Some light reading for those who care

[Lukew]

http://www.lia.com.au/images/WaterHardness Part I and II.pdf

Interesting reading for those who care.
This possibly dispels the myth that if your town water is hard you need reverse osmosis or deionized water.

 

[chevalier]

Thanks for the share!

 

[Deleted member 16349]

http://www.lia.com.au/images/WaterHardness Part I and II.pdf

Interesting reading for those who care.
This possibly dispels the myth that if your town water is hard you need reverse osmosis or deionized water.

When I first started with offset, we heard from Agi Rosos when she visited us, that if reverse osmosis was used, the fountain solution formula would have to add salts back into the mix because the fountain solution would not work so well without salts.

We were told the point of reverse osmosis was to have a reliable starting point especially if one was in an area where the water quality changed seasonally. If one had a consistent supply of water then it was not needed to have reverse osmosis. The fountain solution provider could adjust the fount to accommodate for the hardness of the water one was using.

That advice was over twenty five years ago and I guess it still holds up.

 

[D Ink Man]

Agi was the best.

 

[Green Printer]

What ever happened to Rosos Fountain Solutions?

 

[Dan Roll]

Each grain of 'German Hardness' equals 17 parts per million, thus 10 grains GH equals 170 ppm of the chemicals making up water hardness, usually calcium and to a lesser extent magnesium (iron in water is much less common and does need to be removed). Fountain solution ingredients could be measured in the mixed solution in parts per thousand, one thousand times the volume per increment of ppm. Other than influencing the fountain solution pH, water hardness ingredients have little effect on anything else due to their small volumes.

Many people (myself included) trace the European emphasis on water hardness additives to the late 1980's when Collie-Cook was the Hostman-Steinberg agent in Australia. HS provided many excellent educational materials in English about the use of their very popular fountain solution Combi-Fix (we used to refer to this product as the Rosos of Germany due to its ubiquitous use in Europe, not unlike the once universal popularity of Rosos in the US). All of this material stressed the use of four percent CombiFix in water would yield a pH of 5.0, described as the 'correct' pH for printing. Unfortunately, this was only true if you used hard water as is common in Germany, but unavailable in the populous areas of Australia. In most Australian water, the pH of four percent Combi-Fix was closer to pH 4.0, leading to some confusion. Rather than make a version of Combi-Fix to yield a pH of five in soft water, it was decided that Australian water was too soft for proper printing and had to be hardened to a minimum level that would allow Combi-Fix to buffer at pH five. This led to a blitz of water hardening additives coming on the market all making somewhat extravagant claims about the benefits of hard water.

While everyone fondly remembers Agi, it was her father, Steve Rosos, who started the company and was really the first fountain solution innovator in the US. While Steve was alive, Rosos was the undisputed leader in fountain solution technology in the US.

 

[Lukew]

I'm in Australia,
Some areas have soft water, some area's have very hard water.

The tap water at our work reads between 400 - 550 tds on a Hanna meter. Can't recall the PPM level.
Deionised water with 0.5% hardener added comes in at around 150 TDS on the same meter.

A lot of printers use deionised water in my area as they had a lot of problems with calcium build up due to the high levels in the water.

 

[Dan Roll]

Lukew,

You must work in the Brisbane area, as Sydney, Melbourne, Dubbo, Adelaide, Perth, and just about everywhere else I have visited in Australia has soft, to very soft, water. The water in Brisbane is hard by Australian standards, but is very soft compared to the water in most of the industrial area of Germany. Hardness readings of twenty grains per gallon are not uncommon there and while many German printers use a RO system, most mix the RO water half and half with their tap water to get between eight and ten grains per gallon.

You posted this nice report postulating that water hardness has no effect on printing, yet you admit to using a water hardener, what benefit do you see from this? Does your water hardener use calcium, magnesium, or some other hardening material? We manufacture a water hardener for those customers we have who are required by their press manufacturer to use one, ours is made from magnesium acetate. Why printers are willing to pay extra for a water hardener escapes me, when their fountain solution manufacturer could incorporate the hardening ingredients into the fountain concentrate without changing the cost of the fountain solution by more than a few cents per gallon eliminating the freight cost and mixing issues an extra solution bring into the picture.

 

[Lukew]

Dan,
I use tap water, no water hardener.
It has as I'm aware always been recommended to us by industry suppliers here that if you do use deionised water you need to use a re-hardening agent approx 0.5% to get it to a baseline hardness.
It has also always been recommended to us that any water used in fountain solution preparation needs to be within a certain hardness range.

This is why I found the above document so interesting as it seemed to dispel that myth.

On a side note, every fount supplier we have dealt with here has said we need deionised water if we were to print alcohol free.
Until we got our information & product from the USA, which is working well with tap water.

250ppm the tap water was yesterday.

 

[Dan Roll]

Green Printer,

Rosos went out of business around 2005. There were several companies interested in their formulas but I don't think anyone ever bought them. Fuji was interested for a while but was outbid by a German company (Vegra, I think) who ended up not following through. Rosos had a nice piece of real estate in Chicago, I do not know what happened to it or Steve's collection of antique cars. Rosos made a lot of money for a long time back when fountain solution cost a lot less to make and sold for a lot more than it does today. I am pretty sure Agi, her sister (whos name I do not know), and Agi's three children Kathy, Steve, and Paul (the KSP of KSP 500 and KSP 10) who were the principle owners of the company as fas as I know, are pretty well situated.

 

[Dan Roll]

Lukew,

Sorry, I thought when you said "Deionised water with 0.5% hardener added comes in at around 150 TDS on the same meter." you meant you were using hardener.
There was a time when every printer in the US was told they had to replace their rollers in order to run alcohol free, then they were told they needed to treat their water, then they were told ultra filtration would be beneficial. All was sales BS of course. Most printers do not need to do anything other than lighten their roller pressures and use a decent alcohol replacement product in order to print alcohol free.