We talked about the different ways distilled water is made but we really haven’t touched on costs. We know the cost of a water distiller and its operation it’s cheaper than anything else out there, include water battles (which are NOT made from distilled water), but we haven’t shown you any number. If you need a refresher please read our article on How to Make Distilled Water Easy.
Water Distiller Costs
Water Distillers range in sizes, efficiency, speed of distillation, whether they are fully automatic (i.e. automatic refills). So, it’s difficult to put a hard number to it. But, let’s just say you want a basic Counter top water distiller, that produces one Gallon of water. Prices for such distiller go anywhere between $130 and $200. Some come in shiny metal look with a glass bottle to collect the distilled water while others come in boring white with a BPA-free plastic container. Let’s settle with middle of the road and say $150.
Now we have to consider operating costs. A middle of the road water distiller will distill 1 gallon of water in 5 hours and consume up to 0.6 kwh of energy. At 10 cents per kwh, that means you spend about $0.30 (30 cents) to make a gallon. One gallon contains 128 floating ounces which means you can fill out 10.67 plastic bottles at 12 fl. Oz each. That means each plastic bottle that you make at home is costing you $0.0281 (less than 3 pennies). If you make 2 gallons a day for a year, and say your distiller breaks down after 3 yrs so you’ll have to replace it, that means each bottle of water is costing you $0.035 per bottle (that’s just over 3 pennies!) of distilled water you make at home.
Bottled Water Costs
Now, let’s be clear on something, we have yet to find a water bottle company that sells distilled water inside their water bottles so, you’re getting water that’s not nearly as good as distilled water. But, let’s run the calculations and see how much money you’re spending on this inferior quality product.
Now here we’ll also have many different choices because we have many water brands and we have many different sizes. Not only that, but we also have many different stores that may sell the same exact product at different prices. So, we tried to place nice and found the least expensive store selling Aquafina bottled water and they were selling a 12-oz 8-pack for $2.98 each. That means each water bottle is costing you $0.37 (37 cents!). That’s really expensive when you compare to your cost of making distilled water, in fact, it’s over 10 times cheaper for you to make distilled water than it is for you to buy bottled water (and we remind you, the water quality of bottled water in general is not as good as distilled water).
Would you prefer to pay a lot less for a much better quality product? Get yourself a water distiller, you’ll be glad you did.
