How To Make Your Own Distilled Water

Distilled water is devoid of minerals and impurities that are often found in ground water. While distilled water is available for purchase in nearly every grocery and convenience store across the country, it is rather simple to make distilled water at your home.

Instructions:

1. Fill a three- to five-gallon pot until it is half-full with water.
2. Place a glass bowl afloat in the center, making sure that the bottom of the bowl does not touch the bottom of the pot. If it does, continue to fill the pot with water until the bowl can float.
3. Check to make sure that water is not collecting within the glass bowl.
4. Make sure the lid of the pot is upside down, and place it on top of the pot. As the water heats up, the water vapor will rise and collect on the lid, condense into water droplets, and gather in your bowl.
5. Turn on the heat. While the water does need to get very hot, boiling it isn’t absolutely necessary.
6. Place ice cubes on top of pot’s liquid. The cold will speed up the process as it helps to condense the steam in the pot.
6. Turn off the heat and remove the distilled water from the stove. Be careful, because the pot will be hot.
7. Store distilled water in a sterile, clean container. Make sure the container will be used in the long-term because other containers might be made of certain plastics or other contaminants that can leak into your water, undoing all the hard work you just did to make pure water.

Make Distilled Water from Snow and Rain

While the above instructions are the most common, you can also distill water from snow or rain, two natural forms of distilled water that you can find in your own backyard. Water evaporates from the land, rivers, lakes and oceans and condenses before it falls back to you as precipitation. Unless your living area is highly polluted, rest assured that the water is safe to drink.

Collect snow or rain in a clean container, and allow the water to sit for a few days so that any dirt or sediment falls to the bottom of the bowl. In most cases, you can go ahead and drink the water as-is, but some people may feel more comfortable boiling it or running it through a coffee filter.

In addition, while it is cheaper to buy distilled water than to make it on the stove due to the costs of electricity or fuel to heat the source water, you could always purchase a home distillation kit instead. These kits range from $100 to several hundred dollars, but if you are making distilled water for drinking, the more inexpensive options are fine.