As I was leaving the gym tonight, I noticed that the cool but damp day made the front windows fog up to an extreme degree. The condensation was beaded up in large droplets and running down the glass.
The air inside the gym had a particularly strong funk to it, and it was obvious that all of the window steam was coming from the dozens of sweaty hot bodies slamming weights around.
It occurred to me that the condensate is, essentially, distilled water.
It also occurred to me that they scrub the windows daily.
If I had a nice clean squeegee, I could collect all of the condensate from the length of the gym, probably filling up a glass.
So my question is: would such a glass of condensed gym sweat be totally inert and harmless to drink, or would it be … less than pure?
First of all, you say that they wash the windows daily. That’s all well and good, but I’m sure there will be some residue from the cleaning solution, and perhaps gunk transferred from the squeegee while they were cleaning. Visually clean does not necessarily mean sanitary.
Then you have the dust and dirt that have settled on the window, in addition to the sweat and other contaminants from the humid air.
Go ahead and try it if you want, but I wouldn’t bet on it tasting good or being healthy.
It would be as harmless and inert as the water collected off a grimy window in a dank gym coulld ever be, which is not very.
It probably wouldn’t kill you, but it wouldn’t be very appealing. Along with the water you would also collect all the dust (peices of shed skin, hair and fraying jockstraps), all the bodily aerosols (droplets form people coughing, flicking off sweat etc) and any sundry other material like deodorant spray or dust tracked in on people’s boots…
If I sprayed distilled water on a benchtop at the gym, would you collect it and drink it on the grounds that it started out distilled? Exactly the same principle. Water is a fantastic solvent, which also means that it’s fantatsic in collecting any muck that it comes into contact with.
I’m not worried about gunk on the window – I will scrub the window with alcohol and then be sure to squeegee in such a way as to only collect water from the glass and not water that I cause to run down the edges.
I will use a “food services approved” squeegee.
I will choose a pane of glass as far from the action as possible so that it does not have actual sweat spraying directly on it.
You may have me with the aerosolized funk, though. I can’t see avoiding microscopic stuff from the gym air hitting and sticking to the glass – but I’m breathing that funk anyway.
As I pointed out above, it’s highly unlikely that it would kill you no matter what you did. The stuff just isn’t that harmful. But it’s unlikely to be appealing under normal circumstances.
Of course if you really insist on cleaning the window thoroughly right beforehand and so forth then of course it will be fairly clean. What possible reason could it have for no being fairly clean? As you point out it’s just water condensed on to clean glass.
But most windows are only cleaned once a week, if that.
The only things that would really be harmful to you are chemicals from cleaning as stated above or bacteria. Given your extensive window condensation harvesting preparation, there would be nothing in that water that you wouldn’t also be breathing in by walking by the window. It would probably be cool and nice.
There is no particular reason that shed skin, hair, and fraying jockstrap particles would be harmful to you even if you did drink them. Humans didn’t always drink sparkling clean sterilized water you know. While camping I have drunk water from lakes that moose pee in and from streams that fish poop in. While drunk I have drunk water from a small duck pond filled with algae and duck poop. While swimming I have accidentally drunk water from a murky lake. And once I drank some thin yellow water from a metal can that said “Coors” on it. But that made me puke.
Would you get the same results from a strategically placed dehumidifier?
I’ve often wondered if I could drink the contents in the tank of the dehumidifier…
the fish don’t seem to mind it (I use it to top off the fish tank water).
Nice!
I bet that if it were fairly clean inside (a bit of a chore), one could produce gallons of recycled gym sweat. I just hope nobody steals my idea before I can get jugs of it on store shelves.
Any idea about what kind of non-water vapors mentioned by scr4 might go along for the ride?
i could see drinking this water in a horrible incident. perhaps some sort of structural collapse, earthquake, explosion, etc. so you could stay alive until you are rescued.