Re: Mike's 53 Clipper

Posted by Owen_Dyneto On 2014/12/23 9:15:20

.. is it possible to boil water a few times to get the minerals out? Here in Munich we get our drinking water from the alps, and it is full of calcium. My tea-kettels gets full of white calcium that you need to use vinegar to clean. Can I just boil tap water to make my de-ionized water?

You really want to avoid the use of water high in calcium (so-called "hard" water) in your cooling system for the reason you already note with your tea kettle. Simply boiling water will not change the mineral content.

To keep it simple - deionized water is produced by a chemical process using a chemical resin bed that exchanges harmful minerals and other ions for other ions that are not problematic and it would be the best choice; most (all?) premixed antifreezes use deionized or DI water - check the label. Household water "softeners" are partial deionizers that should effectively remove calcium, magnesium, and other metallic ions though generally not to the same degree as the best deionized water (produced from "mixed bed resins"), I'd think "softened" water from such a system should be fine.

Distilled water is obtained by condensing the steam from boiling water from a vapor back into a liquid, the minerals etc. remain in the boiling pot and do not pass into the steam. I've mixed my permanent antifreeze with distilled water for decades with no problem, though some suggest that being "metallic ion free", it will look to extract metallic ions from the metals of your engine. I'm not really qualified to say whether that is a possibility worthy of concern or not, but I rather doubt it.

I don't know if the anti-corrosion chemical packages in permanent antifreezes have any effect on the deposits that might be caused by hard water, but I'm doubtful of that as well.