DIY Still (for water)

Someone in the UK was bemoaning the dearth and dearity (dearness?) of distilled water** in their stores. The prices that were quoted were incomprehensible to me. Every grocery store in the U.S. has jugs of distilled water, and it's about the same price as bottled drinking water. We had the stuff running in pipes in the labs at work, and the folks in the glassware department washed our lab glassware and equipment in it. I even watered the orchids in my office with it!

So as a public service, I thought I'd post this nerd's demonstration of how one can make distilled water, assuming no economical source can be found.

I made the still below using a 12 quart aluminum stew pot with a tight fitting aluminum lid. I drilled a hole through the lid and screwed in a 3/4" male adapter, attached to a 3/4" female coupler, into which I inserted a 4" length of 3/4" copper pipe. I adapted that to a 3/4" flex line similar to that used to connect domestic water heaters, and fed the inlet of the still with a piece of 5/8" Tygon tubing.



To the back of the radiator, I attached two 5" computer case fans which are powered from a junkbox ATX power supply which provides 12VDC. I half-filled the stew pot, put it on the fire on high and after boiling starts, steam condenses into water in the radiator and trickles out the bottom and into a plastic container.



After collecting about 1 gallon of water, I turned off the fire and found that about half of the original amount of water remained in the stew pot, but it was very murky from the precipitated minerals and probably some aluminum oxides. Once the pot was boiling, it took about 90 minutes to fill the 1 gallon receiver.




The water works fine for CPAP use, and is probably OK to drink, but I don't intend to do so. You never know what materials might have been used in the radiator core, or the flux that was used to join the parts.


My son, who is graduating in the Spring with a degree in aeronautics, saw the still and said to me, "When I see you do stuff like this, I can't help thinking how little I know." High praise! A few years ago, I was a blithering idiot, and didn't know anything. Isn't it ironic that I am the one who has learned so much while he has been away in college!

** The terms distilled, deionized, or demineralized water describe the same product; the difference being in the method by which the water is rendered free of minerals.

Slartybartfast wrote:My son, who is graduating in the Spring with a degree in aeronautics, saw the still and said to me, "When I see you do stuff like this, I can't help thinking how little I know." High praise! A few years ago, I was a blithering idiot, and didn't know anything. How much I have learned in these last few years!

awesome!
+many!

palerider wrote:

Slartybartfast wrote:My son, who is graduating in the Spring with a degree in aeronautics, saw the still and said to me, "When I see you do stuff like this, I can't help thinking how little I know." High praise! A few years ago, I was a blithering idiot, and didn't know anything. How much I have learned in these last few years!

awesome!
+many!

+many and many more

Where there's a still there's a way. (Sorry sorry).
Awesome little invention there to bad it's for water.....

At the (slow?) rate I go through distilled water it would take me years of use to break even on any home distiller. But I do like the one below, pity I don't have a sink next to the stove which would make it super convenient. All stainless but my tap water is so hard I'd wind up having to de-scale it every other batch.

http://www.amazon.com/Stainless-Distill ... +distiller

jonny515 wrote:Where there's a still there's a way. (Sorry sorry).
Awesome little invention there to bad it's for water.....

Not just for distilled water, Granny makes Her medicine with it too!

A couple of things that would lower production costs, I have moved to countertop induction cooktops, much more efficient, easier to control temperatures, but requires magnetic stainless steel cookware. And the fans on that NICE LOOKING radiator would be cheaper to power with a USB WALL WART, you can get them to power up to 4 units or a spare power unit for a external USB drive. The computer power unit is overkill.

If the condenser was Stainless Steel, Grannies Medicine would be safer, or you could go old school and just use copper tubing for the condenser coil.

Again, nice looking project! Jim

My father in law had a coil of copper tubing submerged in an aluminum trash can full of salty ice water.
The clear treasure dripping out tasted like cherries and tested at 180 proof.

There are lots of ways the process can be improved. But I think this is just an interesting demonstration of how one can make their own distilled water using commonly available parts, even using water of questionable quality. The stew pot could be suspended over a wood fire. A heater core from a junked car would work just as well as the shiny aluminum race radiator. And the condenser certainly could have been made from a coil of copper tubing. But for $20, the race radiator was just too pretty to pass up. And the power supply was sitting, unused, in my junk box.

