Larry wrote:
Keith Hughes wrote in
:

Snip

Gotta be stored somewhere, making all that water. Distilled isn't going
to make any difference UNLESS it's the ONLY water ever put in one.

Even then it won't make any difference for a typical vented tank, unless
you use a real bacterial retentive vent filter, and do lots of routine
maintenance on the tank and filter.

Drinking out of someone's filthy water tank is always flirting with
sickness. Who knows what is in there?

Well, the point I was making was that you brought up the tank and
storage as though that was strictly an artifact of RO, not distilled.


No, I was never bitten by RO, myself.

I still don't believe it, I bet you tried to pet one when you were
little... :-)

I'm not sure of your motives for
the big attack, either, but RO ISN'T as wonderful as the brochures say it
is.

I had no intention of "attacking" you or distillation. Sorry if it came
off that way. I was responding to your attack on RO as being basically
a death trap, and it just isn't so. If it were, there'd be a lot of dead
people floating around. People by the millions drink RO problems with
out problems.

Also, there are some BS consumer-level stills out there that are not
very effective at all, because of mist and condensate carryover into the
distillate, so you need to be cognizant that there are 'bad' stills out
there, and blind faith in them is not justified. Especially not the
belief that you can basically dump sewage in them and get nice clean
water out. People need to be aware that all purification/sanitization
process results are statistical in nature, and that means being smart
about the feed water as well as the purification method you use.

As for the capturing of engine heat to use for distillation, I just have
a hard time seeing that the engines used by the typical cruiser, as
typically used, would be amenable to that type of modification.

In the hands of a sailboat "captain", who's a lawyer, bank
president, with no experience in biology outside of suing doctors for
malpractice, I can't imagine them doing the proper testing and
maintenance these complex filters require to make them safe and reliable.

Well, personally, for a boat application I would use cellulose acetate
membranes (instead of thin film composite - e.g. polyamide etc.), even
though they are not quite as efficient, so they can be sanitized with a
simple chlorine solution. I also wouldn't use them in most lakes,
estuaries, or inhabited bays.

I'll drink distilled from my 5 gallon sanitary jug.....thanks.

Nothing wrong with that.

Keith Hughes