Water: Distilled vs purified vs everything else

[Kurt]

Not necessarily. Any one can dump whatever into a river up-stream. So, basically a river may contain any number of contaminants. Dechlorinated tap is fine and its what I use.

[kevinkyang]

what about bottled water? it seems pretty clean to me. maybe not though. im just trying to see what i can use around the house before getting tablets. what about drinking water?

[Kurt]

Bottled water is generally tap water. Drinking water? Are you refering to spring water? If so, thats fine.

[Deku]

Where could you find a cheap ro or di water system? Deionizer(di?)

[Paul Rust]

Where could you find a cheap ro or di water system? Deionizer(di?)

Aqua-Pure has some small systems that would probably be ok because I doubt that they are as efficient with a tiny membrane as some of the large systems like I use. This is a good thing because they won't get all the stuff out of the water.

D.I. water: I have several D.I. water systems and as John pointed out they have significant drawbacks if not installed correctly. An example of one of mine is as follows.

My feed water is ran through 2 GAC (granular activated carbon) tanks.
It is then fed to my 300g storage tank with an Osmonics 23G R/O system.
It is pulled by distribution pumps from the storage tank and pushed through 5 Type II mixed bed D.I. resin tanks. These tanks have both anions (+ charged ions) and cations (- charged ions) and are essentially an all in one tank.
From there it goes through a U.V. sterilizer to irradiate bacteria. U.V. does not kill bacteria, it makes it unable to reproduce.
Lastly it goes through two .02 micron bacteria filters to filter out the bacteria fragments and endotoxins released by the bacteria destroyed by the R/O membranes or lucky ones that survived and were irradiated by the U.V. sterilizer.
Then if flows through a closed loop to the points of distribution (faucets).
Then back to the storage tank to repeat the process.
This sytem takes up the space of an average garage and costs about $100,000.00 to install.
The water produced has a resistivity of 18.2 megohms-cm. This is absolutely pure water which is referred to as Type 1 lab water or reagent quality water or Ultra Pure and is useless for anything but research purposes, the semi-conductor industry or maybe lab sterilizer final rinse cycles.

There is the crash course in D.I. water. You don't want or need it.
What you really want is a crappy or cheap R/O system that filters out a lot but not all of the contaminates.
Or just treat tap water!

[Deku]

@ Paul:Just read that it made my head spin @_@ its too much info to take down on one sitting. xD But I will also try to learn D.I. and R.O. So wh at is a good "crappy" r.o. system? I just want the "best" water for my frogs. I saw a bottle of "fiji mineral water" its expensive but I was wondering if my frogs would like that too.

[Paul Rust]

@ Paul:Just read that it made my head spin @_@ its too much info to take down on one sitting. xD But I will also try to learn D.I. and R.O. So wh at is a good "crappy" r.o. system? I just want the "best" water for my frogs. I saw a bottle of "fiji mineral water" its expensive but I was wondering if my frogs would like that too.

The best water for most people is dechlorinated tap water or water from a well.