Quality water is crucial for dental practices. Choosing the right tools for the job can save practices time and money while also protecting equipment and enjoying easy access to high-purity water, on demand.
City water just isn’t good enough.
Even treated city water isn’t pure enough to use in dental operatories, or for sterilizing dental instruments. That’s because the dissolved mineral content in the water—known as Total Dissolved Solids, or TDS—needs to be removed first. The lower the TDS, the purer the water—and for autoclaves, in particular, TDS needs to be virtually zero.
Levels of Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) in municipal source water vary greatly by geographic region and municipality, but it’s not unusual for TDS to range from 100-200 parts per million (ppm) in the northeastern United States to 800-900 ppm or more in the Southwest. The average municipal source water in the United States contains approximately 300-400 ppm TDS.
Most autoclaves cannot function properly when filled with water with greater than 5 ppm TDS, and using high-TDS water in dental delivery units can contribute to poor taste, increased scaling and corrosion of equipment, and reduced efficacy of necessary waterline cleaners. That’s why many dental offices purchase jugs of distilled or deionized water to fill their autoclaves and bottle systems manually—but that gets expensive, time-consuming, and really inconvenient.
Using only one grade of purified water isn’t sufficient.
Because city water isn’t pure enough for most of the needs of modern dental practices, many offices purchase distilled water for all of their office needs, or install purification systems that produce only one grade of water.
However, using only distilled water in the stericenter can become problematic. Water is generally considered to be the “universal solvent” for its ability to dissolve a variety of different substances, so it is important to use the correct grade of water for different applications. Using the wrong grade of water can be simply inconvenient—such as having to drain an autoclave filled with water with TDS above the sterilizer’s functional specifications—or even damaging, such as the possible long-term effects of using deionized or distilled-quality water in dental delivery units.
Deionized or distilled-quality (000 TDS) water can “attack” certain metals used in dental delivery units and equipment over time. For this reason, this grade of water should only be used for filling autoclaves, which are designed for use with water containing extremely low TDS.
Hyperfiltration—more commonly known as reverse osmosis—results in slightly higher TDS relative to deionized or distilled-quality water, and is best suited for filling dental bottles and ultrasonic cleaners, and for the rinse cycle of instrument washers.
Meet your stericenter’s new best friend.
VistaPure™ provides two grades of high-quality water for autoclaves, dental bottles, ultrasonic cleaners and the rinse cycle of instrument washers. The system connects directly to the city water supply, mounts conveniently under a countertop and slides out for easy access, and sends purified water anywhere it is needed in the stericenter for on-demand use.
VistaPure’s autoclave-ready, distilled-quality (deionized) water eliminates the need to buy distilled water or own a distiller. Its bottle-ready, hyper-filtered water eliminates the need to buy bottled water and ensures high-quality water for mixing with bottle and residual cleaners, and for the rinse cycle of instrument washers.
Unlike many other purification systems, VistaPure does not require electricity or chemicals, so it is silent, cost-effective, environmentally friendly and easy to use and maintain.
Want to automate your stericenter?
VistaPure provides the foundation for a complete, automated water-processing system for stericenters. The combination of VistaPure™ and VistaCool™ systems can save practices time and money while freeing dental staff to focus on their patients and businesses.
Here's how the system works:
Want to become a dental-water expert?
Water quality affects nearly every function of modern dental offices. Our (free!) eBook, The Book on Dental Water, is designed to help you understand how using the right water can help to improve patient care, staff productivity and practice profitability, while also protecting the investments you’ve made in the equipment and appliances in your office.
