Water

OldMedUser said:

Distilled and RO are virtually the same if treated the same. By that I mean that they get passed thru a carbon filter after they go thru the still or membrane filter to remove any VOCs, (volatile organic compounds). A de-ionizing filter is good to have for post treatment too as it will remove any radical ions from the water for even higher purity. When I make colloidal silver I use Distilled, De-ionized water I buy from the drugstore for about $4/gal. That's about as pure as it can be.

Rain water is not as pure as it picks up all sorts of things in our atmosphere on it's way down. Every drop of rain, or snowflake, needs a particle of dust to form. As it falls it picks up molecules of whatever it hits on the way down. Remember acid rain? That is caused by raindrops picking up things like oxides of nitrogen and sulfur. NOx and SOx which are produced in abundance from burning fossil fuels particularly coal. Since many of the coal-fired power plants have converted to natural gas and vehicles use low sulfur fuels now levels of those compounds in the air have greatly decreased. Rain water is generally slightly acidic and can be as low as 5 in places.

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Bugeye said:

Thanks, good info! The only time I tested my rainwater it was 0 ppm, and 6.0 ph. So what sort of impurities can be found in water that do not show up on TDS? Bacteria, fungal spores, etc.? I would think nitrogen and sulfur would show.

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OldMedUser said:

What might be in your rainwater depends on what is in your air and it will be very dilute and unlikely to be any real concern. 30 years ago if you lived north of the all the coal-fired power plants on the eastern side of the US there was a lot more crap in your air than there is today. They put in all those tall smokestacks long ago to keep the pollutants from falling in the local area. Worked great but all that crap just fell out further north and poisoned the land and lakes in Canada. Need a really tall wall to keep that crap out so when is Trump going to build the northern wall 20 miles high?

Rain water is basically distilled water tho it's oxygen content will be a lot higher. Distilled water should be aerated to get more O2 into it and I use a small air pump to aerate my RO water before giving it to my plants just to make sure it has as much O2 in it as possible.

Air pollution is everywhere but worse downstream of industrial areas. A lot of the pollution that lands on the west coast of North America comes from China and other countries way across the Pacific that have much more lenient pollution standards than we have here. China tho is going gung-ho for cleaning up their act and are becoming world leaders in non-fossil fuel energy production.

The oxides of sulfur and nitrogen are probably why the pH of your rain water is 6. Distilled or RO water has no real pH until something is added to it as pH is determined by the amount of + or - ions in the water and pure water has none or very little. Put one drop of pH down in a liter of distilled water and the pH will drop. Do that with most tap water and it won't do a thing as there are too many ions already in it for that little amount of acid to make a difference.

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