Just realised I have a local source of pure water for cleaning Vinyls faffery …
20L plus a few more flushing out containers …£1.70…
Way way cheaper than Halfords de-ionised water …
Churs
Ger
1 Like
What is vinyls?
The things that go on t’gramphone …I was trying to join in on the piss take of folk who say “vinyls” …sorry.
Back in the newbie cage for me I guess …
1 Like
We have a dehumidifier in the dung… er… cellar - pure distilled water by the literal bucketload every couple of days 
1 Like
We have the same, a plentiful supply for a record cleaner I dont own. Pour a couple of litres down the drain most days.
Does get used in the iron occasionally.
Most of ours is used for watering houseplants and the rest goes in the bird bath!
Rarely buy or play vinyls these days, so the RCM mostly gathers dust itself!
Could use it to clean the RCM … 
I think I knew it was bait 
I’ve forgotten almost all the physical chemistry I ever knew but I still (no pun intended) wonder what’s actually in the condensate from dehumidifiers. The main thing, of course, is that there won’t be the hardness (calcium salts) that comes with tap water, or the substituted sodium if you’ve put your hard tap water through a regular water-softener. So I imagine the condensate will be fine for irons and lead-acid batteries (does anyone still top them up ?).
On the other hand water vapour which condenses out of the air does dissolve a little CO2 making (very weak) carbonic acid which is why rainwater (very slowly) dissolves limestone. That happens rather faster when the water’s passed through peat as there’s some chemistry in peat involving sulphur which generates stronger acids.
The last problem could be that the path the water follows never gets hot enough to sterilise it and might contain materials (e.g. Pb-based solder) which can dissolve in it, albeit in amounts which are probably insignificant. Also there’s nothing to stop dust falling into it.
As far as an RCM goes I suspect none of this matters - all the stuff dissolved/floating in the condensate will only be present in infinitesimal amounts. But I used to be paid to look after (among other things) a few tonnes of water that we would deionise to the point that it was tens of thousands of times less electrically conductive than when it came out of the tap, and we did have to put a bit of effort into keeping that pure (at least, from ions).
1 Like
FWIW, peat usually lacks the sulphides required for strong acids to form - but much less so in lignites and coals which can contain large amounts of iron sulphide which readily decays into assorted stable iron compounds plus sulphuric acid. What there are are large amounts of various so-called ‘humic’ acids, to the extent peat is pretty good at tanning things…
2 Likes
See post 3 …
Vinyls! Vinyls! Vinyls!
