Hawk’s Babble-Log

I got a cute little water distiller so that I could make my own distilled water. This little guy works great!

[http://a1-water-distiller.com/](http://a1-water-distiller.com/)

I got the “Stainless Top” version, because I don’t like the idea of the steam rolling over plastic.

The first thing I did was clean out the receiving jug. It arrives with a “new plastic” smell. I don’t like this smell too much, and I did not want it in my water. To clean it out, they recommend filling it with warm water and two teaspoons of baking soda (or dish soap). I didn’t have any baking soda, so I used dish soap. I let it soak overnite as recommended. The next morning (today), the “new plastic” smell was indeed gone, but now I had an “L.A. tap water chlorine” smell. Pretty yucky. So I decided that the first few gallons of distilled water that I made would be used for cleaning out the receiving bottle. Distilled water seems to be good at absorbing stuff. In this picture, the thing has been running for a few hours and has the receiving jug almost half full. I started with hot tap water, so this probably shaved off a half an hour from the total time.

I had it hooked up to my Kill-A-Watt so that I could monitor exactly how much energy the thing uses.

Here are the power consumption details:

The unit uses about 550 or 560 Watts of power @ 4.75 Amps. It’s power factor is nearly perfect at 0.99, so the VA (Volt-Amps) is pretty much the same as the Wattage. In about 5.5 hours, it used 3.15 KWh. What does this mean in dollars, you ask? Well…

Over the last two months, my roomie and I have used about 1170 KWh (KiloWatt-Hours), and this cost us about $121 (not including the huge L.A. city taxes). So, if you do some simple math, you’ll find that we pay about $0.104265 / KWh. That’s about ten and a half cents per Kilowatt-Hour. The water distiller consumed 3.15 KWh, so that cost me, can you guess? $0.32843475, or about 33 cents to make one gallon of distilled water. This kicks ass with whatever you could find in a supermarket! Or any other kind of market.

I put a themometer/hydrometer near it and took some readings. I put the remote thermometer up near the top, just above the fan, where it was a toasty 115 F. But this dropped significantly when I raised the thermometer a small distance. In the picture, it’s resting on the coil of the cord, and this lowered the reading down to 104.5 F. The temp sitting on top of the receiving jug ranged from 80.4 to 84.6 F. I did notice that the room got a bit warmer; I even had to open the window. This little sucker is going to be fun in our sweltering Hollywood summers! Aaah, sweat… I’ve almost forgotten what you felt like, suffering through this _bitterly cold_ Hollywood winter (like, it’s down to 70 F outside! _Burrrrrr!_).

Strangely, the humidity _dropped_ around the distiller. Over by the window, I have another thermometer/hydrometer set up, with the remote thermometer positioned outside the window so that I can saunter over to the window and check out the temp outside before actually leaving my protective domain. This one reported 35% humidity. But in the kitchen, near the water distiller, it dropped down below 30%. That’s kinda wierd, I would have thought it’d be the other way around.

By the way, if you were wondering what that little round white thing is between the distiller and the receiving jug, I’ll try and explain: It’s a little white thing which seats perfectly with the wide mouth of the receiving jug and the small output hole comming from the distiller. It contains a small “carbon sack” or “carbon pouch”, or carbon something. I’m not sure if I like it yet, but I’m going to use it for now. I mean, we never had any carbon pouches up in Washington with our big-ass stainless distiller. That ugly sucker only took about an hour to make a gallon. Course, it wasn’t a full gallon; it lost about a fifth of the gallon due to lost steam. Aaah, good times. Anyway…

Here’s what it looked like after it had completed. The unit must have a timer or something because it shut itself off; I didn’t do it. The receiving jug is nearly full, so if there was any loss of steam, I can’t tell! The sides of the distiller were still warm, and the water in the receiving jug was still warm–and stayed warm for quite a while.

I’m very satisfied with this cute little sucker, and I’ll let ya know how it fares in the future.