re: to tap or distill? long (sorry, sort of)

[Jay Negrin <jmnegrin@domain.elided>]

Charlie (Pottree) asks, again, about tap and distilled water, and its
use as a base for coolant, mixed, of course, with the proper stuff in
approx 50:50 ratio.  I will try to answer some of his questions and
comments in the body of his text.

<<Again the question comes up: tap water or distilled water for the
coolant  mixture?

On one hand, the Digest's Leading Water Authority has explained that
distilled water will dissolve anything.  On the other, it is the stuff
already dissolved in tap water like what's served here in LA that I
would be
concerned about.>>

Nothing to be concerned about.  It hasn't done you in, and won't do in
your car, if mixed in appropriate ratio with standard, over-the-counter
glycol coolant.

<<The 50% antifreeze (<obsolete term for poison green antiboil and
antifreezing
cocktail you put in your cooling system, goes by trade names such as
Prestone
and Zarex; someone smarter than I will recall whether or not it is ethyl

glycol, but some Austrian con men poured the stuff into vats of cheap
white
wine several years ago to make the brew seem sweeter and thereby bilk
some
people out of money -- naturally, people were killed and sickened) is
supposed to limit the wtaer's prpensity to dissolve the car... so,
moving on>>

Ethylene glycol is VERY sweet.  High-priced German (and I presume
Austrian) wines are syrupy sweet.  Much easier, and cheaper to make them
sweet with an additive, than actually working the grape for the
product.  Other than going around the very strict wine and labelling
laws, which is a no-no, glycol is, as you said, POISON.  Problem here,
dumping glycol in the street.  Dogs are known to have a sweet-tooth.
They drink the stuff, and over-heat.  Expire.  Double-plus ungood.  In
small amounts, though, glycol can sweeten, and the toxic effects are not
too bad.  Headache, and that sort of stuff, if memory serves.  Ethylene
glycol, by its lonesome, lowers the freezing point and raises the
boiling point of regular water.  I believe the other additives to
coolant, likely as toxic if not more so, do more for anti-corrosion than
the glycol alone.  Someone will correct me if I am wrong on this count.

<<Some places have hard water and some have soft water.  I suppose then
you are
into the realm of the subjective.  Here, the Great Authority calls the
water
rather softer than hard, but to me it s just this side of ice, or
possibly
granite -- at least compared to the baby-soft stuff I knew in other
parts of
the country.>>

Hardness of water is strictly a chemical term.  It refers to the amount
of calcium and magnesium in the water.  Nothing else, really.  The water
can still have a very high mineral content, and chemically, technically,
be soft.  Sodium, iron, manganese, all are metals which have formed
compounds which can be dissolved in water.  Likewise the cations, such
as carbonate, nitrate, chloride, to name a few.  Softened water, by the
way, has just as much mineral content as the hard water you started out
with. The calcium and magnesium ions (hardness, remember) have been
replaced by sodium.  Two sodiums for each calcium or magnesium, but the
way.

<<Here's my own test: say your Alfa was painted a dark color and you
sprayed it
off with the hose to clear away some dust.  If the water then evaporated

leaving a clean looking car behind, I would say that is soft water.  If,
like
here, the water evaporates leaving behind thousands of roundish white
mineral
stains that make the surface of the car look like the surface of the
moon,
and about 25% of the water seems to be dissolved solids, then I would
call
that hard.  If you need to replace all the pipes in your house every so
often
because they develop arteriosclerosis, I would say you live in a hard
water
area.  If it does that to the house, do you want to risk the same
happening
in your Alfa?>>

See above, regarding mineralization, not necessarily hardness.

<<Moral: I have had good resulting with a very standard 50-50 mix of
Prestone
and distilled water and I have also seen an aluminum pot boiling tap
water
spring a leak on the stove.>>

Aluminum is a fairly reactive metal.  It will dissolve more readily in
water (creating that ugly white stuff, aluminum hydroxide) than, say
iron or steel.  It is lighter than iron, so we forgive its propensity to
corrode in normal water.  You want to see something, watch that same pot
leak much sooner if you boil distilled or de-ionized water (same stuff,
only a matter of how you get there) in it.  Thin aluminum pots are made
to fall apart, so we must go out and buy new ones.  Get the ones that
have the hard anodized finish.  Much more imperveous (sp?) than bare
aluminium.  That or stainless, but this belongs on another digest . . .
get it?  ;-)

<<YMMV

Charlie>>

Bottom line?  In the colling system the differences between tap and
de-ionized is small.  Remember you are adding a whole bunch of chemicals
on top of what is there anyway, and in much greater concentrations.  In
a battery, which lives or dies on purity, literally, use di-ionized or
distilled only.  This has been said before on this digest, and maybe
needs saying again.

This guy in the water biz has his own opinions.  As others have said,
you can do anyway way you wish.
Jay Negrin
ARO So Cal

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