water for 50/50 coolant mixing

[Brett Dikeman]

At 11:58 PM -0500 12/19/01, Marc Swanson wrote:
>  > I'm a hopin' that you meant softened and not distilled.  Softening removes
>>  the bivalent ions that cause scaling and replaces them with harmless
>>  sodium. Distilled h2o is a no-no for metal systems.
>
>
>Huh?  Could you please explain to me how distilled water can harm a metal
>radiator?

Yeah, he's right...sounds wierd, but its not.  Deionized water is
even worse, I believe.

   However, I suspect that even after flushing with a garden hose,
there's still plenty of little bits of things, scale, solder bloom,
etc. for the deionized water to go to town on, so to speak.

Flip through McMaster(speaking of which, their website is MUCH better
now since they allow you to browse via HTML; just beware, IE tends to
choke on the complex pages, Opera handled it much better)...a lot of
the metal fittings state if they're compatible with deionized water
etc.

Of course, all of this is a moot point with a non-aqueous coolant ;-)

B
--
----
"They that give up essential liberty to obtain temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Ben Franklin
http://www.users.cloud9.net/~brett/
http://www.users.cloud9.net/~brett/bdikeman.asc	(PGP Public Key)