"Doug Kanter" wrote in
:


"Salty Thumb" wrote in message
newst4ud.3318$N%6.1832@trnddc05...
"Doug Kanter" wrote in
:

Jim, you're as mixed up as I am!

Boiling water will kill microorganisms, but it will concentrate
whatever else it contains. That's why chefs will simmer meat or
fish stock if the flavor needs to be concentrated further.
Distilled water was a thought, but I believe it's actually more
volatile than your typical tap water. It'll eat through things, so
I don't want to use it on plants.

true, true, true, true, but cough http://tinyurl.com/3vau4 cough

That explains everything.

I think you will find that although distilled water is more volatile*
(talking about propensity to become vapor) than your tap water, the
difference is neglibile for gardening and most other purposes.

Water is an excellent solvent but to observe a difference in
corrosiveness between distilled and tap water I guess you would need
some cartoonish hyperbole. If anything, your tap water will have non-
neutral pH and so be more likely to eat through things although you may
still need time dilation or Elmer Fudd to see a difference.

Somewhere, you can actually buy distilled water in distilled water-proof
gallon jugs which some people actually drink as if it were regular water.
8^@ So either you're thinking of something other than distilled water or
there is a definition of distilled water that I'm not familar with.

* I thought about it some more, and maybe this is or isn't true. There
is a high school chemistry experiment where you raise the boiling point
of water by adding various soluable solids. I would expect something
similar would happen to a much less measurable degree when you add tap
water residue (not sure about gases) to distilled water, but who knows?
I don't know why volatility is even a concern.