Distilled Water

Zoot wrote: .........I wonder what the carbon footprint of a bootlegger is to that who grows the whacky tobacky looks like? Al Gore says grow more dope!!!

Al can grow a good crop of weed now, but he will have to move much further south of Tennessee when the coming ice age hits.

I'm going to make a still this morning. It will have no carbon footprint because it will be solar powered. It will use two items of cooking equipment, a small stone from the garden and some clingwrap. I'll post a photograph and a report tomorrow.

K

Well, today I made 300ml of distilled water, without consuming any power.

I put a few inches of water in a ceramic bowl, then put an empty cup in the middle of the bowl. Covered the top of the bowl with clingwrap, the forced the clingwrap into an inverted cone shap with a weight ( a glass stopper actually)

The whole lot went outside into the sun for the day. It was about 25 degrees with no cloud. Within minutes there was water vapour condensing on the clingwrap,then running down the slope till it dripped into the cup. Presto - a still.

Tomorrow I'll use a dark coloured bowl, which should be a little more effective.

What did I do with the distilled water? I put it on my basil.

Cheers

k

Today I got a similar amount, despite the dark coloured bowl, although it wasn't as hot today. I must do some more experimentation, since my goal is to generate 1 litre a day with solar power alone. I'm thinking I'll use alarger black vessel, a smaller water reservoir, and perhaps a glass cover, but the cover needs to be convex to channel the condensate into the collector.

This time I put the distilled water onto my coriander, and filled my humidifier with tapwater.

Cheers

K

I changed the experiment a little - today I put salt water in the bowl, with a little red food colouring. Tonight I tasted the distillate water. Not salty. And guess what - it wasn't red.

I put this on my chives tonight. Filled the humidifier with tap water again.

K

kopoloff wrote:I changed the experiment a little - today I put salt water in the bowl, with a little red food colouring. Tonight I tasted the distillate water. Not salty. And guess what - it wasn't red.

I put this on my chives tonight. Filled the humidifier with tap water again.

K

Kopoloff Okay now I want you to come to Canada and try this outside anywhere in this great country in December and see if you can produce distilled water outside! The only condensation happening is in our homes when moisture in the air condensates on our windows. Basically like mask rainout!

I like the idea though a great way to reduce our carbon footprint and free! Now I would probably be able to replicate here in Canada from about mid-June to August. After that it's too damned cold!

So, turn your home into a still.

Get a piece of aluminum extrusion, a U shape, and glue it to the window with silicon so that the silicon forms a seal all along the extrusion. Have the extrusion as long as possible, running just a little bit off parallel to the floor, say 5 degrees. Make sure the open side of the U is facing upwards so it forms a channel. Now, you'll need to make some sort of tube to get the distillate from the channel into a collection vessel. Perhaps some alfoil, but I'll leave that up to you.

I reckon you should give the window a bit of a clean for your peace of mind, but I wouldn't give a hoot, as I've said before.

Anyway, that's the challenge, distill water using your house as a still

Cheers

K

PS - the silicone will scrape off, and acetic acid will clean the residue.

That's it. At 89 cents a gallon, I think it's just going to be much easier to continue purchasing it...

This isn't about economics. If you're going to use distilled water, I agree, just buy it.

I'm trying to make the point that even if we put tapwater, seawater or raw sewage in the humidifier, the stuff that goes down the hose is actually water vapour, which is the only ingredient in distilled water.

K

kopoloff wrote:or raw sewage in the humidifier

ROTFL!!!

My gawd, you do have a way with words, kopoloff!!

I understand your point, but that was "ewwwwwwwwwwww-funny".

kopoloff wrote:This isn't about economics. If you're going to use distilled water, I agree, just buy it.

I'm trying to make the point that even if we put tapwater, seawater or raw sewage in the humidifier, the stuff that goes down the hose is actually water vapour, which is the only ingredient in distilled water.

K

Hmmm.....I may have to conditionally disagree with you. I suspect the problem with using tap water or other non-distilled water, is that if not cleaned regularly, that water vapor can wind up containing nasty little bugs that can cause (ok, I read your other post and can't resist the acronym) URI's. When I lived in Michigan, in the winter we had a humidifier for the house since it would get so dry when the heat was on. We used tap water in it, and if I did not clean that sucker faithfully, you could smell the scummy smell when the molds started to form. For the folks using tap water, cleaning and deliming regularaly is a must.

Water vapour is a gas containing only water molecules. It cannot contain anything else. Water vapour is really just molecules of distilled water in a gaseous form.

I would not suggest that you keep topping up your tank - as you so rightly say, you must flush it out daily to ensure that the impurities in the seawater, tapwater or sewerage don't accumulate in the tank and stain it. And the reason it is will accumulate and increase in volume is because it has no other way of leaving. just like the clothes iron.

Certainly there would be a smell, but smells are not going to give you URI's (acronymn alert) Remember the miasma that was blamed for the disease in London before they installed sewers.

Look back at my post about the solar powered still that I made. The water i started with had a lot of salt in, and had food die also. The distillate was clean, no salt, and colourless, no die. And these are dissolved materials, whereas sewerage is primarily made up of solids in suspension.

I am convinced that tap water is fine as long as you flush the tank regularly.

By the way, when i run my solar powered still, I put the distillate on my herbs, and fill the humidifier with tap water.

Cheers

k

Actually if you can smell something, its because your olfactory sense is actually sampling a bit of what you are smelling. Even if its raw sewage several feet away.

So contaminants can get airborne in at least extremely small quantities. And when something is dissolved in solution and that solution is evaporated, I believe that enhances that effect. I remember when disposing of my old dog's dried poop it smelled less than his moist poop.

Anyway, fresh distilled water is somewhat antiseptic. Pure water is an unfriendly environment for many bacteria. It also denies anything in your tank 'food' to build further.

After passing air over it for a while it will accumulate debris from the atmosphere and that antiseptic effect will be lost. So I drain the tank and refill it. Although I do that daily, it probably can be done a little lest frequently.

I get respiratory infections (usually sinus or throat, but sometimes lungs) at the drop of a hat and spending about a $1-$1.50 a month doesn't seem like that big a cost for any help avoiding an infection.

I know my RT told me to use Distilled to avoid respiratory infections. Kopolov has had some good posts that I must agree with and now starting to question the whole issue of water quality etc. However, I am sticking to distilled - just because!

There's nothing wrong with using distilled water, and I certainly don't advocate using raw sewerage, despite my previous posts, in which I was just trying to illustrate my point.

I need to explain something about Kopoloff. Kopoloff is a pedant. Kopoloff hates misinformation. Kopoloff is a smartarse. But most importantly, Kopoloff gets very annoyed when supposed experts (what you call RT's and DME's etc) give us advice that reveals their lack of knowledge and understanding.

So, when we get told to use distilled water, we should ask why. And I asked myself why, and could come up with only one reason, and that is to keep our humidifier tanks looking clean. This means that if we're travelling, or if we run out of distilled water, or we find ourselves in the desert and only have our own urine, then as long as its wet, we can use it, and it will not make us sick.

By the way, what we smell isn't what is in the water, but products of decomposition, or of some other reaction that is occuring in the water. When we smell the flowers in the garden, we're not sucking in bits of award winning rose flowers. The exception to this is probably dissolved gases like chlorine, which leave the water in their gaseous state due to their lower vapour pressure.

By all means, keep using distilled water, but don't stress if you can't on some occasions, it doesn't matter.

Cheers

k