Keith Hughes wrote in news:46e8db3d$0$3579
:

Safer than tap water, by a long shot.

I also don't believe this to be true. From the time it was injected with
Chlorine and other chemicals until it reaches your tap is longer than you
think....plenty of time for the chemicals injected into the water to, at
least, KILL the bugs in the water. This is not true in a boat RO system.
If any kind of live organism makes it through the membrane, it's STILL
live when you drink it. It STILL can multiply in the storage tanks,
probably already contaminated by dock water from Smiley's Marina and
Tire's swamp water well out back of the old outhouse.

You could be sure by simply boiling it for a few minutes. That will kill
whatever crap you ingest from RO and that filthy tank you've never seen
the inside of. Of course, for the hermits, that takes power.

Larry
--
The seawater sucked into the RO is loaded with microscopic life the ocean
lives on. The plankton, alone, must represent a huge attack on the
system. Plankton is, probably not, toxic. But, microorganisms have a
tendency to, well, to put it bluntly, ****. That's, probably, a toxic
soup of organic chemistry I'd rather not talk about over dinner. It's
amazing all this doesn't just clog the filter dispite the constant
flushing.....and I keep thinking about all those people on the cruise
ships that got sick from drinking the water on the ship....RO water.
They didn't get sick off tap water.....

Larry wrote:
Keith Hughes wrote in news:46e8db3d$0$3579
:

Safer than tap water, by a long shot.

I also don't believe this to be true. From the time it was injected with
Chlorine and other chemicals until it reaches your tap is longer than you
think....

No, it isn't. In my case, it's long enough for the chlorine level to be
undetectable at my tap. And long enough for plenty of growth to occur.
I've been looking at potable water micro results (total microbial and
coliforms) for 25 years - I know the quality of tap water.

plenty of time for the chemicals injected into the water to, at
least, KILL the bugs in the water. This is not true in a boat RO system.
If any kind of live organism makes it through the membrane, it's STILL
live when you drink it. It STILL can multiply in the storage tanks,
probably already contaminated by dock water from Smiley's Marina and
Tire's swamp water well out back of the old outhouse.

OK, where'd the storage tank slip into the discussion? You think
putting distilled water in a vented storage tank remains sterile?

You could be sure by simply boiling it for a few minutes. That will kill
whatever crap you ingest from RO and that filthy tank you've never seen
the inside of. Of course, for the hermits, that takes power.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again...you were bitten by an RO
unit as a small child weren't you? :-)

Keith Hughes

Keith Hughes wrote in
:

OK, where'd the storage tank slip into the discussion? You think
putting distilled water in a vented storage tank remains sterile?

You could be sure by simply boiling it for a few minutes. That will
kill whatever crap you ingest from RO and that filthy tank you've
never seen the inside of. Of course, for the hermits, that takes
power.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again...you were bitten by an RO
unit as a small child weren't you? :-)

Keith Hughes



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

No, I was never bitten by RO, myself. I'm not sure of your motives for
the big attack, either, but RO ISN'T as wonderful as the brochures say it
is. 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.

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

Larry
--
Search youtube for "Depleted Uranium"
The ultimate dirty bomb......

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

On Sat, 15 Sep 2007 10:43:37 -0700, Keith Hughes
wrote:


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.

Good advice. Having worked on the steam generating end only, where
the "cool" steam was +600 F, I hadn't given much thought on the
potential distillers have for biological type carryover.
A good boiling of the water, perhaps under pressure, before any
steam/vapor is allowed to process further, and close care with the
carryover and condensing elements of the distiller should solve that,
but the cost and complexity grows greater.
Larry had me a bit concerned about RO quality, and his take on
"toxins" created by RO hydraulic pressure on bacteria, and mass cruise
boat illness is interesting, but I'm not sold on either.
You have raised red flags about distiller feed, design and operation.
Very educational discussion.
Put me down on the RO side.
But I admit I've never been a big drinker of plain water.

--Vic

Keith Hughes wrote in
:

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.



Granted. A couple of years ago, I got in a ****ing contest with an RO
dealer on a web forum. RO was better than distillation, which just isn't
so. So, he and I swapped a quart of our finest product in sanitized
containers. My container was a polycarb jug I meticulously cleaned, then
sanitized in my convection oven for an hour at 220F. Trying to do his
best, his sanitation method was very similar. I took his word he was
sending me RO, not distillate...(c;

The bet was to put each water sample in the sun for a couple of months to
see what grows in it. (I cheated because I'd already set a gallon of
distillate in a sanitized container in the sun for a whole year that
grows nothing...doesn't even change the taste in polycarb containers.

