In the procedure of estimation of organic carbon content (Walkley-Black method), 200 ml of distilled water is used.
My question is - Can we use tap water instead of distilled water in the estimation of organic carbon content from soil?
If not, what is the reason?
Tap water it would be rich in chlorine, heavy metals, .. and it may hamper your results. While in case of distilled water this error wouldn't affect and seems a safer choice in compared to tap water.
I agree with @ Arezoo Agharezaei Tap water may contains excess ions of chlorine and other minerals which may interfer and hamper the accuracy of the analysis.
Disttilled OR DM water only used for correct result, in Tap water number of impurity , High TDS, High chlorine so it is not good choice.
Dear Sir Kunal,
Hello.
No, you should not use tap water instead of distilled or double de ionized (DDI) in measuring organic carbon content of any specimen. Because, tap water contains little total organic carbon (TOC). This TOC will alter the organic carbon counter of your specimen under instrumental analysis. Hope, this will answer your question.
Use of tape water could make life in the laboratory easy. However, this can influence the results that we obtain particularly due to the presence of dissolve organic carbon (DOC) and other tiny pieces of particulate organic carbon (POC) in tape water. Further, there could be other minerals in the tape water could also influence the outcome. These could lead to slight over estimation in the results I guess. Therefore, it would be good to use de-iodized or distilled water for getting more precise result.
Definitely not, it will contain many impurities which will give us inaccurate results.@kunal
The only purpose of addition of 200ml of water after certain time of chromic acid oxidation process is just to check
or stop the reaction process. As this method is associated with titration to determine the organic carbon content, hence precaution to be taken not to add extraneous impurities which may provide error in estimation. Tap water contains many impurities, in addition it might also contains DOC (dissolved organic carbon) which may give erroneous results in organic carbon analysis. But If the quantity of distilled water availability is scanty, then we can first analyse all the required parameters for Tap water, and if it is found suitable (impurities percentage is less) then we can go for adding this, compare the data with distilled water added results for some samples. If it is found suitable then we can go for adding tap water.
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