On Thu, 31 Mar 2005 19:40:56 -0500,
Larry W4CSC wrote:
"Skip Gundlach" skipgundlach sez use my name at earthlink dot fishcatcher
(net) - with apologies for the spamtrap wrote in news:APKdnY-Wred0-tHfRVn-
:

Is the stuff out of the watermaker acceptable? That is, Reverse Osmosis,
not distilled, water?


Hmm...As RO water takes out salt and other chemicals, I suppose it would be
acceptable.

I'm, personally, afraid of drinking RO water. I've read some disturbing
reports of drinkers getting very sick when the bacteria filtered out by the
membrane broke down and released toxins into the stream that were small
enough to penetrate the membrane into the outlet side....

I've often wondered if this is why these passenger ships, who I'm sure are
running on RO water, have massive sickness epidemics. You can see why they
never seem to find out what the cause was as the lawyers are lined up on
the dock.

I have two distillers, here. One is a laboratory grade, ceramic and
stainless, that provides about 20 gallons per day and will run continuously
if you flush it out every couple of days on tap water. The other is a nice
Sears countertop model a friend gave me when it crapped out the second
time, bad thermostat $30. I replaced the crappy boiler steam seal with an
O-ring the company was very interested in talking to me about....$1.28
instead of giving Sears $13 for a little doorseal. I keep about 30 gallons
of distilled, activated carbon filtered (to get the benzene and other
volatiles that also distill with the water out) on hand. I pack a big
Brita fridge dispenser with activated carbon over a coffee filter. The
whole top of the Brita's intake tank is full of activated carbon. Makes
the water coming out of it taste wonderful!





How well does your distiller work on distilling from salt water?

--
Jim Richardson http://www.eskimo.com/~warlock
We have only two things to worry about--either that things will never
get back to normal, or that they already have.

Jim Richardson wrote in news:md92i2-
:

How well does your distiller work on distilling from salt water?



Taking a challenge from a local RO dealer, I put one gallon of seawater out
of the Ashley River into my simple Sears countertop distiller. There was
no salt taste, whatsoever in the distilled water. It was about 6ppm on the
meter and we both drank the water.

However, you'd have to clean the pot every time you did it, of course,
which you don't have to do but once a month to get the calcium deposits out
from our tap water. The pot is stainless steel and seemed unharmed by the
boiling seawater.