De-ionised water - where can I get a few gallons cheaply?

try your local motor factor, we get 25 ltr barrels for a customer that's uses it in her steam machines, laundry business.

Do you know someone with a dehumidifier ? Pints and pints of the stuff poured down the sink every few days, probably. (I'd filter it if I was being really cautious as it could be marginally dusty.)

If you have a fridge that you manually defrost, save and thaw the accumulated ice. Its pure deionised water.

Slurp

We just fill up a plastic container with water from our rain barrel, seems to work OK and hasn't caused any problems in a couple of regularly used steam irons.

Isn't that distilled water not deionised?

Malc wrote on Tue, 11 Oct 2005

Which is what he asked for?

Typically with half a handful of breadcrumbs, and a few frozen peas :-p

Oh bloody hell, there goes my selective reading again. I saw the deonised bit but missed the distilled completely.

heh heh - we suffer from gravity in our house and use the ice from the top of the ice box which seems to avoid the normal fallout.

Slurp

^^^^^^^^

No its not!. Its distilled.

Dave

So when water freezes, all the ions freeze inside it?

Water jug filters take the calcium out, done a world of good to my kettle - I know its not the full deionised thing but if your in a fix.....

Ad

Carry on using tap water and descale it occasionally? Or am I missing the bigger picture?

some tumble dryers produce it dont they ?

Pete.

On Thu, 13 Oct 2005 15:35:57 +0000 (UTC), Pete wrote: snip distilled water sources

They use a spray of cold mains water directly into the condenser. So the condensate is mixed with hard water and of no use.

A gas condensing boiler or fire will produce distilled water from it's drain. CH4 + 202 = C02 + 2H20. Condensate directly from burning gas is how a lot of distilled water is made for schools and colleges as the lack of a boiler means it's not a "still" so they don't have the trouble of customs and excise inspections to check it's not been used for anything it shouldn't.

The message from Peter Hill contains these words:

Mine doesn't. Nor any of those I've dismantled in the past. Just pulls the incoming air through a heat-exchanger which is sufficient to condense enough of the water out of the exit stream to be good enough.

Well, yes, I did that before and it kind-of works. But the descaler never seems quite as effective as I would like, and the "semi-removed" stuff tends to come out later as a grungy brown mass - inevitably while ironing something white...

Generally, thanks for all the help and suggestions, that's given me some ideas to try!

Tony

This may seem like a stupid idea, but when my kettle recently needed descaling and I didn't fancy dumping copious amounts of chemicals into something I was later going to drink from, I thought back to my science lessons at school and what liquids used to disolve teeth and bones when left over night (I'm sure there's some calcium connected train of thought in there somewhere).

Vinegar had a slight impact, but not much, even after boiling,

A fizzy drink however (Aldi's lemonade no less!) stripped it clean as a whistle.

No guarentee it'll work for you, but worth a try. You'll have lovely lemony smelling clothes to boot...