Water quality

GeorgesGiralt · Jan 5, 2005

Hi Dave and Jim !
THe problem is bacteria. Your de humidifier is in a dark wet basement. You may have some sort of bacteria or fungus in the water. (does the water smell ?)
When I was young at my camera club we mixed old recipes ..... And we used boiled water. Boilling water remove hardness, drives dissolved gasses out and help coagulate the organic stuff in it. This water was filtered using coffee filters and used for dev. mixing. We had very good keeping properties doing so.

Claire Senft · Jan 5, 2005

Water filters

One of the best purchases i ever made was to put water filters on my darkroom water lines. I was getting particulate matter from the house's water supply. Since adding 5 micron filters that problem is gone.

jp80874 · Jan 5, 2005

We have awful well water out here in the country. Its been tested safe to drink, but we dont like to. We drink bottled water from 5 gallon jugs that a service delivers. The house has a water softener. If I remember to get salt it works. I have added a 1 micron filter for the cold water going into the darkroom. I need to locate a filter that will work at the hot water temperatures. Normally when I fill the CPP-2 Jobo to even all chemical temperatures I fill several 1 gallon jugs with cold filtered water. By the time I develop the B&W film, the gallon jugs have warmed up to close to room temperature, warm enough for the wash cycles. The empty gallon jugs formerly had distilled water in them so I know they are clean.

There still seems to be a speck or two of grit after the wash cycles in the Jobo. I now use a gallon of distilled water with a drop or two of Photo-Flo in a final 30 sec wash in a separate stainless tank. As you probably know, you are not supposed to use Photo-Flo in the Jobo. Now the 4x5 negs look clear and clean. I will be adding 8x10 this week. I just got a taller 8x10 stainless tank down at the eBay store to use for the final wash.

As Dave Miller suggested hanging the film out to dry can be a dust problem. My solution is a portable canvas storage closet that Bed Bath & Beyond sells here. It is the size of a single bed mattress. To give a narrow profile it stands vertically on a wheeled frame in the guest room. The canvas lets the moisture out while filtering the outside dust. When guests come, they flock here for the water tastings, we wheel the storage container/film dryer into my wifes painting studio. She is entertaining then, not painting. We could also put it in the darkroom, but that is three flights down in the basement.

To help maintain our fine quality of water the Photography Department at the local university lets me dump my spent fixer in their silver reclaiming process. If I dont take any summer courses we have a few gallons stored up by September, but we got jugs galore.

John Powers

gainer · Jan 5, 2005

modafoto said:
About water:

A wise danish man onde said:

"I will not drink something a long-haired hippie once walked on..."

Are you sure he wasn't talking about wine?

gainer · Jan 5, 2005

My well water is hard but tastes good. The well next door is sulfur and iron water. Go figure. If I am using a borate or TEA as base, I use well water. It precipitates a lot of calcium-magnesium carbonate in something like D-72, so I either use rain water, dehumidifier water or Calgon in the well water.

Hard water is said to be good for the heart. A travelling salesman tried to sell me a water softener once. He put on a show by dropping stuff in my well water. He said "Would you drink that sludge?" I said "Not after you put that stuff in it. What is that sludge?" He said "Calcium and magnesium. Your water is very polluted. It has 1 gram of calcium per gallon." I went and got my bottle of calcium tablets and said "You mean if I drink a gallon a day of this polluted water I won't have to buy these pills?" He went off sadly.

johnnywalker · Jan 5, 2005

modafoto said:
About water:

A wise danish man onde said:

"I will not drink something a long-haired hippie once walked on..."

And God only knows what the fish do in it!

John_Brewer · Jan 5, 2005

Dave Miller said:
I can confirm this, I now use bottled water from my local Tesco supermarket. At 18p per litre it doesn't add much to the cost of film developing, but does save on spotting time.

That's a good idea i'll use from now on. Much cheaper than de-ionised water. The water in Bristol is so hard it almost comes out the tap in lumps! Make great tea though.

Aggie · Jan 5, 2005

Morten, In the late 60's I was refused water on a ferry to Copenhagen. They told me I could habe beer or soda vand, becasue water is what the ship was sailing in.

Kirk Keyes · Jan 5, 2005

GeorgesGiralt said:
Hi Dave and Jim !
Boilling water remove hardness

This statement is wrong. Hardness is defined as the combined concentration of calcium and magnesium ions in the water. Boiling will not remove these ions from water.

Kirk - www.keyesphoto.com

jcausey · Jan 5, 2005

So, here's a question from someone who's been doing a lot of dfilm evelopment at home and is trying to settle down his techniques to a consistent grind:

I've been using distilled water for all chemistry mixing, prewets, rinsing, etc to avoid any problems, and have had good luck with avoiding particulates on my negs, spotting, etc. However, as you can imagine, the costs of distilled water, while not earth-shattering, are also not insignificant.

