Rain water vs river water vs tap water

mikky101

Hello,
has anyone got any information on the above comparisons with regard to horticulture?
Im having trouble finding any studies or research done previously and would like to know whether or not it would be worth doing so myself.
Any help or advice would be appreciated,
Mark.

El Siglo

I take it you're looking at some sort of chemical and mineralogical differences between all three and how these impact plants? Well I suppose you could consider these vectors of water in the following form. River water is usually influenced by the catchment geology (i.e. what's it's flowing over) and the land use it's draining. So that'll have some impact, and there are plenty of studies on this. I'll give you an example, if you've lots of granite chances are your river water will have a low pH and thus any metals will tend to precipitate out of solution and end up in the sediments. That's a simple example but you see the point? Tap water is dependent on the treatment, what it adds and what it takes away, so water treatment is probably useful to look at. The rain water will be a function of what can be successfully be evaporated and in the case of Ireland proximity to the Atlantic would probably be the thing here. However, it does depend on where your site is and where you'd like to conduct your work. I'd contact Teagasc down in Carlow, they've done some stuff like this before with a few PhD students (think there's still some work going on regarding nitrate retention). If you explain what you want to do they might give you some guidance from there. Sorry I couldn't be any more helpful.

The_Captain

Veolia Water have water treatment plants all over the country and would have constant measuring of water chemistry.

The problem you're going to have is that there's no standard river water, it's going to vary from place to place and even one site will vary from week to week.

There's not even a standard level of tap water, EU directives set out the minimum limits for human consumption, but again each tap water sample will vary massively.

I don't know enough about rain water to say much about it.



If you're doing a PhD and you're comparing growth rates using the different types of water, you might not find any statistical difference tbh.

If I was you, I'd probably focus more on how known concentrations of nitrates and minerals in water affect plant growth rates and extrapolate that to match the likely chemistry of the three water types you mentioned.


Although, to be honest, there's plenty of articles and reports out there examining the effects of water chemistry on plant growth