Silly me, I always thought that when a cooling system had the proper percentage of antifreeze and water it was a buffer solution...
I guess if you are really worried about carbonates in the system you can always pour in a little EDTA in the mix.
Chris Middlebrook
1962 Custom Southampton
--- On Tue 12/05, James < nyb@xxxxxxx > wrote:
From: James [mailto: nyb@xxxxxxx]
To: mailing-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Tue, 05 Dec 2006 09:07:52 -0700
Subject: Re: IML: distilled or soft water for the cooling system?
I'm curious about the basis for 'Skinned Knuckles' advice. There may be
some reason for using soft as opposed to distilled water hidden in
there, but from a chemist's perspective, the explanation is poor.
Properly distilled water should not have an 'abundance' of ions (for the
record, ions can be positively charged, too!). The only reason I can
see distilled water having an abundance of ions would be if the
distillation system used was dirty, or a poor choice of a condenser
material was used. Yes, distilled water is weakly acidic due to the
uptake of CO2 from the atmosphere and the formation of carbonic acid,
but this is again a weakly acidic
system and in your cooling system will
be offset by the ability of antifreeze to act as a corrosion inhibitor.
For your radiator, I think the author's of 'Skinned Knuckles' forget
that although softened water contains fewer Ca++ and Mg+ ions, it can
still be full of all sorts of dissolved solids. Soft water only refers
to the type of dissolved solids, not the amount. Granted, the biggest
enemy in terms of adding tap water to your radiator is calcium carbonate
deposits, which obviously can't form as well with little Ca++ around.
From a corrosion perspective, adding softened water is really adding an
unknown quantity as its composition depends completely on the tap water
you started with, and that varies a lot from area to area. And, as I
said in an earlier post, the chloride stuffed into softened water by ion
exchange water softeners using sodium chloride is one of the worst
things you could consider adding.
So,
although I'd love to hear if there's some good science behind
'Skinned Knuckles' recommendation, I'm going to stick to using a mixture
of antifreeze and distilled water, with the usual residence time of two
years in my cars.
James
Frederick Joslin wrote:
>
> Pure water is naturally ionized to exteny of 10-7 moles/L.
> In absolutely pure water at a pH of 7 there are 1x10-7 moles of H+ and
> 1x10-7 moles of OH- ions per L.
>
> One mole of water H+ is 1g; one mole of OH- is 17g.
>
> Thus there are a total of 1x10-7 x 18g / L of ions in pure water =
> 1.8x10-6g/L = 7.6x10-6g / gallon
> =.00000024 oz / gal ions.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
>
----------------- http://www.imperialclub.com -----------------
This message was sent to you by the Imperial Mailing List. Please
reply to mailing-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx and your response will be
shared
with everyone. Private messages (and attachments) for the
Administrators should be sent to webmaster@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To UN-SUBSCRIBE, go to http://imperialclub.com/unsubscribe.htm
|
Back to the Home of the Forward Look Network