RO water in radiator/car engine

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Just wondering if anyone knows if this would be safe (mixed with coolant of course).

I have access to RO water at my work as we have a filtration system that's used to make ultra pure RO water for use in a clean room.

It's free so if it works fine and won't cause issues in a radiator/car then I'll fill up some jugs at work. Need to flush out an engine that's been sitting a while too and don't want to buy 20L of demineralised water if I can avoid it.

Thanks!
 
Just wondering if anyone knows if this would be safe (mixed with coolant of course).

I have access to RO water at my work as we have a filtration system that's used to make ultra pure RO water for use in a clean room.

It's free so if it works fine and won't cause issues in a radiator/car then I'll fill up some jugs at work. Need to flush out an engine that's been sitting a while too and don't want to buy 20L of demineralised water if I can avoid it.

Thanks!
Best to Worst

DI - Deionized
Distilled
RO
.
.
.
TAP.
 
It is equivalent to deionized or distilled water. All those processes remove the undesirable ions. There is no "ranking" between any of them.

Much misunderstanding on this issue and regurgitation of half-truths.

https://bobistheoilguy.com/forums/t...d-vs-kinetico-filtered-drinking-water.208239/
 
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I have used RO water for cooling systems and it worked great I want to say the conductivity of the water was something like 4 micro seimens, very pure water.
 
When I worked in the photo film industry, we used deionized(DI) water.
When I worked in the medical(assay) industry we used reverse osmosis(RO) water.

And over the years going back to the 60s-70s, all I used was garden hose water and I still never had any problems.
Today I buy full strength coolants when possible(non-2EHA chem's) and buy distilled water from W*M.
 
I have a 49 Farmall C, the manual says to fill it with whatever water you can find and then drain the radiator and block before the first hard freeze comes.
I've switched it over to modern spec antifreeze but I sometimes think we put way to much stock into the water that gets mixed with the antifreeze, tap water/well water sufficed for 100 years.

Would be interesting to know if peak/prestone/zerex etc have water distillation plants within their facilities, maybe they get it trucked in, wonder what they use to make the 50/50 mixes.
 
I have a 49 Farmall C, the manual says to fill it with whatever water you can find and then drain the radiator and block before the first hard freeze comes.
I've switched it over to modern spec antifreeze but I sometimes think we put way to much stock into the water that gets mixed with the antifreeze, tap water/well water sufficed for 100 years.

Would be interesting to know if peak/prestone/zerex etc have water distillation plants within their facilities, maybe they get it trucked in, wonder what they use to make the 50/50 mixes.
Prestone states they use "demineralized water" which could be either RO, deionized or distilled. All three remove the ions they wish to remove.

And some tap water is fine, yes. When I lived in the City of Milwaukee and we had Lake Michigan water that was acceptable for cooling systems due to the very low mineral content. But out here in the suburbs there is no way I'd load the chelation agents down with that much hardness. There is no point.
 
The water where I grew up was referred to as, "liquid rock". Everyone had a well.
I refreshed all the cooling systems in the family after happening upon a stash of coolant at an old dealership mechanic's house sale.
The Dex-Cool in the family's Saabs glistened its red/orange warmth when mixed with either distilled water or DI water from my sister's lab.

However, old friends insisted it didn't matter when I did theirs and used "liquid rock".
To cut the bovex, it was the illusion of money saving which shortened their sight.
Those systems' reservoirs were cloudy immediately.
Sorta dampened my enthusiasm to help with other stuff. Hey, I got feelings too.
 
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It is equivalent to deionized or distilled water. All those processes remove the undesirable ions. There is no "ranking" between any of them.

Much misunderstanding on this issue and regurgitation of half-truths.

https://bobistheoilguy.com/forums/t...d-vs-kinetico-filtered-drinking-water.208239/
Technically RO is not necessarily mineral free as it depends on the system.
RO does not remove ions. Not that it's a big deal for a coolant flush anyways but technically it's not the same as distilled or de-ionized.

