That is rather amusing. “If swallowed, rinse mouth with water” - I could see this turning into an infinite feedback loop. I was annoyed enough about it not listing the LD50 of water to go and look it up - apparently it’s about 90 g/kg. So about 8 L (roughly 2 gallons) for a 200 lb person. A lot, but not as much as I would have thought.
We have a reverse osmosis water filter system that came with the house we bought 16 years ago (the well water is fine to drink but doesn’t taste the greatest). I don’t know how pure RO filtered water is, compared to, say, distilled; but I think it’s pretty pure. So I hope it hasn’t been slowly killing me; I’ve drank a lot of it over 16 years.
I have a RO system at home as well. Tap water tastes pretty awful here so it makes a useful difference. I’m not dead yet.
About the only issues seem to be that they strip out the fluoride, so you need to ensure growing kids are getting fluoride in some form. Also, if you are a total coffee geek, Getting some dissolved solids back into the water improves the extracting process of espresso machines. Usually adding a calcite post filter stage does this nicely. RO systems do need regular maintenance and replacement of filter elements and the membrane to stay working well.
For laboratory work, you can buy benchtop water purification systems like this one:
Thermo Scientific Smart2Pure 3 UV Barnstead Smart2Pure Water Purification System
Type 1 water is pretty much the purest water you can get.
The MSDS for Type 1 water is interesting. They insist no adverse effects are expected, but but if it’s ingested, they’re pretty specific about not inducing vomiting and advise you to seek emergency medical attention.
There is all kinds of crap floating in the atmosphere, and precipitation is pretty good about collecting it on the way down. Rainwater is anything but pure.
Whole lotta crap floating in the air. In fact, crap in the air is involved in making rain.
No. I’ve drunk lab-grade pure water many, many times, pints at a time, with no ill effect.
No, this is silly. Why would you buy an 18MΩ DI water purifier and run it through a pipe that’s dyed for no reason, knowing it will leach contaminants into your ultra-pure manufacturing process? Your bullshit detector should be tingling when you hear this. But that sound is about to get louder:
Nope. I’ve spilled a ton of the stuff on me. It does not tear anything, color or otherwise. It’s the least concerning thing I’ve ever spilled on me in a lab. OK, our BS detector is about to blow up now:
Absolute fiction. Water is not a degreaser at any level of purity unless you’ve mixed it with massive amounts of some other solvent or detergent. And if it were a degreaser, you couldn’t run it through plastic pipes. You’d have to use metallic or mineral pipes which defeats the purpose of having DI water. If you know what “polar solvent” means, then this should have put your bullshit detector on maximum alert.
DI water can cause relatively more mineral leaching, on a very micro scale, relative to tap water. The concern is not that it will cause any appreciable damage, but that it rapidly loses that 18MΩ resistivity as it picks up ions from the piping or other holding vessels, defeating the purpose of having that expensive deionizer. Plus as I mentioned in another thread, the deionization process doesn’t remove bacteria, or organics, or particulates as would normally be done for drinking water.
You are correct that this is probably where the wild stories come from… it’s an example of crazy stuff people are willing to believe about highly resistive DI water. You shouldn’t drink it… it may have bacteria, but don’t worry, it’s not going to strip the lining out of your guts. Or anything else.
Hard to say the veracity of the stories. I was told all of the above by the plant manager who supervised the system. He oversaw the installation of the system when the plant was built and claimed to have witnessed the bleaching out of the piping. They produced many thousands of litres of water a day for a chip plant. The entire system had bleached out long before the rest of the plant came on-stream to use the water. I have heard the same story from other chip manufacturing plants. I saw the piping - it was snowy white.
But I agree, it is just as likely he was just repeating stories that are passed down through the trade that don’t actually have any science to back them up. I was always a trifle sceptical simply because the level of contaminants that arrive in the water once it hits anything dirty will near instantaneously render it no longer pure. I’ve never had any need to mess with 18MΩ water. So it is useful to have something of a reality check.
