tap water versus filtered water - Orchid Board

camille1585 · #1 06-20-2009, 06:26 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zdenglan

Hi all, I have tried to water my plants with water from one of these filtering doodaahs and it was not good. When i used it for misting it left white residue on the leaves. That can't be good for sure. It's mineral salts of some kind that are added during the filtration process. Currently I use water that i boiled over in a kettle. That gets instantly rid of all chlorine and some of the minerals as well. Allways using tepid water that has ambient temperature. My plants seem to be loving that. However thinking about investing into a reverse osmosis kit - that I think is the way to go for totally pure water. Costly though...

The white residues are probably not due to the filter. Filters won't remove much of the calcium in your water. So if your tap water is hard to begin with, filtering it will not made it softer, thus the residues. The residues are just not nice to look at, but they don' harm your plants.
Boiling will not remove minerals either, as minerals are not volatile. If anything, you are concentrating the minerals, as during boiling it's basically pure water which is evaporating. You could also get rid of the chlorine by letting the water sit a few hours, or over night.

RosieC · #2 06-20-2009, 06:32 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by camille1585

The white residues are probably not due to the filter. Filters won't remove much of the calcium in your water. So if your tap water is hard to begin with, filtering it will not made it softer, thus the residues. The residues are just not nice to look at, but they don' harm your plants.
Boiling will not remove minerals either, as minerals are not volatile. If anything, you are concentrating the minerals, as during boiling it's basically pure water which is evaporating. You could also get rid of the chlorine by letting the water sit a few hours, or over night.

I've very confused by this and can only think that the filters common in the UK must be different to those common else where. Our water filter jugs claim to remove limescale (calcium carbonate) and to soften the water.

We use water from one to fill my hubbies coffee machine because it suggests doing so will reduce limescale and so far there has been no sign of it building up in the machine. We are in a hard water area though and the kettle (which just gets tap water) builds up limescale all the time.

It seems really strange to me that the UK has something different as most things are very global these days, but that's all I can think

camille1585 · #3 06-20-2009, 06:45 AM

It depends on the filters too I guess, but if your water is quite hard to begin with, the filters do remove calcium, but I don't think it removes it all. Of course, I may be talking utter BS here since i haven't used a filter since moving from the states 10 years ago. But if that water still leaves residues on the leaves, it's obvious that it was not all removed. Filters may filter things, but they don't make distilled water.