Deionized water freakiness - Has anyone experienced this before?! (Feb/18/2009 )

I know how scary it is to have DI water with terrible condition specially when you want to make buffers with specific pH. our DI water's pH is 4.7....i'm not kidding. I noticed this a while ago when I was preparing buffers for my experiments. so I collected samples from tap water, the main machine and the tank to check the pH and surprisingly it was the tap water which had the low pH. I ran to my supervisor and informed him that water's pH is very low and this way everybody's samples will be spoiled. but he ignored me...so I wrote on the notice board about the problem and asked everybody to check the pH of their samples.....nobody cared....lol...I had no other choice rather than to get DI water from other departments for my own experiments. it's not my problem anymore if they don't care.

Our DI water "specialist" changed the tanks yesterday morning. Today, the pH is at ~3.3. Better, but still not good. It's been bad in the past, but never this bad. Also, I found out today that the problem is not confined to my building. What I don't understand is if people knew for so long that the pH is WAY off, why hasn't anything been done? I ran around yesterday and collected samples from every faucet I have access to in my building. So, at least the problem will be well documented. I'm sure many of you know how hard it is to get someone to do something about such problems. If I've learned anything working here (science-aside), its that the squeaky wheel gets the grease!

I had a similar problem in a lab that I was briefly in. The post-doc there had no idea what was going on, so he told me to just buy sterile water and use that rather than the DI water.

Would that work for you?

labrat612 on Feb 19 2009, 12:31 PM said:

We'd have to buy an awful lot of sterile water. Plus, I'm pretty sure it would come from the same company that is screwing up our DI water. Thanks though!

rkay is 100% right. You shouldn't accept the poorwater - and your PI is not worth hanging with he he/she blows this off.

GeorgeWolff on Feb 19 2009, 07:13 PM said:

It's not her. She's just as angry about this as I am. Neither of us knew how bad the water was.

I see - maybe you can set up a still.