Distilled Water

[meatheadmerlin]

Hello All.

I didn't see a specific post on distilled water, so I figured I try to start a discussion.
With the amount of water some of the processes in refining can take, I don't want to be spending a lot of money at the store for distilled water when tap water will suffice. That being said, are there any specific instances that it is absolutely necessary to use distilled water people would like to share?

In the mean time, I was wondering if anyone had suggestions on reducing contaminants in tap water. From what I know, simply boiling the water long enough and filtering once cooled and settled can improve it's purity. This will drive off hydrogen sulfide gas (sulfur smell), most municipal chlorination chemicals (but not fluoridation), and cause some minerals to precipitate on cooling (especially excess calcium deposits).
Can anyone comment on the effectiveness of using water purifiers like softening systems or Britta filters for reducing contaminants? I will probably eventually be making my own distilled water once I get the proper glassware (boiling flask, fractionating distillation column, condenser, ...), as an acquaintance experiment at the very least for my introduction to distillation.

 

[rickbb]

You can remove chlorine simply by letting the water sit in an open container. Heat will also drive it off, no need to get it boiling hot though.

Water softeners, (ion exchange resin beds), will greatly reduce the mineral contents. If you put several in series you can get close to DI water.

Another method is reverse osmosis, forcing the water under high pressure through a membrane with microscopic holes in it that allow water molecules to pass but not minerals.

Unless you plan to generate lots of DI water though, (hundreds of gallons), it's cheaper to just buy it in bulk from a big box store.

You need DI water when mixing chemicals with, and for washing gold and PGM's, not so much for Silver and not for base metals like copper, iron.

 

[goldsilverpro]

The only time I use distilled water is for dilution or rinsing when there is silver in solution. City tap water is usually chlorinated and, therefore, silver chloride will be precipitated, I assume from chloride ions produced from the chlorine. The AgCl clouds the solution and makes it difficult to observe the reaction. Also, if the final silver is cemented and melted, the AgCl will end up in the slag. The AgCl is a pain to deal with. Distilled water is very cheap compared with the high silver values usually involved in the solutions and the hassles that occur if you don't use it.

 

[Westerngs]

I agree with GSP. The only time you really need distilled or deionized water is when working with silver nitrate.

For those that require hundreds of gallons of chlorine free water, an activated carbon filter will work perfectly. No need to pay a water service company for deionized.

If you are trying to make ultra-high purity metals, or analyzing for trace impurities, that is another story, you will need deionized water.

 

[Harold_V]

I refined for years, using tap water (chlorinated) for everything except specific test solutions and silver processing. I didn't even use distilled water when dissolving base metals and silver after inquartation. I knew I'd recover any traces of silver from chloride when I processed my waste materials, which proved to be correct, and to benefit, as it acted as a collector for greater values.

Many suggest that they use distilled or deionized water in place of tap water so they can ensure the quality of their gold. A rather unusual mindset, considering the vast majority of contaminants in water will not report in gold. Water high in manganese or iron might present problems, but such water would also not lend itself to drinking. If your water is good enough to drink, it's more than good enough for use in most operations. Save your money for things that really make a difference.

I don't get it. Some guys obsess over the water they use, then melt their gold in a dirty dish, with a dirty torch. Which one do you think is better?

Harold

 

[nickvc]

A quick cure for those who need chlorine free water in volume for silver refining came I think from 4metals but i could be mistaken, fill a large plastic container with tap water and add a small volume of silver nitrate, stir and allow to settle. This should allow the free chlorine to form silver chloride, decant carefully and save the chlorides for later treatment and your water should now be fine for silver refining.
As Harold pointed out for nearly all refining processes standard tap water will be fine and in some cases such as inquarted gold and PGM bearing scrap a benefit as the silver chloride will carry any Pt with it.

 

[rickbb]

I use DI water simply because I live in the country and have well water.

No chlorine but lots of iron, manganese and other minerals, very hard water.

 

[goldsilverpro]

At my last refinery, I rented a DI water unit, but it was mainly for my 30 gallon silver cell.

 

[JHS]

A funny thing happened on the way to the forum today.
I had a bucket of ap sitting for six months with 50 or so cpu's.
I more or less forgot about it.yesterday,in the process of cleaning up everything,i poured off what was left into a few beakers to filter it.I used a small plastic tub to rince the cpu's in some h2o.had a nice little bunch of foils in the h2o which was a little green from the ap after finnishing the rince.
rinsed the buck with the rest of the foils in the ap.I left the little tub on the bench with the foils,to go and get a bite to eat.
To my suprise when I got back there were no foils in the little tub that had the light green h2o.
I picked up a jug of city water,instead of the di h20.
even with the very small anount of chlorine and small amount of hcl that was in that tub,it put the foils into solution.
I filtered it,put it on low heat and cooled it.I then put .5 grams of smb in it.then went to the house not feeling on the top of my game.
This morning I checked it and had a nice little bit of light brown gold in the bottom of the beaker.
The whole point of this post is that there was a very small amount of hcl/cl in this quart of water and it still reacted.
A simple mistake of h2o but the end result was good.
john
P.S.This happened back in september.If I had filtered the foils before thinking of my stomach, there would have been no problem.

