How to Make Distilled Water

I use distilled water to dilute my homemade cleaners and in my humidifier . It costs under 90 cents per gallon. I use roughly a gallon every two weeks. The cost isn’t much, but I would like to stop buying water in plastic jugs. Thankfully, I stumbled across instructions on how to make distilled water at home from wikiHow’s website.

http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Distilled-Water

Here are my findings:

I started off with a large stainless steel stock pot and a large glass bowl. The bowl’s rim diameter was a little smaller than the pot. I placed a beer can chicken rack at the bottom of my pot, then filled it with enough water to cover the rack about an inch. Next, I set the glass bowl down on the rack, and the bowl was able to float on the water but not rest on the bottom of the pot. Next, I placed the lid on the pot upside down, so after the water boiled and condensation formed on the lid, it would drip into the bowl.  My lid had a small hole in it so I plugged it with a small piece of foil. After I brought the water to a boil, I then placed ice on lid to speed up condensation.

The most difficult part of this process is removing the inverted lid from the pot without spilling the melted ice into my collection bowl. Then I discovered I could remove the water from the lid by extracting it with a turkey baster. I started dumping the melted ice water into the sink, but then I realized that was wasteful. I gathered several empty 16 oz.plastic containers for the water. Then I’ll refreeze the water for the next time I do this.
 
I let my water boil on medium heat for about an hour. I extracted the melted water and replaced it with fresh ice about every 5 minutes. I used about 1 1/2 cups of ice each time and repeated the process about 12 times. I think I went through about 18 cups of ice.

Once the pot had cooled down, I carefully took off the lid to see how much distilled water was collected in the bowl. Then I extracted the distilled water from the bowl with my baster and put it into a container for storage. The above method rendered 3 cups of distilled water.

Will I do it again? Absolutely, no more purchasing those plastic jugs anymore!

Tomorrow I think I’ll try using the sun instead of the stove. I’ll follow up with my findings.

*Update on 5/8/13:

Placing my contraption outside (minus the ice) for 24 hours rendered only 4 teaspoons of distilled water. Looks like I’ll be using the stove if I need some in a hurry.

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