At the end of the day, it's not economically worthwhile to make your own distilled water when you can buy it at any grocery store for $1.49/gallon. In the States, that is. I really don't understand why it would be so expensive and hard to find in the U.K.

For $20, I'd have had a hard time passing it up too, I'm a car guy. Jim

Amenite posted this link http://www.amazon.com/Stainless-Distill ... +distiller I've seen these on eBay, too. It would probably work fine for water, but definitely lacks the ability to separate alcohol from water. For that you need a fairly tall, packed, distillation column.

For the price, it's a nice still. But you will waste a LOT of tap water to cool the condenser. That would never fly here in Southern California, where we're under tight water restrictions because of the ongoing drought.

Perhaps a mixture of crushed ice and water in the condenser container would minimize the tap water consumption of the commercial design. One would have to experiment with the ratios of ice to water and with the rate of heating the boiler to see if could be made to operate economically.

I love your DIY design. An elegant use of otherwise scrap materials.

I thought this was a fantastic solution. With the distilling process of fine spirits, the cutting of the head, heart and tail are integral to achieving a great product. While water may not be as complex a mixture that requires cutting, I immediately began wondering if an analysis of the different stages of distilled water yielded different purity for a given water source. Not that I'm suggesting anything for you, just my thinking.

That's a good question. But unlike distilling spirits, which is an art that involves selecting among a complex assemblage of volatile organic compounds, each of which can be expected to contribute to the taste, texture, mouth feel, visual appearance, aroma, etc., of the final product, distilling water is a simple brute-force method of separating the volatile water from the non-volatile solids (minerals). There's no art here.

However, if one's water source contains volatiles, like ammonia (it shouldn't!, but if your ground water has become contaminated by that dairy a few miles away . . . ), or metabolic byproducts of microbial organisms, those volatiles can be expected to distill across prior to, following, or along with the water. That depends on each volatile component's characteristic boiling point. And the final mix can affect the aroma and taste of the distillate. So in the case of something funky turning up in your distilled water, it's a good idea to, as you suggested, take samples from the beginning, middle, and end of the distillation process, to see where the objectionable odor/taste is coming across. Similar to distilling fermented spirits.

Since I started with municipal tap water, which has been tested and shown to be free of volatiles except chlorine, the resulting distillate should be nothing other than pure water. The chlorine boils off at a lower temperature than the water, so it passes through the condenser before the steam hits it.

Slartybartfast wrote:That's a good question. But unlike distilling spirits, which is an art that involves selecting among a complex assemblage of volatile organic compounds, each of which can be expected to contribute to the taste, texture, mouth feel, visual appearance, aroma, etc., of the final product, distilling water is a simple brute-force method of separating the volatile water from the non-volatile solids (minerals). There's no art here.

However, if one's water source contains volatiles, like ammonia (it shouldn't!, but if your ground water has become contaminated by that dairy a few miles away . . . ), or metabolic byproducts of microbial organisms, those volatiles can be expected to distill across prior to, following, or along with the water. That depends on each volatile component's characteristic boiling point. And the final mix can affect the aroma and taste of the distillate. So in the case of something funky turning up in your distilled water, it's a good idea to, as you suggested, take samples from the beginning, middle, and end of the distillation process, to see where the objectionable odor/taste is coming across. Similar to distilling fermented spirits.

Since I started with municipal tap water, which has been tested and shown to be free of volatiles except chlorine, the resulting distillate should be nothing other than pure water. The chlorine boils off at a lower temperature than the water, so it passes through the condenser before the steam hits it.

I'm now thinking of reasons to set up a still - baking extracts and homemade tinctures for home first aid, officer? LOL

How about distilling essential oils? Rose or lavender flowers, crushed and heated, emit fragrant oils which can be captured and concentrated via distillation. Same with crushed red pepper. Make your own capsaicin spray (pepper spray). Or get creative and concentrate the volatiles that come off of baking bread into a spray.