Destilled and deionized
SubSailor said:
No. Distilled water is second best. It still has some traces of dissolved minerals that can clog your radiator over time.
Distilled water is absolute H20, if there is anything else in it then it is contaminated distilled water. When you boil water and bring it to a gas and then by cooling it liquifies into H20. All contaminants and solubles stay in the heating tank.
SubSailor said:
Tap water is the worst to use.
I agree! Depending on the source there will be a variety of stuff in it.
SubSailor said:
The best water to use in cooling systems is deionized water. It's 100% pure H2O.
Deionized means it has no ions in it, it is therefore not conducting any electricity and thus it stops electrolysis (which will corrode dissimilar metals in your engine by carrying particles from one metal to the other.
Yes that is a good thing, but there may be non-conducting solubles or contaminants in deionized water that will stick against real hot surfaces of metal (like around the exhaust port of the head).
Deionized water is filtered water that goes through a process (I think intense magnetic fields) that reduce the ions in the water). Distilled water is a much more expensive process as it requires too much heat/energy to produce.
Here is a trick though. As water in gaseous form exist in our humid atmosphere (even in the dessert there is some humidity but very little of it) when it encounters a surface much cooler than the atmospheres it condenses into liquid or even a solid. That snow/ice you find in the freezer part of your non-auto-defrost refrigerators is pretty much as close as you can get to distilled water. If you are patient enough and scrape every day and funnel it in an very clean container, you can collect enough for your bike
Air-conditioners also produce water but you have to make sure you clean the surfaces very well before you can collect some.
The reason distilled water is bad for us to drink is because it is very absorbent of all salts and bases in our system. Therefore it drains our body of all electrolytes and by drinking it we eventually dehydrate.
If you want to test your distilled or deionized water use a multimeter set on resistance and see if you get continuity. If you do there are ions in it. If you get a very high resistance it is pretty clean. But air carries so many particles in it that the moment you open the container it collects ions from the air it comes in contact with.
In the old days in ships they use to produce water by distilling it from the sea, but they had to add electrolytes in it before drinking it. Now they have reverse osmosis filters that just allow enough salt past it to make it drinkable. (the best water I have ever tasted).
Water is very hard to produce for drinking and agriculture and it is vanishing at alarming rates. The only way we have to create water out of the sea is very energy intensive. Water will run out before oil does and it will be the source of major wars in the future.