Paul Holloway wrote: > Hi List, > > I am a new member and I hope you can settle an argument. > I have been making CS for many years, using deionized water as I live in the > UK where distilled water is hard to come by. > I have now been told in no uncertain terms that it is impossible to make > good quality CS using deionized water, and that only distilled water will do > the job. The deionized water I was using for several years was from the > biochemistry lab I used to work in, and had a resistivity of less than 0.1 > uS/cm (resistance 10-15 megohms/cm), which is at least as good as distilled > water. I now use deionised water that I buy (from my local pharmacy or from > Superdrug), but it seems in every way identical to the lab deionized water - > the initial current is identical and the colour and taste of the resulting > CS is identical. > > Do I really need to start distilling water, or can I carry on using > deionized water? > If I can't use this water, why not, as it is at least as pure as distilled? > Surely it is the purity of the water that maters, not the method used to > purify it.
First of all dionized water is not necessarily as pure as distilled. For instance, if you put sugar in the water before deionizing and distilling, the sugar will still remain in the deionized, but not in the distilled. So the question is whether compounds that may be present in the deionized water could be a problem when making CS. Well, first of all, there are two main problems with contaminates when making CS. The first is that if the compound is ionic, then it will increase conductivity. But since it is deionized, these should not be there, and your conductivity measurements seem to confirm this. The second is are there ions available for the silver to react with, such as chlorine, the ammonia radical and so forth. Once again, those compounds and radicals will generally be ionic, and as such would have been removed. So my opinion is that deionized water should work fine for making CS. If you can end up with a clear batch with a good tyndall then I believe that would be the proof of the pudding. Marshall -- The Silver List is a moderated forum for discussing Colloidal Silver. Instructions for unsubscribing are posted at: http://silverlist.org To post, address your message to: [email protected] Silver List archive: http://escribe.com/health/thesilverlist/index.html Address Off-Topic messages to: [email protected] OT Archive: http://escribe.com/health/silverofftopiclist/index.html List maintainer: Mike Devour <[email protected]>
