Actually they can be but I don’t think it is cost effective. New replacement radiators are cheap.
Ray talked to a chemist and those guys work with test tubes in laboratories with their white coats on. But we Chemical Engineers work in the real world. ChemE’s deal with fluids and corrosion all the time.
So with that, I say you’re washed up: mix your coolant with the best water you can get - dionized good; distilled better. The coolant manufacturers use treated water in their mixes. Besides, once you mix the water with Prestone or whatever, it isn’t hungry any more because it’s all mixed together in the solution.
And a more important thing you didn’t bring up is that US water supplies are getting harder as the years go by - mineral counts and dissolved solids are rising. Maybe your Boston water is soft, but where I grew up in the southwest, the water was so hard (with calcium) it could clog a radiator in as little as 10,000 miles - I had to buy a new core less than a year after I used city water to flush one when I was young. Big mistake.
If you freeze “Hungry Water”, do you get “Hungry Ice”? (sung to the tune of “Hungry Eyes”)
1 Like
You could just avoid this whole argument and put in Evans coolant (basically propylene glycol) and not ever have any of that corrosive, freezable water in your coolant system.
I had my doubts at first, but after running it now for two seasons in my DD / weekend track cars I am sold. It simply works better. It boils about 100 deg F higher (at about 370 F), and when it finally freezes (or rather gels), it shrinks instead of expanding.
I am a chemist and the term “hungry water” for distilled or deionized water does exist. Almost all water has some ions in it. These ions come from the water interacting with salts and minerals (rocks) and the act of dissolving the salts and minerals. Since distilled or deionized water has no (or almost no) ions in it, it will want to dissolve what ever it comes in contact with until it reaches an equilibrium point. So the distilled water will dissolve some of the aluminum or other metals in the radiator. Whether this would be enough to seriously damage your radiator, I doubt it - you would have to continually replace the distilled water in the radiator for a long time before you saw too much damage.
You are forgetting something, the distilled water is mixed with an antifreeze that has a corrosion inhibitor. I think you will find that the antifreeze will satisfy its hunger, if it does indeed have a hunger.
I think there maybe some confusion here between dissolving and corrosion. Distilled water does not corrode metal as easily as untreated water, it very little to no free oxygen in it. Even salt water that has little or nor free oxygen in it, does not corrode metal. Witness steel ships and metals found in older ships at the bottom of deep oceans where there is little to no oxygen being preserved for decades, even a centuries.
There is some discussion about distilled drinking water leaching minerals out of our bodies. I believe that this is true in extreme cases where a person has a condition that causes them to drink a lot of water. Even those people drinking mineral water will suffer some mineral loss and have to take supplements.
But those minerals in our bodies are in a free form, that is they are available to be absorbed by any liquid. This is not the case inside an engine. Most of the metal inside an engine is bonded to itself. It does not want to go and join up with water. Any free metals such as mineral deposits that may have built up inside the engine would want to dissolve into distilled water, but in our case, that would be a good thing, not a bad thing.
On the whole, I think using distilled water is a good thing. It is not a strong enough solvent to dissolve the “good” solid metal of the engine. It mixes well with the antifreeze. Any corrosion or other reactions that does occur in the cooling system that would create metal oxides or metallic ions that can be dissolved into the water, will be held in suspension and not build up on the tubes of the radiator. It will also hold any metals eroded from the engine in suspension.
I don’t think the question here should be, “Is distilled water hungry water?” but “Is distilled water mixed with antifreeze better for your engine than tap water mixed with antifreeze?” I say the distilled water is significantly better and well worth the effort.
Two things, the city here adds calcite to keep the pH high so pipes are not eaten, low pH would eat the pipes rather quickly.
The older pipes in my house and some of the faucets suffer calcite deposits, which fizz and dissolve in weak acids, that’s how I clean the shower head and why the pressure from the original pipes is not so great.
Second, Cadillac clearly states to use distilled water in the radiator, maybe they know something?
I am more concerned with clogging the radiator with a proper antifreeze water mix with tap water than with feeding hungry ions.
Besides, the radiators here in the north seem to rot from the outside with all the salt used in the winter, they can look fine on the top, but totally rotten at the bottom, and it does not look as if it comes from the inside, as the fins rot along with the tubes. The fins sometimes loosen with age and no longer cool effectively.
Just the same, I am now going out to attach a sacrificial anode to the car body to drag around town. More concerned with the MGB, as I can find the radiator in that car.
Now, where did I put those chains from the farm?
The issue of the corrosive properties of distilled or deionized water is moot here. The water that is used is mixed with antifreeze. So, the question is really which type of water is best used to dilute antifreeze?