 

[MysticColby]

I happen to have one similar to this: http://www.amazon.com/Water-Distiller-Countertop-Enamel-Collection/dp/B00026F9F8
My Dad had it when he died a few years ago, now I use it and can't live without it.
I found a piece of plastic tubing that perfectly fits into the output, I just have it drain into a 5 gallon water jug that I store until needed (keep refilling until the jug is full).
It works well: fill the pot with a gallon of water, plug it in, press the button, wait ~4 hours, turns itself off. It also helps warm the house on cold days
Pretty sure the electricity to run this is much less than the $1/gallon Safeway charges, but I haven't tested it. I should do that just for giggles... the room heater part will reduce heating costs, so it's essentially free
I use it for basically everything refining-related. dilute solutions, rinse filters, even a quick rinse of glassware after cleaning so minerals don't stick after water evaporates.

 

[saadat68]

Hi
I have some silver source ( see this topic please: http://goldrefiningforum.com/~goldrefi/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=25632&p=272851#p272851 )

I want to boil tap water then wash my scraps with it and let to dry and then go for leaching with nitric acid and distilled water. In this way do I lost any silver or produce silver chloride ?

If we have chloramine in tap water can it make problems like chlorine ?

 

[4metals]

Chloramine needs to be boiled and then sit for a day. The chlorine remains much longer than in regular chlorinated tap water. It is easy to test if you have aged it long enough after boiling, just add a small drop of silver nitrate to the water, if it gets cloudy, it still has chlorine in it.

You need to heat the water to break the ammonia complex, then the free chlorine can dissipate. But it takes time, at least a day. Another trick is to add an excess of silver nitrate to form silver chloride with all of the free chlorine and dechlorinate it that way, but I believe you still have to heat it to break the complex. Seeing as you are using the water to mix with nitric and dissolve more silver anyway, the little bit of extra silver nitrate that was not converted to silver chloride isn't a problem.

A lot of refiners do this with chlorinated tap water in tanks which they allow to settle and decant the chlorine free water off the top. Usually two tanks, one settling and one they are decanting from. When the silver chlorides accumulate on the bottom they can be collected and reduced to silver metal so you are not losing any silver.

 

[saadat68]

Chloramine needs to be boiled and then sit for a day. The chlorine remains much longer than in regular chlorinated tap water. It is easy to test if you have aged it long enough after boiling, just add a small drop of silver nitrate to the water, if it gets cloudy, it still has chlorine in it.

You need to heat the water to break the ammonia complex, then the free chlorine can dissipate. But it takes time, at least a day. Another trick is to add an excess of silver nitrate to form silver chloride with all of the free chlorine and dechlorinate it that way, but I believe you still have to heat it to break the complex. Seeing as you are using the water to mix with nitric and dissolve more silver anyway, the little bit of extra silver nitrate that was not converted to silver chloride isn't a problem.

A lot of refiners do this with chlorinated tap water in tanks which they allow to settle and decant the chlorine free water off the top. Usually two tanks, one settling and one they are decanting from. When the silver chlorides accumulate on the bottom they can be collected and reduced to silver metal so you are not losing any silver.

I read this in a PDF and copy here :

Add ascorbic acid (vitamin C). 1000 milligrams is enough for 30-50 gallons of water.
Instead of crushing a tablet I would suggest adding a tiny amount of powdered vitamin C
to the water. The sites I saw only suggest this for removing chloramine from bath water.
Not sure why. They also don’t say how long it takes for the chloramine to neutralize using
this method. Lastly, the ascorbic acid in vitamin C will lower the ph of your water
slightly. I do not know what effect this will have on your cultures.

 

[heliman4141]

Hello,
Im an old member back after enjoying several Gold recoverys & refines. I have one question ...........I have access to reverse osmosis at .35 a gal. verses $2.00 a gal.of distilled. I had always used distilled in the past in my rinses/washing etc. but, if the reverse water is fine id prefer to go that rout as i use a LOT of water, more then anything else, a penny saved is a penny saved in small recovery attempts. As always the posts here have been great reading especially the vid of the idiot that refined silver in his bathroom indoors with no hood vent.............. good grief!

I hope i can sw to reverse with no issues its so easy to get at my local grocers machine.


Dave

 

[goldsilverpro]

R/O is a lot cheaper - about 25-35 cents per gallon, if you bring your own container. If there are no chlorides in it, it should be fine for silver - I would guess it's OK. We drink R/O almost exclusively, mainly because the brand we use, from Walmart, has about 95% of the toxic fluorides removed.

 

[snoman701]

I'm to the point that I think I'm going to install a reverse osmosis system on the house water (well). I don't have any chlorides, but I've got some really nasty irony scum.

I use a lot of tap water now, but even with that, the distilled water does add up.


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[FrugalRefiner]

I don't have any chlorides, but I've got some really nasty irony scum.

Yummy! It's been a long time since I drank "irony" water. They had irony water at the vet hospital I worked at when I was a teenager. It goes down just fine as long as you're drinking it, but when you stop you start to get a taste in your mouth that's like you just chewed on a bunch of nails.

Dave

 

[snoman701]

I don't have any chlorides, but I've got some really nasty irony scum.

Yummy! It's been a long time since I drank "irony" water. They had irony water at the vet hospital I worked at when I was a teenager. It goes down just fine as long as you're drinking it, but when you stop you start to get a taste in your mouth that's like you just chewed on a bunch of nails.

Dave

I'd offer to send you some for nastalgic purposes, but it precipitates on storage!

Brita works wonders


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[jimdoc]

This is an interesting video on water;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVnXzGaD68M

 

[gcdrummer02]

Those of us in the country can have a lot of iron in our water, which would start precipitating out PM's.