Fresh Water From Seawater?

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DoChenRollingBearing

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I would be interested in hearing members' ideas on devices or methods to make fresh water from seawater.

Solar stills? I cannot find any in my city.

Reverse osmosis? Any comments?

Water for me is TEOTWAWKI prep item No. 1 for me. When I finish the book (Survivors by James Wesley, Rawles (hey that's the way he writes his name), I'll put up a review here.
 
I looked around for a non-electric (campfire) steam distiller, but the only one that I found that I liked is no longer being made. The few that I found that are available seemed too small / light duty for my taste.

I ended up buying a LifeSaver Jerrycan and after using it for a bit (with tap water so far), can highly recommend it. The water it produces is excellent.




 
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I actually bought the Katadyn Pocket filter too, but have not used it yet. The Lifesaver products actually have a better filter than the Katadyn and don't require iodine or additional processing to make safe for drinking.

 
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I actually bought the Katadyn Pocket filter too, but have not used it yet. The Lifesaver products actually have a better filter than the Katadyn and don't require iodine or additional processing to make safe for drinking.
:agree:

Katadyn Ceramic
Ceramic filters have a micro porous structure with impregnated silver which delays the growth of bacteria. The pore size of Katadyn ceramic filters is 0.2 micron (0.0002 mm). Bacteria range in size from 0.2 to 5 micron and like protozoa (1 – 15 micron), are efficiently filtered out. Ceramic filters can be mechanically regenerated and the filter capacity is measurable.

LifeSaver:
The bottle's interchangeable filter can purify between 4,000 and 6,000 litres (1,050 to 1,585 gallons).[2] It filters out objects bigger than 15 nanometres—including viruses, bacteria, and heavy metals.[3][4] The carbon filter does not require chemicals.[4] The process of filtering the water takes 20 seconds, allowing for 0.71 litres (1.5 pints) of water to be filtered.[4] Once a filter has reached its limit, it will not allow contaminated water to be drunk.[4] The Livesaver bottle has been used by soldiers for drinking water as well as cleaning wounds.[2][3][4]

To filter the water, one puts contaminated water in the back of the bottle, then screws the lid on. The lid has a built in pump which is operated manually with a hand, the pumping action forces the contaminated water through the nano-filter and safe drinking water collects in another chamber in the bottle. The drinker then opens the top of the bottle from which safe drinking water comes out.

A much larger version of the Lifesaver bottle, called the Lifesaver Jerrycan, has the same filtering technology. The can allows for the filtration of 10,000 to 20,000 litres (2,650 to 5,300 gallons).[7] One jerrycan filter can provide water for four people over a three-year span

After some research I would have to absolutely agree that Lifesaver will be better investment than the Katadyn brand.

I'm sure you would still need a desalinator as step one in the process if you will be using a salt water source.
 
A Katadyn filter will not remove salt: "The Katadyn Pocket does not remove dissolved minerals or chemicals. Therefore, sea water or brackish water is not desalinated. Nor is water softened by removal of the hardness, minerals, calcium and magnesium, normally considered beneficial in water for drinking and food preparation."

But distillation is a simple process.

desalinationprocess.gif


lesher1.jpg


DiY: stovetopstill

Or maybe you can order a watercone when they are available again.

Have no experience with reverse osmosis but I know the units can be costly but the water quality is excellent, they use them on ocean going yachts so maybe that's an option to look at.


ps. i bought a katadyn pocket filter 2 years ago just in case, filters 13.000 gallons so should last me the rest of my life (I'm at the half century mark) have not used it yet, it's in the bug-out bag, and although it was pricy I find it very comforting to know that whatever scenario unfolds I can have potable water, after all it's the next thing, after air, you need to survive.
 
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Oh cool. Thanks for those links. I like the watercone design. Very simple.
 
OK, I just emailed the makers of the watercone:


Dear Mrs. Batra,

I learned of your company from the pmbug.com, where a small group of us are interested in your watercone product.

