The determination of water content by means of the Derivatograph is treated in the paper. The determination of water in analytical precipitates, various pharmaceutical products, biological substances, the products of food industry is treated on the basis of some practical examples. The applicability of the Derivatograph for determining the adsorption capacity of industrial adsorbents, the hydration conditions of cement, the system Ca3A--CaSO4 9 HyO and the rehydrability of clay minerals is demonstrated. The aluminium oxide barrier layers were investigated on the basis of the water content of the aluminium hydroxide. For the characterization of the different strengths by which water is bound in strontium chloride hydrates the apparent activation energies are also presented.Thermal methods of drying have long been used to determine the moisture in solid substances. In the case of both the direct and indirect determinations the moisture is generally removed from the substance by heating; in the first case the water is bound by an adsorbent and the weight increase is measured while in the second the residue is weighed. These water determinations can be made under isothermal or non-isothermal, dynamic conditions, or in their combination.In the past nearly fifteen years the Derivatograph [1 ] has been successfully used in the determination of moisture. Taking into account that in the course of thermal analysis only thermal energy is transmitted to the sample, the temperature at which the water is released is to a first approximation characteristic of the strength of bonding of the water. On this basis the relatively loosely bound water (adhesion, inclusion, adsorption) which is released at a relatively low temperature can be distinguished from strongly bound water (zeolitic, crystal and structural) which is lost at a higher temperature.The present paper is a survey of the fields in which this complex thermal apparatus has been applied to the determination of water bound by the different forces.The device has been widely used to investigate the structures and thermal behaviours of precipitates used in gravimetric analysis [2][3][4]. Some bivalent metal ions, such as Mg 2+, Mn 2+, Be 2., Cd 2+, Zn 2+ and Co ~+ give precipitates with diammonium hydrogen phosphate in an aqueous solution containing ammonium chloride. The thermal decompositions of the ammonium phosphate precipitates of the various ions proceed very similarly. In Fig. 1 are shown the decomposition Y. Thermal Anal. 4, I972