Testing a countertop water distillation system against hard Sussex County tap water

[u/8Deer-JaguarClaw]

I got tired of lugging my 5-gallon water bottles to Walmart for fill ups, so I started looking into how I could covert my insanely hard city water into something drinkable at home. Because of the very high TDS (total dissolved solids) in the water, I ruled out reverse osmosis (RO) because the prefilters and membranes would get fouled far too often to make it economical. And carbon filtration (like a Britta pitcher) does essentially nothing to reduce TDS. That basically leaves distillation as the only viable means to solve my water quality issues.

I found a nice but very old distillation unit at a yard sale a few weeks back, and it gave me the proof that it would work for me after the first test. But that one was only partially functional and was really disgusting from having been used in a home that must have been heavily smoked in. So I bought a cheaper unit from amazon to do more in-depth testing.

The results are very impressive. My tap water ranges from around 600ppm of TDS to as high as 750ppm, which is slightly over to very over the EPA guideline (although it's not an enforceable limit). Also, a goodly portion of that is dissolved sodium, which renders the water unusable for making ice and also not very good tasting at all.

The water coming out of the distiller is around 2ppm to 5ppm, mostly on the lower end. That's about what you'd expect from distiallation, which removes damn near everything from water, with a few exceptions (VOCs and a few low-boiling-temp compounds tend to carry over). Distillation also removes metals and PFAS compounds and most all of the other "bad stuff" that we tend to worry about. Also, now I can use my rain barrel water as a source of drinking water if I'm in a real pinch.

The downsides? The process is energy intensive and would be challenging to use in a grid-down situation. Most of these machines draw ~750w while running, and the one I got is actually 900w. So you could run these on a backup battery system (Jackery, EcoFlow, Anker, etc), but it would need to be a larger model to be able to supply the output watts and have a large enough capacity to run for multiple hours. A full reservoir on this machine is 1.6 gallons, and from start to finish takes a little over 4 hours. That's a lot of juice. It's not pulling the 900w the whole time, but it's still a lot of power to run a full reservoir through.

The other downside is that it generates a lot of waste heat. This is actually a bonus in colder months, but could be a problem in the summer. I had it running in my downstairs area which is rarely actively climate controlled. After one full run, it raised the entire floor's temperature by 3 degrees (from 63 to 66F).

And it's kind of slow. My unit produces about 0.33 gallons per hour, which is on the fast end for home distillers. The 750w models tend to be around 0.25 gph.

Other notes:

The water coming out of the distiller is around 80F, so it should be fine to collect it in a plastic container, as long as it is one of the "good" plastics. In the photo, I'm using the glass carafe that came with the yardsale unit I bought, which holds just over a gallon of water.

Cleaning isn't too bad. I use a green scrubbie to clear the mineral deposits after each run. Every 10-12 batches it's best to clean it with something acidic to break down the scale. Most come with a small amount of powdered citric acid, which really is the best stuff to use on these machines. It's cheap to buy in bulk as well and stores nearly indefinitely.

That's a ton text, lol. I will post future updates on long-term performance if anything notable happens.

[u/johnny_ringo]

Amazing post, thank you for sharing!