Distilled Water 7.4 PH??

[spyvsspy]

G'day everyone. Today I went and picked up some grocery store brand distilled water and PH tested it before I added anything. To my surprise it read 7.46. Just to be sure I calibrated my meter and tested another fresh gallon- same reading. I live at almost 6,000 feet above sea level, and I talked to one of my friends who has been doing this a while and he said the altitude causes the PH of even distilled water to rise. Anyone ever heard of this??

 

[Mackawber]

rather odd, isn't it? Most people say their distilled comes in slighty acidic because of carbonic acid. Add a couple of drops of phosphuric or nitric acid (pH down). Or switch brands.

 

[spyvsspy]

Yea i thought distilled water is supposed to be 7.o even. It is definitely a cheap grocery store brand ($.69 a gallon) Weird, wacky stuff.

 

[Wait...What?]

Is it steam distilled, or distilled by reverse osmosis?

 

[Jacksparrow]

I buy Earth2o distilled water from the grocery store, and I swear it tests at like 6.

Im using one of those fish tank "match to the closest color" type testers, and it's bright yellow (6) every time.

I dont really know if it's due to cheap distilled water or what. It was the most accessible option for me regardless. I've just been upping it , adding nutes, then re balancing and it's works great.

 

[Wait...What?]

Not relevant to whom? And you know this how?

I'm betting that its RO filtered and wasn't filtered quite enough to remove everything.

Steam-distilled is a more expensive, albeit more reliable distillation process.

Spyvsspy, did you take a TDS reading? Was it non-zero?

The process is not relevant.

MT

 

[spyvsspy]

It just says "Distilled and Ozonated for Purity." Its' cheap grocery store water and I'm betting it's distilled by RO. I'm not too sure what a TDS reading is, so I'm guessing that I didn't take one. I used my old reliable PH pen, which I calibrate frequently and that is all I used to measure.

 

[marx2k]

Distilled is distilled. Reverse Osmosis is RO. RO is not distillation. It is filtration. TDS = Total Dissolved Solids. You can use a TDS meter to test for so many parts dissolved solids per million. My reverse osmosis comes out at 12-15ppm. That's down from 350+ppm hard water coming out of the tap. Distillation I think would bring it down even lower (Should be -1ppm), but it's expensive to do, the plants don't require it and I read it can leach your body of it's own nutrients when you drink it a lot. But that could just be one of those craaaazy studies.

The RO system I got was $100, 6 stage, attaches to sink and does 55gpd. Best health and plant investment I ever made