I was looking at a bottle of purple ice kind of like water wetter and they say to use filtered drinking water not distilled water. Fwiw

 

Not quite but like I said, distilled is good enough. Hell filtered bottled water is better than tap. We use condensate from our steam which is distilling. But our steam is from deionized water already. Basic rule is the cleaner, the better.

 

OK...you guys have valid points that can't be argued. We use DI water here at work as well (We have our own DI plant built into the building for our silcon wafer fab). I've always avoided using it around most reactive or moderatley reactive metals because it does pull ions from them to reach a state of neutrality (I guess this isn't corrosion in its most technical definition). With coolant added to it, that would likely satisfy it as well as balance it's PH.

For those wondering about the difference between DI and distilled:

From Wiki:

Deionized water, also known as demineralized water / DM water (DI water, DIW or de-ionized water), is water that has had almost all of its mineral ions removed, such as cations like sodium, calcium, iron, and copper, and anions such as chloride and sulfate. Deionization is a chemical process that uses specially manufactured ion-exchange resins which exchange hydrogen ion and hydroxide ion for dissolved minerals, which then recombine to form water. Because most non-particulate, water impurities are dissolved salts, deionization produces a high purity water that is generally similar to distilled water, and this process is quick and without scale buildup. However, deionization does not significantly remove uncharged organic molecules, viruses or bacteria, except by incidental trapping in the resin. Specially made strong base anion resins can remove Gram-negative bacteria. Deionization can be done continuously and inexpensively using electrodeionization.

 

Yeah, distilled water is sans bacteria, viruses and microbes. Deionizing processes don't remove these. That's the primary difference between the two. Deionized water will have fewer minerals in it because of the process it undergoes; distilled water is soft, but it's "clean" in terms of us being able to drink it. I wouldn't drink deionized water from any of the plants these guys work at.