[DeTomaso] Suitability of Distilled Water in Cooling System [WAS: need advice before I cry]

[Garth Rodericks]

<<< If you use 100 AF and mix it yourself use distilled water. Not crap from the city with floured. Lime and probably mind control drugs added in. >>>


From the No-Rosion technical page (http://www.norosion.com/technical.htm):
 
Many people have heard that distilled water is best to use
in a cooling system.  This is wrong, unless a mix of 50/50 antifreeze is
used.  While it certainly is 

true that distilled water’s purity prevents
electrolysis and scale/deposit formation, it unfortunately comes with a
potentially very damaging side effect.  During 

the distillation process,
water is vaporized into it’s gaseous phase, so all impurities are left behind. 
These impurities include a number of minerals, including 

calcium and magnesium
– the two components of “hardness.”  The water is then condensed back into
it’s liquid phase, so the resulting liquid is pure water – 

in fact, some of the
purest water on earth.  The problem is that when water is distilled, or
“stripped” of impurities, the resulting solution is composed of 

chemically
imbalanced “ions.”  This leaves distilled water “electrochemically
hungry,” so it will actually strip electrons from the metals in a cooling
system as it 

attempts to chemically re-balance itself.  As it chemically
removes electrons from the cooling system metals, it does damage that will
eventually lead to leaks 

and system failure.  Using distilled water in
combination with 50% antifreeze is no problem, because the distilled water will
seek and find electrochemical 

balance from the various chemical ingredients in
the antifreeze mixture.  But using distilled water as straight water
coolant, either with or without No-Rosion, is 

strongly discouraged.  
 
 The best type of water to use as coolant is softened
water – especially if you run straight water coolant, without antifreeze. 
During the water softening 

process, the same impurities and minerals are
removed from water as the distillation process – but with one very important
distinction.  Rather than 

STRIPPING the impurities from water, softening
EXCHANGES the impurities with a sodium ion.  The resulting solution is
electrochemically stable and ionically 

balanced, making softened water very
stable, pure, and non-threatening to cooling system metals.  It should be
added, there seems to be a perceptual issue 

with regard to usage of softened
water.  Many mistakenly believe that because SALT is added to water
softeners, softened water must contain salt, a 

substance known to be very
corrosive.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The salt that’s
added to a water softener is NaCl, or sodium chloride.  During 

the
softening process, only the sodium ion is exchanged into the water, whereas
chloride ions are removed when the softener is regenerated.  Therefore, 

softened water does NOT contain corrosive salt.