Distilled water??

[highseraphim]

Hello,

Can I use distilled water? I am just about to begin filling my first tank and don't want to use tap water.

Jeff

[TekCat]

yes, just to be on the safe side, check TDS of distilled water. sometimes it is not as pure as you'd expect.

Another option is to buy RO/DI water from your LFS, they usually charge around 0.20 - 0.40 cents per gallon.

[seatown76]

I agree....I once filled a 20H with distilled that I had purchased and it wasn't even close on the testing.

[highseraphim]

is the specific gravity of distilled water supposed to be higher than tap water?

[Shagsbeard]

I would bet that it would be slightly lower... but not so much that you could measure it without some pretty sophisticated stuff. Of course that depends on your tap water.

[TekCat]

in theory, there shouldn't be anything in distilled water but molecules of H20... nothing else! But, during distille process most use copper pipes, so there will be slight Cu in there; then packaging process could potentially introduce other "stuff".

highseraphim, SG of distilled water, in theory should be 1.0 and tap could be 1.00001. like Shagsbeard said, in our home labs we won't detect any difference. Your best bet is check TDS number.

[r0bin]

If you use distilled, make sure you use a ph buffer, because the ph is very low in distilled water and the buffer in the salt only brings it up to about 7.8. Trust me I have a lot of experience with this and suffered from low ph for years until I figured this out.