Water purification.

[The_IndustrialPhreak]

So I scored a brand "new" never used water distiller that normally went for $300 for $15 at a local thrift store. It is a Sears/Kenmore 423450 counter-top water purifier with stainless steel boiler and condenser.

So far its rather nice but I have found it takes quite a bit of time to boil and condense a gallon of water. I usually find it takes anywhere from 5-7 hours to produce a gallon of clean drinking water depending on the temperature of the water when I start the process.


Some of the issues I have found after condensing 6 gallons of water through this machine.

1. Initial water temperature is important.

2. Source of water is important regarding what sort of residue is left in the boiling chamber.

3. Collection vessel is important. I've noticed a strange aroma and flavor imparted to the resulting nectar with the stock plastic jug for collection. I may want to upgrade to a glass carboy from a local brew supply shop.

4. The speed of distillation is slow, I may want to modify the setup.

 a. run a secondary condensing coil outside to take advantage of winter temperatures. ( not really a issue due to no steam coming out of the condenser)
b. upgrade the boiling chamber coils or introduce a vacuum to the chamber to lower the boiling temperature. (upgrade coils = more energy into the water, vacuum to lower boiling temperature)
c. Figure a way to hook it up to my water line with a valve in the chamber and in the collection vessel in order to assure constant supply of clean water.

What are your thoughts?

[David Knaack]

Regarding boiling chamber reside, if you boil the initial charge down to about 5-10% the initial volume and then pour off the remainder you can reduce the accumulation. A periodic soak with white vinegar should take care of the rest of it. You can also get commercial solutions for this, since this is a common problem with tea kettles.

If you add a water line, remember to dump the chamber periodically or all the minerals that are left behind will build up and reduce your heating efficiency faster.

Increasing the speed of distillation may impact the quality of your result. Running faster will, in principle, carry over somewhat more non-water chemicals. However, you'd have to test to see if that matters. I'm guessing you won't notice a difference.

Assuming you are boiling a gallon of 60F water with a household circuit limited to about 1500W at best it's going to take around an hour unless you can get some significant heat recovery from condensation going. Maybe you could add a peltier to pump heat from the condenser to the boiling chamber (no idea if running a peltier with a hot end at 100C is going to be efficient enough to bother with).

I don't think doing it under vacuum will help very much, since most of your heat energy (600Wh or so) is going into the phase change rather than temperature change.

You might want to experiment with adding small amounts of salts to the distilled water to adjust the flavor, and aerate it to put dissolved gasses back in. Evidently these can have a large impact on the flavor.

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[Jeff Jensen]

These distillers also can be used for distilling another volatile liquid.  One suggestion is to use inexpensive wine or beer to produce distilled alcohol.

Beyond that, I don't have anything to add.

Jeff

On Wed, Feb 18, 2015 at 11:18 AM, The_IndustrialPhreak <mdkl...@gmail.com> wrote:

[David Knaack]

In principle, one might expect that distilling beer would leave hop oil all over the boiling chamber. One might further speculate that hop oil is a pain in the ass to clean. Just guessing here though.

[Jeff Jensen]

Time for an experiment?

[David Knaack]

Unfortunately I lack the appropriate licenses to do this with food products.

I think solvent recovery of denatured alcohol is OK though, so one could probably create a beer/denatured alcohol solvent mix and recover the alcohol solvent and water separately, then inspect the remaining residue.

[The_IndustrialPhreak]

I love the idea of the heat exchanger to reclaim wasted heat from the condenser coils back to boiling chamber.

I have seen some more modular survival stills where you use a bucket of cool brackish water on the top chamber thus warming the second batch of water for energy savings while producing additional drinkable H2O units.

Adding pink Himalayan salt along with the baking soda to buffer the resulting distillate adds a interesting dimension to the hydration units. I saw a post not to long ago about Soylent might be interesting to experiment with using this with the human fuel powder.

Aside from that I may want to look at getting some fresh aquarium charcoal and rolling my own charcoal polishing filter as well filtering the water first before adding it to the purifier.