Hallmark of an urban legend is “I heard it from a guy who claimed.”
Again: do you think a chip fab is going to spend six figures on DI water purifier, only to run it through a $10 pipe that “everyone knows” will leach dyes into that ultra-pure water?
With that thought in mind, can you now think of a better reason that the pipes you saw didn’t have any dye?
However this guy really was the plant manager and really did oversee construction of the plant. He wasn’t just some random guy retelling random stuff. This was retold in person during a private tour he took a few of us on of the operating plant.
I agree that there is some doubt, but I’m not of a mind to just dismiss the entire story as urban legend.
Any claim is “I heard it from a guy who claimed”. I’m hearing from you, you are claiming. It isn’t any sort of hallmark of an urban legend. “I heard it from a guy who heard it from another guy who claimed” perhaps. But this wasn’t. I agree he is likely in error on a lot, but don’t go all urban legend on me. First hand from a claimed eyewitness is not the hallmark of an urban legend.
I have had the occasional glass of pure water and agree with you that it’s fine (and I have never, ever heard any rumours to the contrary—people may be thinking of heavy water), but how do you end up drinking pints of it?
Yeah but I heard it from a guy (you) who heard it from another guy.
This is mostly a UK thing. Folks in the UK just know that drinking distilled water is harmful, just like folks in Korea just know that sleeping with a ceiling fan is deadly. Folks in the US aren’t aware that sleeping with a ceiling fan is deadly so they often sleep with ceiling fans in their room and don’t die. Similarly, folks in the US have distilled water right next to the drinking water in Walmart and drink it all the time with no ill effects.
Tell that to someone in the UK and they’ll say well it must be only very pure water that is dangerous. That’s also a myth.
You’re not going to convince people it’s safe, though, not when they have been taught their entire life that distilled water is deadly.
On the other hand, I hear that the Korean fan death myth is starting to become less commonly believed in Korea, so maybe there is hope after all.
The main reason you’re not supposed to drink the ultra-pure water is just that it’s a lot more expensive than tap water. Even if ultra-pure water were somehow, in some sense, dangerous, it would cease to be ultra-pure so quickly that only a trace amount of harm would be done.
And you’ve been hanging around the political and other CT threads how long? 
People see what they wanna see and hear what they wanna hear.
It’s a common belief in the UK and it’s been making its way around the internet for a while now. If you do an internet search you’ll find dozens of articles about how dangerous it is and almost nothing explaining that it’s actually not dangerous.
“THIS WILL KILL YOU!!!” gets clicks. “Meh, it’s just water” doesn’t.
FWIW, I checked the owner/operator manual (PDF) for the laboratory water purification system I linked to upthread. There are a number of hazards associated with the system itself, but there’s no warning not to drink the final product. Given the tendency for US businesses to warn their customers about even the most trifling of hazards, it seems likely that there really is no hazard at all associated with drinking laboratory-grade purified water
In a geochemistry lab with gallons of it - both Milli-Q (deionized) and quartz-distilled water made on site - thirsty, and too lazy to walk to the bathroom. It was probably slightly bad lab protocol, but everyone did it, from the HoD on down. We used a lot of pure water, for washing crushed rocks and for diluting acids.
Mineral content in water is exactly the kind of thing you don’t want when you’re, you know, analyzing something for mineral content…
As a corollary to “this water is BAD for you”, we have promoters of super-special “healthy” water.
This site is devoted to taking down water scams.
It has now become clear. First, here is the actual quote:
"The team used filtration systems to clear the water. But by the time they were done, it was too pure for human consumption.
`If you actually drank it,” Mark Callan, the deputy ice technician for the curling events, said, “it would burn your insides.’"
So who is Mark Callan? Later in the article, he is identified as living in Glasgow. So this is obviously just something British as suggested above.
Incidentally, the “filtration” described in the original article is actually reverse osmosis. I read about it elsewhere.