 
Need to flush out an engine that's been sitting a while too and don't want to buy 20L of demineralised water if I can avoid it.
For others, if you're going to flush, use copious amounts of water from your garden hose. When finished, displace the hose water in the engine with your demineralized water. This would be more effective and economical.
 
I use filtered rainwater. Total Dissolved Solids are usually around 10-15 ppm. Use 1 coffee filter per gallon.

Good RO water is even lower, when working at a water bottler they used city water and a huge RO system. Had a iron filter before that because of local meteorite crater. It generally was down to the 5ppm area and we would add some bicarbonates 'for taste' . But it defiantly will filter out ions.

At the old battery factory we used a DI water for the mixing with acid.
 
Technically RO is not necessarily mineral free as it depends on the system.
RO does not remove ions. Not that it's a big deal for a coolant flush anyways but technically it's not the same as distilled or de-ionized.

They are not sequestered by a resin bed but they are removed from the feed stock and are not present in the finished product. Even with deionization it's still an exchange.

If that is your definition of "removed" then it would equally apply to distilled water.

RO grade water, or Type III water, is quite simply the reverse of the naturally occurring process of osmosis. Osmosis is the movement of water molecules from low ion concentration to high ion concentration through a semipermeable membrane.
 
It's better than tap water, but not as good as distilled water
The OP's clean room ultrapure water is likely some of the best water on the planet. Overkill, and perfectly good for use in radiators and batteries.

While the precise Ultrapure water production process depends on its intended end use, at a minimum it would have two passes through an RO system, degassifed under vacuum, possibly UV treated for organics destruction, followed by polishing in deionizer beds or electro deionizer system. The end product is so "clean" that electrically conductive (scale producing) ions have been reduced to levels that are unmeasurable by a conductivity meter. Any remaining contaminants are measured in parts per billion.

The "deionized" water I am familiar with is produced by passing the water through series of columns or tanks filled with deionizing resins. The end result is close to the same quality as the two pass RO/polisher system, but is much more costly per gallon. This method would be used for much smaller scale operations where the cost of a RO plant isn't justified, such as antifreeze blending.

According to the measurements I've made on distilled water and "RO purified" water bought from the store, they are about the same level of cleanliness, (conductivity in the low to mid single digit micro mhos/cm) and correspond to tap water that has made 1 trip through an RO system. YMMV since part of that conductivity could be due to CO2 absorbed from the air.

Contrary to popular belief, distillation is not the ultimate purification process. There is carryover of the feed water in "ocean mist" droplets from boiling and some contaminants, especially organics, are volatile and carry over to the end product.

Part of my job while working was ultrapure water production for boiler feedwater so I had access to and used the good stuff in my cars for 20 years. Since I've retired I've had to downgrade to the the distilled water swill, but it is still plenty good enough and light years ahead of even the best tap water.
 
Contrary to popular belief, distillation is not the ultimate purification process. There is carryover of the feed water in "ocean mist" droplets from boiling and some contaminants, especially organics, are volatile and carry over to the end product.

Part of my job while working was ultrapure water production for boiler feedwater so I had access to and used the good stuff in my cars for 20 years. Since I've retired I've had to downgrade to the the distilled water swill, but it is still plenty good enough and light years ahead of even the best tap water.
Yup. In the research laboratory I worked at they triple-distilled the water to achieve an acceptable conductivity.

For use in an automobile cooling system any of the three mentioned is fine. The coolant has chelation agents that are nowhere near being overwhelmed by such low concentrations of ions.
 
Thank you Gyro, yes indeed this water is filtered through 4 pre filters (not part of the actual system) then it goes through the system called a MilliQ, which does much of the things you described. Then it goes through more filters in the cleanroom and a polisher (4 ppb typical reading) but I'll be filling from the system outside of the cleanoom pre polishing. Probably is complete overkill.

Good to know it will work as deminerlised is around $6 per 5L over here and I don't want to flush out $20 of water doing several flushes if i can use the free RO water. Thank you everyone.
 
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