Distillation for Water Treatment

[14DFASniper]

Water is one of the most valuable resources after an initial catastrophe. Chemical treatments, filtration, and boiling are more common methods of purification prior to drinking.

However, in some instances ions (salt water, nitrates, sulfate, sulfite, heavy metals like iron, lead etc)and other chemicals might reduce the quality of the drinking water. Chemical treatments, boiling, and most filtration does not remove these. (unless you have a reverse osmosis filter)

You may be forced to try and extract water from vegetation (IE -cactus) in order to survive where the traditional techniques will probably not work either. Yeah, you can do the solar still, but if you can heat it up with fire your recovery time will be a lot faster and allow you higher capacity to produce extra water.

A simple stopper for your water container and 6 ft coil of narrow gauge tubing (copper or plastic) might make a simple distillation column that will get you through.

In addition to water, you could distill off ethanol if you needed to make a small lot of liquid fuel or antiseptic if you ended up out there longer term. The coil of tubing can have multiple other uses as well so I think it might be something worth considering.

Thinking about adding something like this to my own kit. Anyone else have something like that in your BOB? I'd be interested in knowing a little about your setup.

[Wheelgunner]

Distilling enough water for your needs is not that difficult if you have what you need.

You need:

A metal vessel. A stainless pot is good.
An enameled steel pot is good if it's in good condition.

You also need:

A condenser. A stainless condenser is best, but any non-reactive metal condenser is good. Copper will be okay but copper is toxic if you ingest too much copper.
Aluminum is bad.

The problem is, how do you attach the condenser to the vessel that you boil the water in?

If you use lead solder, you endanger yourself.
Lead is poison.

Some folks have used huge metal tanks for vessels and truck radiators for condensers when distilling moonshine.
This is the reason I never drink moonshine unless I see the still it comes from.

The method is simple. You heat water to the boiling point, the condensate is cooled in the condenser, the pure water is bottled or consumed at the condenser's end.

You don't need a coil of condenser tubing, but a coil saves space.

You can pour dirty water over the condenser to cool the condensate or use a wet rag to cool the condenser.

[MikeK]

Distillation takes a lot of fuel for any more than small quantities. To me, it's not really practical on a large scale or for long term. Plus, a lot of aromatics and solvents will distill off with the water. I can see it's usefullness in certain limited cases though. For me, fuel would be the main issue.

[wootie]

If you are going to have to cook over a live fire, simply set the boiler on the side of the campfire and use your cooking fire for both.

[14DFASniper]

As far as the fuel required it is dependent on what is available for you to utilize as a fuel source and how plentiful it is in your area. I was assuming you would be able to make a simple fire with some type of easily accessible fuel source available such as wood.

As WOOTIE suggested, you likely are going to have a fire going anyways, so while that is burning, you could be continuously distilling water. I don't think it would be ideal for massive production gallons, but you could make a gallon or two of clean high quality water in a few hours.

Good points on the types of metals you use in the distillation system. That would suck getting lead poisoning by not using the right types of vessels. The idea of pouring "dirty" water or wet rag over the condensing coil to aid collapse of the vapor is a good idea. Or you could simply place the coil in a water supply like river, lake, or even just a simple water bath to do the same thing.

I've done this with both copper coil and simple polypropylene tubing. Seems to work okay but the water bath around the coil will heat up over time and become less effective at it reaches bpt.

I used a simple rubber stopper on the stainless steel metal container boiler with a hole in the stopper to connect the condensing coil onto for my setup. It was simple and cheap. I suppose the KISS principle rules out in the bush and also allows you to use the components individually for other tasks.

You are correct, various VOC's and other aromatics will be distilled off with the water. I suppose if you believed these were in the water source, and they were harmful you would probably want to look for a different water supply to begin with. In addition, if those are in there, then probably other harmful and non-volitile components are as well.

Does anyone have anything like this already in their BOB setup for this purpose of safe water procurement from water sources with high ion content? (salt water, alkaline water, hard water, etc) Anyone try water extraction from vegetation with a distillation system?