I’m wanting to set up a humidifier and read I should use distilled water. A lot of grocery stores have water refill stations (where you can refill a gallon jug for 40 cents or so, rather than spend $1 on a new jug) but I get the impression those are just for spring water, not distilled water.
Do stores tend of offer the option to refill a gallon jug of distilled water for a fraction of the price of buying new jugs of it? I’m snowed in right now and can’t go to the store to check, but I’m wondering if other people who use distilled water or use refill stations know if this is generally an option.
There are some water companies that deliver the big 5 gallon jugs of distilled water. I’ve never seen or heard of a store that does refills.
There is a two pot stovetop solution to making distilled water. It looks like C/Net has it written up pretty well. Search/Scroll down to " How to make your own distilled water"
The issue is I think Primo water is only for drinking water, not distilled.
As far as making my own distilled water at home, I’m wondering if the electricity costs of using the stove are about the same as buying it from the store. The article said it took an hour of heating water on the stove to create 12oz of distilled water, while a gallon of store bought distilled is about a dollar. The total cost is probably about the same assuming around 10 cents per kwh of electricity.
Not even that; usually just filtered city water. (which is the case on a whole lot of bottled water as well)
The big issue is that distilling water isn’t the sort of thing they’d do on-site in a kiosk, so it would have to have a 100 gallon tank or something to draw from as people came up and filled whatever receptacle they have.
This. Those water vending machines don’t simply have a big tank of water from which they dispense, that is refilled from a big truck that makes the rounds each week. (Like those tanker trucks you see refilling the underground tanks at gas stations.)
They just connect to the local water supply, and treat the water there in the machine before vending it.
Where I live, the municipal water is putrid. So those vending machines are everywhere around here (at 35 cents a gallon). I use that for drinking and cooking. The machine has a placard describing at least five ways the water is processed. But the source is still the local water supply.
The water is filtered, reverse osmosified, ozoned, ultraviolated, charcoalated, and maybe something else too.
Our drinking water here in Dallas is pretty good, and most of those vending machines seem to be in immigrant/ethnic areas - presumably the people there don’t have the trust in the public water system that native born people do. Or maybe they’re more discerning… I don’t know.
That seems a bit extreme; filtration and reverse osmosis ought to make any water considerably better to drink by itself. Maybe a pass of charcoal filtration to remove smells and odors might be good, but I don’t know that the ultraviolet light or ozone is really necessary- city water ought to be microbiologically sound to begin with.
Sounds like a water treatment from A Clockwork Orange.
On a more relevant note, I put regular tap water in humidifiers and haven’t really felt like I’m missing anything. With the cheap way that these things are made, the electronics fry or a key piece of plastic cracks long before the thing becomes unusable from water deposits.
I don’t know what your humidifier recommends but I have a Rowenta clothes iron and its manual specifically says not to use distilled water, and that it’s designed to be used with tap water.
Our Opal ice maker does recommend only distilled water for purposes of keeping deposits to a minimum. Since we’ve got the add-on reservoir that holds exactly one gallon, using the jugs from the store is pretty easy; probably easier than buying in bulk would be.
A big reason, I think, why there aren’t distilled water refill stations is that if the container you’re refilling isn’t scrupulously clean, it’s going to be impure water.
What kind of humidifier, and where did you read that?
I have an Aprilaire whole-house humidifier installed on my furnace and it just uses water from the cold-water line. I use a portable blown-air humidifier with tap water in the room where I store my guitars to no ill effect.
I used to use ultrasonic humidifiers and if you use tap water in those you will get white dust everywhere. I quit using those.
I have an Opal as well, and back when it lived in the kitchen, it got reverse osmosis water, but now that it’s been exiled to the garage it gets tap water. If I remember, I run a little vinegar through it now and again, but otherwise it’s no worse for wear six or seven years on.