De-ionized water for phrags?
 

I am trying to spread the joy of orchids to my husband. He has a few phrags of his own. Someone told us water from his many aquariums was great for the chids. The plant died and someone else said it was "salts". Hmmmm:scratchhead:Today he came home with an empty Coke bottle that was filled with "de-ionized water". I'm not too sure about this, but said I would ask on the forum-- Anyone know what that is and if it would be good for the phrags??:hmm

It should do just fine provided you use a fertilizer that supplies all the trace elements. I would also suggest that you might want to check the pH if you can as deionized water is usually quite acid. You might want to check with Ray as to the best fertilizer to use.

I only use rain water on my phrags because they are sensitive to salts and hard water (as a matter of fact all my orchids :))

Sounds like a reasonable and logical way to go Tom. I'm afraid that rain water would be quite a problem here. Our total rain fall for last year was less than 4 inches!!! It seems a real shame that orchids can't thrive on dust!

RO water or Distilled Water are other choices.

Where did he get the de-ionized water,I know for a fact that it is a very expensive process to produce, true de-ionized water is like the opposite of Gatoraide,it has absolutely nothing in it.If a person was to drink it, it would do the exact opposite of Gatoraide,I mean it would suck out the minerals and electolites from your body until the water was stabilized.
You would have to add everything to the water/fertilizer mix to provived the proper nutrients for your plants.
Simplest explanation of de-ionized water is RO water with all the minerals and electrolites removed.

Wow, he just brought a bottle of it home from work. Said something about a "cartridge"...do you know what that means? Anyway, doesn't sound like it would do too much for the phrags...Thanks for the information:)

I don't know what your husband does, but I'm guessing a type of manufacturing, as de-ionized water is probably the purest form of water and is used as a cleaning solvent on very sensitive products, it will not leave any residue and because it has nothing in it, it acts like a sponge and will suck-up any contaminates on the part.

The cartridge that he refered to is probably one of the many filters in a de-ionazation system.

I hope this is not a duplicate post-I am having computer problems today. Anyway, my husband works in the photograpic department of an industrial screen-print company. What you say about a pure solvent to be used on sensitive materials makes perfect sense. However, I don't think it will do anything for the phrags and we now have a good excuse to collect rainwater. (Someone told me that was illegal in Colorado?)
Thanks again for your explanation--much appreciated!

Think of deionized water as an "extra pure grade of distilled water that has been purified without heating it". As Ross said, RO or distilled are alternatives. Collected rain water would also be an excellent alternative. Many people who have only a few orchids find that the "under the sink" RO system they have for producing drinking water also works well. Regardless of which method you use, deionized, distilled, RO, or rain water, you really need to use a fertilizer which contains the necessary trace elements. Any of the above methods of providing suitable water should work fine.