Rain Water / Dehumidifier Water

[dougroc]

I wanted to get some opinions from the board about switching to rain water or dehumidifier water for their orchids. Do people find the increase in the health of your plants to be worth the hassle of collecting rain water? How about using rain water on occasion to flush out accumulating salts? Does anyone do this?

[catttan]

I definitely notice a marked improvement in the health of my plants using both rainwater and dehumidifier water from my air-con unit. This could be due to the high chlorine content in our tap water.
But we are having a hot dry spell at the moment - so no rain water for the next 3 months and very little dehumidifier water because of the low humidity. It's now back to the tap water.

[Brutal_Dreamer]

I use tap water, but the water here is very good. I think I remember Gin uses a rain barrel and her orchids are amazingly well grown.

Cheers,
BD

[ksb]

I know a couple very successful growers that only use rain water for their plants.
Now that you mentioned it I think I will catch some the next time it rains.

[Alana]

I don't think rain water here would be very good >.> The pollution is not so great. I don't know what is is about Jacksonville, but the air here smells bad! I water with distilled tap water.

[ksb]

Very good point. Distilled water is a lot easier to get and more reliable.

[bungaraya]

We have used tap water for years now, very occasionally straight from the tap, but, usually, my wife bottles the tap water up and then stores it in our boiler room. She reckons this keeps it tepid and won't shock the plants and also allows the Chlorine to evaporate. I'm not sure if that last bit is correct or not. While on about water I may as well go off subject a little and mention that I boil tap water for my snakes drinking water. There is a fear that the well known Cryptosporidium organisms, found in tap water, are lethal to reptiles. Boiling kills off the bacteria.

[raybark]

I won't claim to fully understand why, but in general you will find that plants watered with a pure water source - rain, deionized, reverse osmosis, distilled, etc. - will be more vigorous and look brighter and shinier.

I am convinced that some of it has to do with how they have evolved, being tailored to very dilute rainfall cascading through the forest canopy, and that the excess minerals in most water supplies might be "overdoing" something.

That said, if you use pure water, you must fertilizer periodically using a formula that provides everything.

[jai_star]

I am using both dehumidfier water from the machine and tap water that has been allowed to stand for 24hours before i close the cap on the bottle. I think our water is very clean here as it's safe to drink from the tap. The orchids are seem to like both

[bungaraya]

Many thanks to both raybark and jai_star for these responses. The points about the wild Orchids and the natural rainwater are very interesting. We have never used rainwater for our plants before but It does sound like a good idea. We are checking prices of rain butts now and have given up on the dehumidifier idea, thanks to all.