Distilled Water Association

Water Education through Science and Engineering

how to make distilled water easy

Cheap and Not-so-cheap Ways of Making Distilled Water

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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.

The Easy, Not-So-Easy, and Very Hard Ways of Making Distilled Water

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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.