Should I Buy a Home Water Distiller to Purify My Water?

By Tom Ribe
America's water supply is becoming increasingly contaminated. The federal government set up laws in the 1980s to protect drinking water and we've come to trust that city water supplies are safe to drink. While few people get sick immediately drinking from city water supplies, federal laws are lagging behind the rate of new

contamination entering supplies and enforcement lags. We have to protect our own water these days especially if you have small children.

Several kinds of water filters are available. Its best to learn the strengths and weaknesses of each type of system before you buy.

How Can We Purify Water?

Because of its structure, water is a powerful solvent which makes it a great cleaner. But because its a great solvent, it also picks up all kinds of foreign materials like dissolved minerals, heavy metals like mercury, chemicals dumped by industry, and many kinds of tiny life forms like bacteria, viruses and algae.

These substances cling to the water molecules and to purify water, we need to somehow separate the water from the contaminating substances.

People have developed several systems for cleaning water. It can be filtered, forced through a membrane (reverse osmosis) or distilled. (I've discussed carbon filters and reverse osmosis in other articles.)

In nature, water evaporates and purifies itself constantly. Evaporation happens when water molecules float away from the surface of the ocean or a lake or whatever. The molecules drift away with no contamination clinging to them so they are perfectly pure.

The ocean provides the biggest source of evaporated water. With 70% of the earth's surface covered with seawater, a huge amount of water evaporates from the oceans every day, leaving the salt in the seawater behind and becoming pure water in the sky that falls as rain. Naturally the rain falls on land and flows back to the ocean and the cycle is endlessly repeated. This process produces 100% of our drinking water.

Home Distillers

We can get devices for our homes that will use the evaporation process just described to purify water. When water boils it sends steam up into the air. The steam is pure water. A distiller captures that steam, cools it, and collects it.

The good thing about distilled water is that it is very pure. But distilling has its down sides too. First it is energy intensive, using a great deal of electrical power to boil the water. A gallon of distilled water can cost 40 cents and while that's cheap compared to store bought bottles, it adds up fast and we must consider the air pollution we are causing by using electricity this way.

Also, home distillation systems produce slowly so you must wait for the system to work, just as you do with a reverse osmosis system. Other filtration systems work much faster as we'll see in a moment.

Finally distillation produces water that lacks minerals that our bodies need for good health. In short, we want pure drinking water but we can't have it too pure or we miss basic minerals like calcium that are common in spring water that our bodies need.

What's the Best Water Purification System?

Every type of water purifier has its strengths and weaknesses. Carbon filter have limits, reverse osmosis has limits, distillation has limits and so do filters. The answer lies in combining these elements to make a high quality water purifier where each stage works to remove contaminants that slipped past the stage before.

With so much industrial pollution and biological hazard in our water supplies, you owe it to yourself and your family to use a very high quality filtration system at home. Click below to find out how to get one quickly and affordably.