UK
Wherever I look online for help regarding distilled water then all I seem to see is that tap water is ok but distilled water is better and cheap so worth spending a little on.
Well I'm not seeing cheap distilled water anywhere, it's very pricey. Some people say that deionised water is the same but it's not. Also, adding salt to the tek is a very wise move resulting in far higher yields and this is done to ionise the water, so deionised water would appear to be a bad idea regarding yield right?
So, Americans seem to be able to get distilled water for about a dollar a gallon and I can get a litre for the equivalent of ten dollars.
So many problems for us in the UK with this extraction.
Naphtha is poorly defined and there's about a billion different opinions on this, some say this one's awesome and others say it's crap, then some say this is good for yield but not for quality and vice versa then ter's the carcinogenic ones which I dO NOT want to be using).
It seems in America you can just walk into your local supermarket, buy a good amount of distilled water, over to another aisle for your VM&P naphtha, grab some salt, get some lye from the gardening section, head home and STB your way to a fun tomorrow. While we're digging around the internet trying to find the best thing to match VM&P naphtha, trying to find a way to not bankrupt ourselves on distilled water and hope in the end we got the right gear.
I don't want to use tap water because where I live is notoriously crap for fluoride, chlorine and impurities. Can I use mineral/spring water as an alternative to distilled water? It's very cheap compared to the distilled I've seen.
I was just wondering if the PH level would even be important considering I'll be basifying it before it even comes into contact with the MHRB. Also what about all the minerals in spring water, will they react with the DMT in any way? I know these won't be sliding over to the NPS with the DMT so I know I don't need to worry about purity at the yield stage, but I was wondering if it did any reacting that we don't want with the DMT before I pull the DMT and therefore either affecting the yield or the molecule itself. I don't want to accidentally make some 5-meo-DMT or something haha.
Sorry for the moan, it's so frustrating and I've literally spent months trying to get my head around this and still I have no decent definition of naphtha, which hydrocarbons I want and which to avoid, what to look for on a can of panel wipe etc. And as I said, I just can't find this "cheap" distilled water I keep reading about. I guess we just don't get it over in the UK and therefore it's expensive.
How strange considering I can get Twinkies over here and I think I'll grab one tomorrow as I'm in the vicinity

I just want to do this extraction safely and easily with no drama's and I want to make the purest I can, I don't want jungle, I want white, white, white.