I've been considering refilling my distilled bottles with filtered water from the supermarket (much cheaper), which should deal with the particulates. Is this a good/bad idea?

If I were to test either this filtered water, or my tap water, for its suitability in photographic uses, how should I test it (I'm assuming PH strips would be a good start), and what should I test for? Could taking my water to the local water authority for an analysis be a good step as well?

jp80874 · Jan 5, 2005

Try using distilled in just the final wash as I mentioned above. This cleaned up the small amount of grit I had and probably cut the price by 95%.

John Powers

Bob F. · Jan 5, 2005

Boiling will make some of the minerals fall out as a precipitate which can be filtered out. Possibly the ions recombine at the higher energy levels to form solids? - dunno, not a chemist, but it does happen - have a look in the bottom of your kettle. Don't know what percentage of minerals are extracted in this manner tho...

Boiling drives out oxygen and other gasses such as chlorine and whatever other gunk the authorities put in the water to make it safe to drink, and kills live organisms. Personally, I use whatever comes out the tap except for mixing stock solutions and a final film rinse, for which I use de-ionised water from the local car spares centre. Possibly if I was more concerned, I would use it for making up the working solutions and pre-soak too, but I'm not, so I don't... I did get drying marks occasionally before I started using de-ionised (+ wetting agent) for a final rinse but do not any more.

Cheers, Bob.

gainer · Jan 5, 2005

Kirk Keyes said:
This statement is wrong. Hardness is defined as the combined concentration of calcium and magnesium ions in the water. Boiling will not remove these ions from water.

Kirk - www.keyesphoto.com

That of course explains why the pot I boil water in is always coated with white stuff. Only the molecules are removed, not the ions.

Ole · Jan 5, 2005

gainer said:
That of course explains why the pot I boil water in is always coated with white stuff. Only the molecules are removed, not the ions.

Boiling water vaporises some of it, raising the concentration of salts. Boil emough (or have hard enough water), and you get a saturated solution with some salts falling out as solids. So even if some solids are removed, the water ends up with MORE salts in it.

There are also some salts that are more soluble in cold water than in hot - gypsum (calcium sulfate) is an example. Heating water with dissolved gypsum makes a lot of it fall out. Some of it can then dissolve again as the water cools...

Shmoo · Jan 5, 2005

Who would have thought that water theory would come up with so much info? Oh well, for what it's worth, I found that I only need distilled water for the final rinse. Using the distilled water in the rest of the procedure caused me to under fix my film (purple-pinkies). Using the same fix bottle with regular tap on another set of the same type of film did not result in this problem. Go figure...

S

TPPhotog · Jan 5, 2005

Shmoo said:
Who would have thought that water theory would come up with so much info? Oh well, for what it's worth, I found that I only need distilled water for the final rinse. Using the distilled water in the rest of the procedure caused me to under fix my film (purple-pinkies). Using the same fix bottle with regular tap on another set of the same type of film did not result in this problem. Go figure...

S

I quess it's similar to a friend who used to travel widely as a photographer. He has used clean river water (ie no scum floating on top) to sea water to process his negatives depending on where he was at the time. He always says that the only difference the water made was to the development time not the quality.

Kirk Keyes · Jan 5, 2005

gainer said:
Only the molecules are removed, not the ions.

Ha - good one, Patrick.

Certainly if you are boiling for a long time to where you are actually significantly decreasing the volume of water, you can drop stuff out by concentration. Maybe you could save some energy and not boil your water for so long...

My 18 Ed. CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics lists the solubility of CaSO4*2H2O (Gypsum) as 0.241 g/100 ml at 0C and 0.222 g/100 ml at 100C for water. Not a very significant difference, as there is with most compounds, which actually increase solubility as the temperature of water increases.

While I understand that some people may believe that they are dropping out organic matter by boiling their water, the couple times I'm tested people's drinking water that "looked" like it had organic precips in them (brown, flocculant matter), the material actually tested out to be insoluble silicates that were appearantly tinted brown from small amounts of iron.

My understanding is that if you can drink your water, it is most likely suitable for most every photographic purpose. I understand that Kodak has 3 water supplies available in their testing lab - deionized water, Rochester tap water, and a "worst case drinking water" that they prepare.

Kirk - www.keyesphoto.com

jcausey · Jan 5, 2005

jp80874 said:
Try using distilled in just the final wash as I mentioned above. This cleaned up the small amount of grit I had and probably cut the price by 95%

This will definitely save me a ton of water.

Is it also a good idea to continue to use it in mixing up one-shot developers? I currently use HC-110, and am considering branching out into Rodinal.

gainer · Jan 6, 2005

Kirk said: "Certainly if you are boiling for a long time to where you are actually significantly decreasing the volume of water, you can drop stuff out by concentration. Maybe you could save some energy and not boil your water for so long..."