According to the Prestone website: “Prestone team highly recommends that shops and DIYers use distilled, deionized or quality soft water during flush and fills to minimize potential contamination. Ions and impurities that are sometimes present in poor quality water can attack and/or adhere to metal surfaces in hot heat exchangers and cause scale build up. Also, some municipal water carries chloride, chlorine and sulfate, which can cause corrosive issues.”
Generally speaking, the idea of “hungry water” is a complicated issue. The corrosive-ness of a particular aqueous solution depends on not just on the amount of dissolved salts, but also their composition.
I’ve seen deionized water eat away at aluminum in a system where the water was continually deionized to keep its conductivity down. But as others have said, it a radiator it would rapidly reach equilibrium. So I think the benefit of starting with non-corrosive water might outweigh the small “hungry water” effect.
gtv2000. I doubt the deionized water is responsible for the erosion of the aluminum in your system. The deionization process itself could have been setting up a galvanic action that caused ions of aluminum to migrate to some other metal part in the system. If you had copper pipes, they probably have a plating of aluminum by now.
I’ve seen tap water (from a well) eat right through copper plumbing pipes in 10 years. I had 16 patches on my pipes before I replumbed my house.
I’ll stick wil distilled water, thank you. Not deionized water, distiilled water.
I feel for you, I had eh same thing happen to me. Turned out to be a defective backflow preventer in the well that pumped air into the water. I ended up replumbing the whole house with cpvc.
Just bumping this back to page one for comparison to the 2009 thread.
In my biology lab we have two sources of water, reverse osmosis (RO) purified and “ultrapure.” The purity is measured in resistivity (ohm-cm). Really pure water has very high resistivity–it does not like to conduct electricity because it has very few dissolved ions to carry the charge.
Tap water is typically 2000 ohm-cm. RO and distilled water are between 20,000 and 200,000 ohm-cm. The ultrapure water (which is made by taking the RO water and passing through a series of ion exchange columns and filters) is 18 Mega ohm-cm! That is, it contains 2 orders of magnitude less dissolved ions than distilled or RO water.
Ultrapure water is indeed “hungry”, and can strip ions out of stainless steel. Every piece of equipment we have recommends using distilled or RO water (to prevent scaling) BUT NOT ultrapure water.
In an auto shop or average home, tap distilled water or reverse osmosis water from a home water purifier is not pure enough to be “hungry” and is fine for radiator use.
The rationale for distilled water is not so much whether it’s “hungry” or not. My understanding is that it has to do with the fact that water is an excellent solvent for many, many things, so standard tap water, even though it’s safe to drink (potable) still has lots of dissolved minerals in it. Some of these minerals give the water its taste, and some may even make the water better for human consumption. The problem is that when water evaporates or boils off, the minerals are left behind, and are thus more concentrated in the water that remains. If enough water evaporates or boils off, the water can be so over saturated with minerals that they come out of solution, causing scale. This is really bad in a radiator, and will clog up the passages and coat surfaces that will reduce the efficiency of the cooling system. This is less of a problem with modern cooling systems, which are tighter, and don’t lose nearly as much coolant as used to be the case, but the prudent approach is still to use distilled water, which doesn’t contain minerals, so there is nothing to worry about if some boils away.
My Roenta steam iron directions say use tap water only.
You’re welcome.
To thechums: I suspect they want to sell you more steam irons. ; - )
BTW, in the days of steam engines that ran the rail roads, they used massive amounts of water (it was, after all, a STEAM engine), and scale build-up of a major problem. The scale would clog up all of the pipes, and engines had to be constantly rebuilt.
joedcorn,
Pure water is harder to boil. The dissolved minerals in tap water act as nucleation sites for the formation of bubbles. Really pure water has a hard time making bubbles. If it doesn’t boil, it becomes superheated, then when bubbles are introduced (such as by bumping the iron down hard), a sudden surge of steam forms that could spray out of the iron unexpectedly.
This can also happen if you try microwaving purified water in a very clean cup. You’ll swear it should be boiling by now, but it’s not, then when you jostle it or stick in a spoon, it flashes to steam.
Your answer might be right also, but there is a real reason to avoid (or at least be very careful) when trying to boil purified water.
I’d like to read a post from someone who can describe with authority what antifreeze mfrs. have done to account for the varieties of water used for vehicle radiators.
To StrongDreamsWaitHere: Good point about bubble formation. I have seen this type of thing occur in my microwave, even when boiling tap water. It could be an issue with a steam iron, where you wouldn’t want a sudden surge of hot steam after the iron had been sitting undisturbed while heating up – although you’d want to trade that off against the build-up of scale if using water with a lot of mineral content. On the other hand, not having the water easily boil (off) would appear to be advantageous in a car’s cooling system. Given that the car’s system is sealed, and the car is constantly being jostled around while driving it down the road, I would not think that distilled water would create the type of problem you’re discribing in this application.