Impurities raise the freezing point of water. Not by much, I should think.
Back to aquariums, some creatures like fairy shrimp will only hatch in spring water, not distilled or tap.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t aquarium fish sort of well known for being susceptible to harm from any sort of sudden, large-scale change? Like being moved from one tank to another with similar water, just at different temperatures.
UV is used as a step in water purification.
However if you use “distillation” as a another step, it becomes redundant.
Distilled water, and plain tap water, for that matter, will “burn” if you put it on an open wound. I think osmotic pressure drags water into the cells, and can burst them.
I first noticed this effect when i had chickenpox as a kid. I had pox (and open wounds) through my esophagus, and it was very painful to drink water. Milk was less painful, and (salty) chicken broth was okay.
(I lived on chicken broth and hard candy for a week.)
I also ran into it once when i accidentally sliced the tip off my finger, and was supposed to change the bandage and clean the wound daily. Mixing some salt into the tap water made the process a LOT less painful.
That makes sense, and as you point out, tap water will do it. If I cut my finger and keep the wound closed and completely dry, it will knit back together almost completely leaving nothing deeper than a scratch. If I wash out the wound, it will heal at a deeper level, but the skin at the surface of the wound, especially the edges of the cut will die back and eventually peel off.
I’m not familiar with raising these creatures, but I suspect that the problem with tap water would be chlorine/chloramine content (aquarists use small quantities of an agent(s) to remove chlorine/chloramine before adding tap water to an aquarium).
From what I’ve heard, hardly anyone changes more than 50% of the existing water in an aquarium at a time, and usually considerably less. Imagine the fun, though, in completely replacing the water with distilled and watching your fish explode.
Nope, lower it. Pure water freezes at 32 F. Water saturated with salt freezes at 0 F. That’s why, when the temperature is, say, 10 F, the city will spread salt on the roads: It’s below the freezing point of pure water, but above the freezing point of salt water, so the salt melts the ice.
Yes, lowers the freezing point and raises the boiling point.
Then why is it desirable to make skating ice from pure water?
Yes, water changes are usually less then half. The same temperature and chemical composition will work, though.
Fairy shrimp won’t hatch in distilled water, either. They require some property of spring water.
I’m not sure that it’s necessarily bursting cells. At wound sites, nociceptors are abnormally sensitized (hyperalgesia), and I think non-isotonic water is more likely to make them fire.
That sounds plausible, too
What i know, from personal experience, is that water with a low level of dissolved ions (like straight from the tap) hurts like billy-o, and water that’s salty (much too salty to drink) doesn’t.
Pure water is hypotonic and therefore will bloat blood cells and possibly fuck up the kidneys if injected by itself without the proper solutes. That one is not a myth.
You are supposed to have proper electrolytic balance in the bloodstream; I know they even sell salt pills for runners and Gatorade and stuff like that; of course, if you wash those down with loads of distilled water then it does not really count as pure water, does it, at least not by the time it hits your bloodstream.
There are a LOT of differences between what’s safe to ingest and what’s safe to inject. Pure, hypotonic water is perfectly safe to apply to your skin or to drink.
Yeah, it could even be as simple as a mechanical effect where washing interferes with the normal wound healing process - fibrinogen and all that.
Fairy shrimp do perfectly well in distilled or rodi water. Here is a site suggesting either distilled or ro water.
http://www.arizonafairyshrimp.com/hatrais.html
Why do people say this stuff about aquariums, freshwater fish and so on. No, your fish won’t explode or die if you use distilled water. If your fish died, it was because you did not acclimate them to the tank or new water. Even if you did 100% water change, you just need to acclimate your fish to the new conditions.
Your fish adapt to the conditions they live in. And if you change it, they may not flourish but they will live.
Personally, i used ro/di water. I would change about 15% every two weeks. And i am getting ready to start up again. Freshwater only this time. Saltwater is too expensive.
A personal anecdote, and I apologize for not providing a cite… A relative of mine had cancer a while back (and has been cured and is doing fine now). After being treated and cured, they installed some kind of drinking water purification system in their home, which involved some kind of super-filtration, treatment by UV, etc. When they stored this water in the fridge they had to use glass containers, not plastic, because the plastic would leach out. This relative’s spouse is a doctor so whatever they were doing was not woo. Anyhow they drank the water and were fine.
This thread inspired me to drink a nice glass of water out of the RO purifier system.
Anecdote or not, bisphenol A has some bans now. (Solubility in water: 120–300 ppm)
Keep in mind that our bodies don’t behave like individual cells in a petri dish; we have osmoregulation and our kidneys adjust water reabsorption to keep the cell chemistry balanced. Ion concentrations are constantly changing slightly as food comes in, goes out, as do various liquids. You only run into problems when the organs or systems regulating that balance are compromised (as with the sick person above who needs to watch their food & fluid intake because their body can’t adjust very much), or when you add or remove extreme amounts of salts that even healthy organs can’t keep up with.
Taking in huge amounts of sea water or various types of freshwater is unusual behavior but it does happen. Your body can easily handle drinking a cup of sea water or distilled water, though you’ll run into trouble drinking 20 gallons of either over 24 hours. It’s not that the water is toxic or even dangerous, it’s that your body can only handle so much of it at a certain rate; and you can exceed that rate by drinking faster than your body can balance your electrolytes. Hell, we regularly splash acid on our food (vinegar) and drink actual poisons (alcohol) recreationally. Either one of those substances are orders of magnitude more dangerous than any form of water, but rather than fear them we often look forward to ingesting them (in non-toxic amounts).
At Petrified Forest National Park the rangers, tired of seeing specimens being pilfered, started a legend that taking items from the park would lead to bad luck. They began getting packages with rocks in them and a note apologizing and listing the calamities that had befallen the sender.
Did he happen to work in Hawaii for a while, too?