Actually I have never boiled water to use for photography. I was just making a funny. I had my well water analyzed for safety and it is quite good for drinking. It is a deep well, not easily polluted from the surface. I don't use a detergent in the wash, but do remove surface water with a soft sponge or cloth, which keeps my negatives and prints clean of deposits from the water. Most commercial developers have a chelating agent, and every so often I add some tetra sodium EDTA when I want to use carbonate activators. In print developers, borax also helps. In place of carbonate I often use half and half borax and lye, which is a sort of higher pH version of metaborate.

Tap water in many if not most applications works quite well as long as it is really drinkable. After living here in West Virginia for a while, I went back to civilized Newport News, Virginia and went to wash my face in the lavatory. The chlorine was so strong I wondered how I ever managed to drink it in the 34 years I had lived there. That chlorine makes a difference in the length of time you can leave a print in the wash.

Maine-iac · Jan 6, 2005

gainer said:
Hard water is said to be good for the heart. A travelling salesman tried to sell me a water softener once. He put on a show by dropping stuff in my well water. He said "Would you drink that sludge?" I said "Not after you put that stuff in it. What is that sludge?" He said "Calcium and magnesium. Your water is very polluted. It has 1 gram of calcium per gallon." I went and got my bottle of calcium tablets and said "You mean if I drink a gallon a day of this polluted water I won't have to buy these pills?" He went off sadly.

My experience in Paris was similar; the tap water there was so full of calcium carbonate, that when you drew a glass, you could see little particles of calcium trickling to the bottom; good for the health, but not for clean negs.

I quickly learned to keep a liter of rinse water which was simply tap water with a few water-softening crystals (which one could buy in the supermarket to add to one's dishwasher reservoir to prevent calcification) added. It could be reused a considerable number of times. After final washing, I simply gave my reels a dunking in this softened water, and then as I hung them up, used my two fingers as a squeegee, and voilà! clean negs.

Larry

Lee L · Jan 6, 2005

gainer said:
My well water is hard but tastes good. The well next door is sulfur and iron water. Go figure. If I am using a borate or TEA as base, I use well water. It precipitates a lot of calcium-magnesium carbonate in something like D-72, so I either use rain water, dehumidifier water or Calgon in the well water.

So is there a recommended amount of Calgon per liter of hard water for a final wash, or is that dependent on the concentration of calcium-magnesium carbonate in the water? I've now live in the only location of 7 where I've processed film that leaves a spiderweb of calcium deposits on my film unless I use something other than tap water. I'm currently experimenting with a cheaper local spring water at 10 cents/gallon rather than the river sourced tap water I've been distilling one gallon at a time. I'd like to try tap water + Calgon for washing if that will work, then a final rinse in either spring or distilled water with Photo-Flo or LFN.

If you drive past our city reservoir, you can see a large pumping station with a white sludge pond where they try to get some of the minerals out of the water, but apparently a lot of it remains.

Thanks,
Lee

Kirk Keyes · Jan 6, 2005

gainer said:
The chlorine was so strong I wondered how I ever managed to drink it in the 34 years I had lived there. That chlorine makes a difference in the length of time you can leave a print in the wash.

Patrick - Why is that? How does the cholrine affect the print washing?

Also, most municipal levels of chlorine should be around 1 mg/L or less. The Maximum Residual Disinfectant Level (MRDL) - The highest level of a disinfectant allowed in drinking water in the US is 4.0 mg/L. It doesn't take much chlorine in the water to smell it.

modafoto · Jan 6, 2005

Aggie said:
Morten, In the late 60's I was refused water on a ferry to Copenhagen. They told me I could habe beer or soda vand, becasue water is what the ship was sailing in.

Yes, that's the danish way! Danish beer is great! Forget about Carlsberg and get hold of some beer from the new and smaller breweries.

Morten

gainer · Jan 6, 2005

Chlorine softens the emulsion. I noticed that if I left a print in the wash water it would keep its emulsion on longer here in my well water than in the chlorinated water I had in the city. That city water was hard also, so I'm pretty sure calcium and magnesium content is not the difference.

Hard water, I have read, is better than soft for print washing, at least up to the final rinse. Sea water is better yet, they say. Who are they? Every paranoiac knows.

Paul Howell · Jan 6, 2005

It my understanding that during WWII some of the large US Navy ships were not always able to distill water to wash prints and prints were washed in sea water. After the war the Navy discovered that the prints that were washed in salt water held up much better than prints that were washed in distilled water. I read somewhere that this lead to the development of hypo clearing baths.

I have worked in military labs that had the best water control, Deionization ph balanced, and I worked in many 3rd world countries with some of the worst water in the world. During the Vietnam conflict the North Vietnamese photographers would develop their film at night and used running streams to wash their negatives.

I now live in the desert southwest and we have very hard water. After a lot of trial and error I now use distilled water for film developes and my final rinse with a wetting agent. I use tap water for prints. It seems to work for me.

Paul

Water quality

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