TBE made with tap instead of distilled water?

[srvadt]

As you may have heard, there is a severe drought here in Georgia. The electrophoresis labs are coming up at our college and we need several liters of 1xTBE to run all the lab sections. Our still uses about 50-100 gallons of tap water to make about 1 gallon of distilled. Right now our 1xTBE jug is empty and we need to brew up several gallons of distilled water (from tap) in order to refill it.

Given the water crisis, I am wondering if we can make up the 1xTBE using tap water instead of distilled. There is quite a bit of chlorine in our tap water in the south, but otherwise, I don't know of any major difference between our tap water and normal tap water.

Will it work with tap water?

[danfive]

I've never tried it, but you can usually buy HPLC grade water from Sigma etc. and use it for buffers.

[pluto]

It will probably work just fine. Also, remember, you can reuse it at least a few times over, so that will help with your water consumption