In this article, we wanted to make a follow up on our article How to Make Distilled Water Easy and explain some of the cons and pros of various methods available to make distilled water.
The easiest way to make distilled water is through a water distiller. Water distillers are designed to make nothing but distilled water so they function smoothly and efficiently. They are made up of two parts. One is the pot, which heats up the water and converts it into steam. The other is the condensing Unit, which takes the steam and cools it back down to water and then releases this water outside the Unit, where a big gallon jar is usually collecting the water, drop-by-drop.
A much more difficult way of making distilled water, although still considered on the easy, is by using a pressure cooker. The pressure cooker heats water and turns it into steam, which eventually escapes from the pressure release valve. So, effectively, the pressure cooker mimics the behavior of the heating pot in a traditional water distiller. The difficult part is taking that steam and transforming it back into water form. Capturing that steam is not that easy. Some ideas on how to condense the steam include attaching a very long narrow pipe to the pressure release valve or releasing the steam into another container that is itself immersed in ice.
Using a pressure cooker and Gerry-rigging the pressure release valve requires a lot of preparation and lots of trial and error. It also takes a lot of resources, including time. It’s certainly a lot more expensive. If you have already the pressure cooker, then you’re saving money on that, but you’re spending money on the connections, fixing leaks, and let’s not mention the highly inefficient way you’re turning water into steam and back into water.
Finally, another less effective way of creating distilled water and that also includes the two basic things needed to create distilled water: 1) Turning Water into steam and 2) Turning Steam back into water. And with that, we have the “a Pot within a Pot” strategy. It involves having a small pot filled with ice and a bowl on top of this ice and putting the entire system inside a larger pot with water and cover the whole thing. The theory is that you heat up the water in the big bot, which creates water vapor and eventually turns into water inside the bowl that was placed on top of the ice, which theoretically is cooler than the water in the big pot and therefore condenses the water vapor easily.
In practice, this is really difficult to achieve. For one, you don’t know how much to heat up the big pot. If you do too much, not only the water in the big pot will evaporate but also the ice in the smaller pot, and well, the steam might just escape the second you take off the lid because the vapor didn’t have the opportunity to cool into the bowl.
