Using RO water to top off batteries?

[Michael Jones]

Is it okay to use Reverse Osmosis water from my water maker to top off my batteries instead of distilled water?

[AnchorageGuy]

Still not good enough. Most watermakers have a setting to allow you to make battery water out of the RO in your tanks by recirculating it again but at a different pressure.

[sailorboy1]

You can also just get some refillable DI resin bottles, fill them with your regular RO water and be go to go. Bascially you would be making your DI water.

[Michael Jones]

Thanks Chuck and Don.

[bstreep]

RO/DI (like from an under-sink unit at home) produces pure water.

[sailorboy1]

RO water can be pretty pure. But it is not DI quality. Each has to decide on their own the degree of pure water they use.

[Minggat]

I had a whole page typed in here. The marina here in La Paz has speeded up the connectrion by cutting people off after short inaction I guess.

After spending 35 years in the water treatment industry, I will pipe in here.

As stated earlier, RO water is not the same quality as DI water. DI is used to clean up what RO leaves behind. That's the fastest way to say it.

Water that is good enough to drink will shut down a power plant inside of an hour. It will shut down a micro electronics plant in a few minets. Are you measuring parts per million, parts per billion or parts pert trillion? If you have access to a conductivity meter, test DI against RO. Test the DI first, so as not to contaminate it with RO water.

Having said that, we need to hear from someone who can tell us how fussy batterys are. I'm guess the better the water, the better the chance of getting long life out of your batterys.

When I was a kid working in gas stations, you know, where they used to clean your windshield, check your oil, tires, radiatior and BATTERY water.....
We used to keep a battery bottle full of tap water handy. I suppose it helped to sell more batterys.

[David M]

Use the purest water you can get within reason. So long as the water is somewhat pure, you wont notice any difference.

[AnchorageGuy]

You can put sea water in a battery. It just won't last very long. Batteries on boats are used and abused and expensive. All of us strive to get the most out of them both in use and length of time before replacement. So put anything in them, but if you want to get the most longevity from them then distilled water only needs to go in them.

[MidLandOne]

Originally Posted by David M

Use the purest water you can get within reason. So long as the water is somewhat pure, you wont notice any difference.

I tend to agree with that.

Some years back a friend and I were discussing this and decided that we would each ask a major battery provider in our respective cities as to guidance on this for cycled batteries. Both of us got the same answer - use tap water if wanted as it won't make much difference, but in both cities the tap water was of high quality so that has to be kept in mind.

From then on I just used reliable tap water until, quite by chance, I was asked to do an assignment for an invester looking to support the development of a particular distillation technology. During that I came across a major supplier of quality distilled bottled drinking water here so I now buy his water off the supermarket shelf at virtually give away prices. It comes in a variety of sized containers and is injected with ozone so's it doesn't go "green" in storage meaning one can store a year or twos supply.

(Now someone is going to tell me that water exposed to ozone kills batteries , but I don't care ).

[Fishspearit]

Originally Posted by MidLandOne

(Now someone is going to tell me that water exposed to ozone kills batteries , but I don't care ).

Ozone kills batteries.


No, I'm just kidding. I can tell you from having worked in a water bottling plant that used ozone in the water, that the ozone dissipates in the bottle within about 24 hours. You just don't want to drink or use the water in that first 24, or Montezuma has another way of getting his revenge on you.

I wouldn't have a problem with using RO water in my batteries, although I use distilled when I can get it. I've seen people use tap water successfully for years without problems. I met a guy once who only added sulpheric acid to his batteries, and when I tried to explain how it wouldn't work well, he told me he'd always done it that way and he always got 2 or 3 years out of his forklift batteries.

[MidLandOne]

Whew!

[Nauticatarcher]

Good clean rainwater is fine, we use distilled water from supermarket (not mineral water), dirt cheap

[sailorboy1]

I'm in the water treatment industry also as well as being in nuclear subs for 11 years (big batteries as backup)... to the orginal RO water question I think will be just fine. But, the cost of a small bottle of DI resin is cheap (I carry one in my water test kit for making "pure" water for anylsis). The DI bottle could take any water and make good water as long as you squeeze it slow. But really here, we filled car batteries with "city" water way back and it didn't really make any difference overall.