Vic Smith wrote in
:
In the Ozarks we had bucket drawn well water, and I admit to missing
the taste, which might be described as "Strongly imbued with a rocky
flavor, but eloquently tempered by subtle undertones of frog, lizard,
snake and cricket."
Before the Feds forced our little town of 1500 people to build and
connect to a fancy sewage plant that has completely polluted Owasco Lake,
the ring finger of The Finger Lakes SW of Syracuse, NY, long after I left
there for the Navy, we drank lake water all the while fishing in it.
Noone ever got sick even though all the camps and homes around the lake
used septic tanks...or more correctly outhouses and cesspools of concrete
block to keep them from caving in.
Now, the lake is destroyed by the sewage plants of the three towns
upstream from its inlet. Huge algae blooms kill all the fish and make
the place uninhabitable. When I was a kid in the 50's, the men stood on
shore at night next to their gas lanterns snatching one huge bullhead
after another until midnight when the bullheads "ran" in season. They're
all dead now, killed by the government greenies.
Distilled water is fine and healthy, and even that deaerated water
would have been suitable if I'd been able to shake some oxygen into
it.
What's wrong with distillers is they distill other things in the water,
besides the water, notably benzene and other light fuels. It gives
distilled water a metallic taste it usually is associated with. However,
there is a very simple solution to this problem that makes the water
taste devine in its pure, unconducting state....activated carbon.
Passing the output of the still through a 6" column of activated carbon
totally removes any trace of these carbon-based enes because they attach
themselves, at the molecular level to the carbon ions, very readily.
There are expensive carbon filter pads available for my distiller but
that's a crazy waste. I use a very high temperature nylon baster from a
gourmet cooking store. I put a coffee filter in the tube as a little
funnel and push it to the pointed end. Then, fill the tube with carbon
granules the filter keeps out of my water. Slowly siphon the water
through the column into my storage bottles and the whole column gets
quite hot with the reaction, even with only a few ppm of enes. The water
coming out the bottom is delicious. You can do this same thing with
store-bought distilled that is not filtered this way. One notable
exception is the best-selling bottled water in the business, Dasani from
Coca-Cola. Dasani is exactly what I make, distilled water filtered
through activated carbon. Try a bottle at any food store. My water
tastes exactly like it, but at a fraction of the cost, of course, about
20c/gallon.
I'm amazed none of the osmosis users haven't chimed in. Maybe they are
not reading this thread. Reverse osmosis was supposed to be the cureall
for our water ills. Unfortunately, it has seen some really nasty
problems since its inception they are not solving adequately. It's not
distilled, no where near as pure. The worst problem is bacteria.
Bacteria cannot pass through the membrane as they are too large. But,
alas, unfortunately, bacteria die because of the osmosis pressures used
to speed up filtration. Dead bacteria against the membrane now become
lodged against it and the pressure soon breaks them down. This releases
the TOXINS that make the bacteria so dangerous to humans, which DO pass
right through the membranes into the output filtered water. Noone in the
passenger shipping business will say, but I think THIS is the problem
with so many passengers of a cruise ship becoming sick all together, over
and over, for no apparent reason they will let us know about....toxic
water.
http://tinyurl.com/2xasfv
http://tinyurl.com/2ynewe
http://tinyurl.com/24nrq4
Distilled water has none of these problems. What I can't figure out,
especially on power yachts, is why all that waste engine heat going up
the stacks isn't running engine-room-mounted distillers for fresh water
to drink. One big V-8 diesel pushing a monster could make 200 gallons of
seawater into two hundred gallons of distilled in no time at all!....with
no bacteria in it!
Larry
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