Noodlers Bay State Blue Any Problems?

[wallylynn]

For something like diluting ink, I'd just boil water in a kettle or pot and collect the few necessary cc of distilled water on a pot lid.

[inkstainedruth]

That sounds like a lot of work (having once made rosewater from rose petals picked in my garden using that technique: you put the petals in the water and invert the lid so it drips into a bowl on a foil covered brick in the center of the pot from the inverted lid with ice put on the lid to cause condensation).  Several hours of work and about 15 -20 lbs. of ice (which of course kept melting) -- just to end up with enough rosewater to put into about a dozen or so small glass bottles (which -- along with their lids -- had previously been sterilized).
Me?  I'm just as happy to buy it by the gallon at the grocery store near me; I use it for flushing pens (I have very hard water where I live) and also for diluting problematic inks like BSB.  And it takes me a while to go through a gallon even then (and I'm also buying boxes of three 3-gallon jugs, so saving a little money per gallon at that).

Ruth Morrisson aka inktainedruth

[wallylynn]

But I don't need a gallon. And t can't buy it. And we just need a few drops, not a dozen bottles. Collect it while making coffee or poaching eggs. Have an Instant pot? There's literally a steam valve (although that might not be quite as clean). I get dribblings of distilled water whenever I cook.

[wallylynn]

9 hours ago, inkstainedruth said:

inverted lid with ice put on the lid to cause condensation).

That reminds me. Ice is another way to get pure water. Just freeze it. Long and slow is preferable. Jut scoop the layer of ice at the top. The salts will remain in the liquid.

[wallylynn]

Rainwater is also very clean. It's "distilled" after all. Just don't collect it from the roof gutters. And at the end of the storm if that makes you feel better about stuff in the air like pollen.

[inkstainedruth]

8 hours ago, wallylynn said:

But I don't need a gallon. And t can't buy it. And we just need a few drops, not a dozen bottles. 

Well, how do you flush your pens out?  Maybe you live where there is soft water -- but I sure don't.  I don't want those minerals around my faucet clogging up a pen feed. 

And I'm not sure I'd agree about rainwater being "distilled" -- I live downwind of a bunch of chemical plants, and a few years ago there was a story on the news about how the rates of things like childhood cancer was much higher in my town and surrounding towns because of the stuff belching into the air from Neville Island (actually worse than for people who live ON Neville Island itself, because they are upwind of the plants).  There was a problem with one of the places not having the proper scrubbers installed in the smokestacks.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[inkstainedruth]

7 hours ago, wallylynn said:

That reminds me. Ice is another way to get pure water. Just freeze it. Long and slow is preferable. Jut scoop the layer of ice at the top. The salts will remain in the liquid.

Actually, that is not necessarily the case, either.

My husband got asked one year to run his sideline business at an event (because of a vendor who had been kicked out the year before for being a problem and blowing circuits with her crockpots in the location we were given).  But that person was basically the liaison with the public for that chapter of the organization, and she ran some press releases in the local paper.  That meant that it appeared to be open to the public, and so the health department inspector showed up (we got dinged for a couple of minor things, and my husband and his brother had to jerry-rig a system for waste water since we weren't allowed to dig a sump hole, and get hoses to drain it into the site's septic system).  But we also got dinged for NOT having a record of where we had purchased bagged ice -- because in that county, that was the main transmission source for food poisoning at the time.  It hadn't occurred to us that it would have been an issue, and we'd bought the ice locally in the center of town -- but if there HAD been a problem, the health dept. would have needed to know where we'd gotten the ice from.

Mind you, the first thing the inspector did was to inspect the contents of the (NSF grade) fridge, to make sure it had been stocked "correctly" and she looked up and down and then closed the fridge with this amazed look on her face and said "It's.... PERFECT...."  (A friend of hers was selling tea out of our booth and her son had stocked the fridge because she'd gotten dinged once or twice at her B&M location in Pittsburgh, and Griffin was muttering under her breath "That's because *I* stocked it...").  We got a minor ding for not having a separate hand-washing station -- as the inspector is looking at our 3 section sink (each section big enough to fit a full sheet pan -- and the 50 gallon propane-heated hot water tank; but she gave us a paper showing how to rig one up with a coffee urn, and we just had one less urn to heat the tea water in.  Of course I'm also pointing out to her all the people on staff who had their ServSaf certifications, including me; the guy who stocked the fridge was literally waiting for his in the mail, and it came after we got back home.  One friend turned out to no longer had one, because she no longer worked in dietary at a hospital (it paid better for her to check on/replace IVs in the patient rooms).

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[wallylynn]

58 minutes ago, inkstainedruth said:

Well, how do you flush your pens out?  Maybe you live where there is soft water -- but I sure don't.  I don't want those minerals around my faucet clogging up a pen feed. 

And I'm not sure I'd agree about rainwater being "distilled" -- I live downwind of a bunch of chemical plants, and a few years ago there was a story on the news about how the rates of things like childhood cancer was much higher in my town and surrounding towns because of the stuff belching into the air from Neville Island (actually worse than for people who live ON Neville Island itself, because they are upwind of the plants).  There was a problem with one of the places not having the proper scrubbers installed in the smokestacks.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

I do have soft water. That said, I'd flush with hard until clear, then rinse with soft. Bsb might be a special case, maybe, I lived with hard water once and had no problems flushing bsb. Bathroom scale was a different issue. I didn't let pens full of water dry up in my pens. They were promptly refilled letting whatever dampness (not drops) left could dissolve in ink.

 

Your neighborhood smoke stacks are not something t needs to worry about. His trouble is he can't buy what you can.

 

 

 

[wallylynn]

1 hour ago, inkstainedruth said:

But we also got dinged for NOT having a record of where we had purchased bagged ice --

Commercial ice is frozen fast, and completely.  So yeah, if you freeze your e-coli water 100% you'll get the e-coli too.  

 

The trick is to do it slowly, and no, don't freeze 100%.  You partial freeze and take the ice and dump the water with e-coli.  For example, freeze some soda pop.  And you get ice and syrup.  Fun fact:  another reason your can of soda explodes is not just because the ice expands.  It's because the ice cannot be carbonated.  The ice forces the carbonation back out into gas.  That's also the reason your ice cubes have bubbles and are cloudy, especially at the center.

[Arkanabar]

A significant number of people prefer distilled water for reconstituting powdered baby formula, so the baby food aisle is another part of the store that's worth checking.