very hard. It's fine to drink, but it's rather hard for film developer.

I mix developer stock solution with room temperature distilled water. This is say 82 F. I usually use a 1:1 working solution, and while diluting I put some tap water ice cubes or tap water that has chilled in the refrigerator in it as part of the dilution. This makes it easy to bring down to about 75 F, which is well within the range of developing charts and so on. 80 F would probably be okay, but it is not hard to hit 75 F. I don't care about mixing some tap water into the developer working solution: it's usually less than half, and even a half-distilled, half-very-hard solution is only mildly hard. If I really wanted to fuss over this, I could chill a gallon of distilled water in the fridge, and use that plus room temp water to make a full distilled solution.

I use tap water for the stop, fix, wash-aid, and water wash. I figure 80-85 F is fine for those. I haven't had any issues due to the hardness. I also do not worry about modest temperature changes like moving film from a 75 F to an 85 F solution, especially not with a modern emulsion.

I use room temp distilled water for the last stage, the Photo-Flo. I don't squeegee, just hang it up to dry.

I have used 80 degrees with T-Max films with out problems. Not Foma though. You will have to dilute your developer, otherwise the times get too short.

I keep cold distilled water in the fridge and use it to mix water to a reasonable temperature immediately before starting processing film.

retina_restoration said:

I keep cold distilled water in the fridge and use it to mix water to a reasonable temperature immediately before starting processing film.

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This. I do the same.

Right now cold comes out of my tap at about 32C (90F). So the very first thing I do is mix up my developer and stick in in the freezer. Then I get the film holders, and dev tank, go in my darkroom and load them. Then I fill it with water as a pre wash (the 32C water). My other chemicals are room temp which in the summer if 25C (77F) but I since those run to completion, and modern film seems really hard to reticulate, I just use it as-is. Usually by the time all the prep is done the dev is close to 20C. I only use distilled water for the the last photo-flo bath.

Where I lived until last year the tap water would get to 84F.
As the interior of my house was usually around 75. If the tap water was above 80F I would just fill a jug of water and leave it on the counter for a few hours before mixing up my developer.
Once it was below about 80F I’d be good to go and adjust the development time according to the Ilford chart.
What is the temperature in your house, could you try the same?
Now that I’ve moved I have the opposite problem.

ags2mikon said:

I have used 80 degrees with T-Max films with out problems. Not Foma though. You will have to dilute your developer, otherwise the times get too short.

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I don't expect 80F/27C will be a problem for Foma films either. You're right about development times.

The main issue with very high or very low temperatures IMO is that you run into regions of non-linearity. E.g. take this often-cited figure from p.449 of Mees based on work by Ferguson and Howard in 1905:

What this shows is that the compensation for variations in temperature are non-linear to begin with (note the non-linear scale of the vertical axis), but that for some developing agents, the compensation factor even expressed as a log-function won't be constant across a wide temperature range. To make matters worse, the temperature compensation isn't the same for all materials (films, papers) either.

Within a reasonable temperature range and accepting a certain fudge-factor, tables like the Ilford compensation table/chart can be used. It won't be exact science, since as indicated above, 'it depends'. However, the question really is what level of exactness you're after. Personally, I wouldn't hesitate to develop my B&W film at 27C if that's the water temperature I happen to get out of the tap. I would do so in the awareness that my negatives would be a little 'off' - but that scanning as well as printing on variable contrast paper would allow me sufficient flexibility to deal with that slight problem. On the other hand, I'd hesitate to develop in temperatures significantly below the standard 20-22C: it's all too easy to heat half a cup of water so a jar of 20C can be mixed, and there's a limit to my patience waiting for my film to develop...All of which goes to show that IMO this is really a practical consideration for the most part, and not a very theoretical/fundamental one.

When I lived in Turkey the Spring to Autumn water temperature was a constant 27°C (that's 80.6°F), so I always processed at that temperature. I never had an issue and in fact it was easy to keep to within +/- 0.2°C of that 27° because that was roughly the ambient room temperature. I used a digital thermometer.

Ian