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Comment by dbcurtis | Hacker News Reader

We bought a counter-top distiller 15+ years ago and are never going back. If fact, I think we have worn out 3 now. Highly recommend.

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Can you link to it? I guess a distiller gets all chemicals out.

It seems that a distiller would remove those chemicals whose boiling point is above the boiling point of water.

Low boiling point compounds, like say benzene, would just evaporate and then condense with your water into your final product. Distillers get rid of heavy things that don't boil, like metals and large contaminants like bacteria and their waste products.

A carbon filter would get rid of the organics and low-boiling point things.

So optimal water purification would first use a carbon filter, and then distill the output of that. Make sure to add minerals to the final product though. Pure water is a vicious solvent and will slowly melt your teeth away. It will also become quite acidic after sucking CO2 out of the air, so consider adding some pH balancing salts too.

The distiller I use has carbon filter packs at the output of the distillation chiller (at the top of each carafe where the water enters).

Basically an earlier version of this beastie: https://waterwise.com/?product=waterwise-3200-countertop-dis...

I suspect that this one is identical for all practical purposes.

Distilling the water won’t remove the chemical.

And it will remove minerals, making the water unhealthy. Drinking distilled water is a horrible idea.

Does tap water contain the optimal amount of each mineral? How does it compare to spring water? Is solid food devoid of minerals?

It doesn't matter if you're drinking the "optimal" amount of minerals, distilled water has none so it leeches those minerals out of your body as you drink it. Drinking distilled water leaves you with less calcium and iron and etc than you had before you drank it.

So, you think I should be drinking water pumped out of the ground in Silicon Valley? First of all, the amount of naturally occurring mercury is very high. (The Almaden Quicksilver mine was the largest cinnabar strike west of the Mississippi, if not largest in North America.) Then there is 50 years of semiconductor fabrication. I'll take my chances with distilled, thanks.

... do you know what distilled water is? It's very different from filtered or reverse osmosis water. You can get filtered water in a water bottle that's not distilled water. Dasani, Fiji, Aquafina, Smart, etc... that's filtered water. Distilled water is really really bad to drink. It's acidic, has zero minerals, and has no electrolytes so it will not hydrate you.

https://www.healthline.com/health/can-you-drink-distilled-wa...

Got a source for "really bad"? Because that would conflict with the above link. I stand by my comment above: distilled water, passed through a carbon-filter post-distilation, seems like a better bet than drinking water the city pumps out of the ground in Sili Valley.

>distilled water seems like a better bet than drinking ground water

Those are not the only two options. There is a third option that exists, it's called purified water and it leaves the important minerals and salts in the water. Water can be purified without being distilled, and even your own source says distilled water will leach chemicals from the plastic container into the water. Distilled water is what you put into a car's radiator or a home humidifier, not into your body.

There are plenty of sources from actual medical journals and the WHO (not random Internet blogs) on the negative health impacts of distilled water here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distilled_water#Health_effects

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