Hawk’s Babble-Log

After I cleaned my water distiller for the first time, I noticed a bad smell and a bad taste in the water that it produced. I asked my roommate to smell it (a college grad in chemestry) and he said it smelled like iron.

Wierd. Well, I tried various things to get rid of the bad smell/taste: I cleaned it again. I scrubbed it hard with the dark-green (scratchy) side of my sponge. I cleaned it again with the stuff they gave me. I ran it without the carbon filter. I even ran a distilled gallon through again. But the bad smell/taste persisted.

“Oh GREAT!” I thought, “Somehow, I’ve already broken my distiller!”

I emailed customer service and got no response. So I called ‘em up and left a brief message about the problem. A guy called me back and figured out the problem almost immediately. The guy was good. He asked if I had used something scratchy to clean out the tank, and I told him how I had scrubbed it with my scratchy sponge.

There was the problem. There is some kind of coating on stainless steel which prevents the iron from seeping out into the water. This makes sense because stainless steel is made of iron and crome (please correct me if I’m wrong). This also makes sense because the bad smell/taste started right after I had cleaned it out the first time (using lots of fource with the _scratchy_ side of my green sponge).

So… how to fix: he said put one cup of vinegar in the tank, and fill it the rest of the way up with water, and run that through once without the carbon filter. Then, run a regular gallon through (tap water) still without the carbon filter to clean out the vinegar smell/taste. Then resume normal operation.

Well, actually, it took one or two more gallons going through to get the vinegar smell/taste out completely, but that _totally fixed the problem!_ Now I’m back to perfect, pure water with no bad smells and no bad tastes!

If you decided to get one of these little water distillers, don’t clean the tank with something scratchy. The support guy said it was okay to use something like a washcloth, but nothing more scratchy than that.

I hope this helps.