When it comes to laboratories, tap water simply doesn’t cut it. While tap water may be perfectly safe for people to drink, no matter how delicious or clean it may seem, there’s a high probability that it could be problematic in your experiments. That’s because tap water contains many ions/salt, bacteria, organics and nucleases. These impurities are what give water its taste and contribute to its hydrating capabilities, but they also greatly impact your lab work and the equipment that you’re using.
Think about when you travel to a different city for example – you arrive, pour yourself a glass of water, only to realize that their tap water tastes very different from the one coming out of your sink at home. That’s because the impurities in water vary depending on where the water comes from. When dealing with sensitive scientific experiments, every aspect needs to be consistent, so it’s important to use purified water, especially if you ever want to have reproducible results. Furthermore, the impurities in tap water can clog filters, driving up consumable costs, and can cause mineral deposits, damaging your expensive equipment.
It’s important that as scientists and lab professionals we always make good choices regarding the lab water we use. Before we can do this, we must first understand the various types of water impurities that exist as well as the technologies that make up each water system. Then it will be easier to understand how we can maintain each of these consumables within our water systems (more on that in our next blog post!)
Learn more about the basic of water purification at our Pure Water 101 webinar here
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