The RO came with a destructive seal I'd forgotten to put on the one I
sent him. I don't think he trusted me. I sat it in the summer South
Carolina sun out on my patio where the daytime temp is in the 90s here on
the river. Two weeks, not a month, later, I returned his RO swamp water
that grew some beautiful algae in a light green color without even taking
a look at it under my microscope to look for bacteria or amoebas. He
never returned my sample and refused to discuss with the group his
findings in my sample.

I told him I thought his membrane had a rip in it....just for laughs.

The algae is harmless, but that wasn't the point. RO isn't the holy
grail the dealers portray it to be. It's FILTERED WATER.

I didn't attack RO, by the way. I only pointed out what I had read of
the bacteria trapped on the high pressure side of the membrane breaking
down, then releasing their toxic load into the feedwater, which WAS small
enough to pass through the membrame into the drinking water on the other
side. It's a serious problem for many drinkers if it's not corrected.
Boaters, the same guys who cannot figure out why the batteries don't
charge, have no training other than the little instruction manual on the
proper maintenance and operation of an RO plant that is complex by its
very nature and REQUIRES this maintenance to be performed at regular
intervals and properly to get safe results. I think THAT is a recipe for
disaster.....not RO, per se.

Larry
--
Search youtube for "Depleted Uranium"
The ultimate dirty bomb......

On Sep 15, 2:48 pm, Larry wrote:
... I didn't attack RO, by the way. I only pointed out what I had read of
the bacteria trapped on the high pressure side of the membrane breaking
down, then releasing their toxic load into the feedwater, which WAS small
enough to pass through the membrame into the drinking water on the other
side. It's a serious problem for many drinkers if it's not corrected. ...

Is it a genuine "serious problem" or a theoretically possibly "serious
problem"? How many is "many"? I've never heard of a single case of a
cruiser getting sick or even suspecting that they got sick from their
RO water. It seems to me you've gotten pretty worked-up without any
disinterested evidence at all. It would be nice to know if there is
any evidence from anyone not selling a competing product that the
problem exists and if if does exist is would be nice to know how
dangerous it is. Are we talking about the mild flue like stuff that
we all get from our food and water as a part of living in a complex
world or need we be worried about something more deadly?

-- Tom.

wrote:
On Sep 15, 2:48 pm, Larry wrote:
... I didn't attack RO, by the way. I only pointed out what I had read of
the bacteria trapped on the high pressure side of the membrane breaking
down, then releasing their toxic load into the feedwater, which WAS small
enough to pass through the membrame into the drinking water on the other
side. It's a serious problem for many drinkers if it's not corrected. ...

Is it a genuine "serious problem" or a theoretically possibly "serious
problem"? How many is "many"? I've never heard of a single case of a
cruiser getting sick or even suspecting that they got sick from their
RO water. It seems to me you've gotten pretty worked-up without any
disinterested evidence at all. It would be nice to know if there is
any evidence from anyone not selling a competing product that the
problem exists and if if does exist is would be nice to know how
dangerous it is. Are we talking about the mild flue like stuff that
we all get from our food and water as a part of living in a complex
world or need we be worried about something more deadly?

It's *only* a serious problem if you don't maintain your RO. Membranes
*will* develop a biofilm, and it is possible that, with serious neglect,
you get bacterial growth-through (i.e. bug colonizing the membrane and
shedding on the downstream side), but extremely unlikely. Much more
likely is the increased pressure caused by fouling with biofilm causes
membrane compaction, severely restricting flow.

With RO, you need to monitor the pressure, and the flux rate (flow
through the membrane) and take some corrective action when you start
seeing a downward trend. And RO membranes have to be replaced - they
don't last forever.

Each technology has its tradeoffs. The bioburden of RO water from a well
designed and maintained RO system will be extremely low - far lower than
tap water. The vegetative bioburden from a stove-top type still will
generally be lower, but there are plenty of bacillus and mold spores
that will cruise right through it without a problem.

Let's face it, if it *were* that big of a problem, you'd die if you went
swimming in your pool, or the ocean, or drank water from a fountain, or
in a restaurant, or....

Just be a little smart about where you draw water from, and don't let it
sit around in a dirty vented tank, and maintain your equipment (still or
RO) and you won't have a problem. Routinely maintain your tanks, and
that water won't be an issue either

Keith Hughes

On Sat, 15 Sep 2007 10:43:37 -0700, Keith Hughes
wrote:

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.

The equipment was on the market at one time[1], although RO may have
killed it off. The idea was to stretch water supply and gain fuel
capacity. As in ocean crossing in powerboats. A sailboat just doesn't
have the fuel burn needed to make a lot of water.

1. I have magazines going back decades. Maybe I can find something.

Casady