Please advise price and availability of your product, I am in the market for one or two easy to use solar stills.

Thank you very much.
 
The reason I did mention that neither the Katadyn or the Lifesaver would filter salt water is because after one attempt your filter would most likely be kaput. Just so you know that I never intended any filter besides a strict desalinator for sea water.. see first post.
 
I just got an email of interest re solar stills:


Thank you for your interest in our watercones.
We are out of stock here in the US at the moment and are awaiting a new shipment of watercones around the beginning of January 2012. We are also in the process of relocating our office from Utah to Florida and are still assessing new shipment companies here.
The single price for a watercone is $69.
Two - nine watercones is $64 per watercone.
As of 10 watercones, the price drops dramatically to $59 per watercone.

I will be more than happy to put you on our pre order list and will contact you the moment our office is settled in here and the new shipment of watercones has arrived.

Best Regards,


Bona Batra
Sales Director
MAGE WATER MANAGEMENT North America, Inc.
USA

Tel: +1-407-403-5750
Fax: +1-703-349-1357
Website: <no longer available, but this one is: http://www.watercone.com/product.html >

---

Edit (pmbug): email address removed per forum policy
 
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DCRB,
I found this on-line.

http://www.thefoodguys.com/solarstill.htm

It looks pretty durable. I would not want to use any of the 'soft plastics' for my water production, because I am afraid of teh chemicals that may leach in to the water. I think I would prefer glass to be the media where water condenses and would prefer that a metal catchment be used over a plastic one.

Water production is the single most critical prep one can make, and the topic deserves a lot of discussion.

Thanks for posting this DCRB
 
Most of this discussion seems to assume a degree of mobility is required and in a worst case situation I have to agree that Jerry Lifesaver is the best bit of kit I have seen.

I have read 'somewhere' that nanotech is capable of creating filtration that will remove dissolved salts but have not yet seen any available.

When this type of filtration becomes available it will be a game changer and suddenly there will be enough fresh water for everyone, as long as we can pump sea water to where its needed.

'Bugout One' has just gone onto its own private water supply -

The nearby moorland quality tumbling streamwater is filtered down through streambed material into a length of 150mm dia plastic land drain wrapped in geotextile to further strain out lumps. This is all hidden from sight and is about a foot below the stream bed level.

A small pump hidden in a chamber about 30m away from the stream draws water through a 25mm pipe with footvalve, sends it through a primary filter to a redundant hot water tank, that just happens to have a built in air pocket system that acts as an expansion vessel.
A pressure sensor switch sends power to the pump when pressure drops to 2bar and stops the pump when the tank is recharged to 2.5 bar. ( this is when the air pocket gets squeezed and means the pump cycles less often ) After leaving the store tank, the water flows through a ( cheap) Chinese Ultra Violet chamber and into the underground distribution system. All the above is hidden in another underground chamber.

Drinking/cooking water is further filtered in a simple undersink twin pot filtration system, one ceramic and one carbon, that claims to remove particulate down to less than one micron.

So far I have not had any 'adverse' reactions and the water tastes bloody lovely.

Probably just a long winded way of saying identify your water source, then set up your own pumping and treating, rather than identifying a filtration system then hope to find something to put through it.
 
From a survival standpoint, presuming that burning a fire to create heat will draw undesireables and that electricity is unavailable, I would feel comfortable with the smaller solar stills. For long-term survival, I think a simple still could be constructed with a hot water heater tank and a little piping.
 
I just got myself a British Berkefield gravity filter, and I've been very impressed so far. It won't do sea water but is used by a lot of aid organisations where they need something portable, reliable, and which will work without power. They seem to come highly recommended.

http://kernowrat.co.uk/page10.html
 
While I agree with ancona that plastic is bad - the plasticizers aren't nice chemicals, there is a bit of an engineering problem with substituting the plastic front that lets light/heat in and condenses water, with glass. Glass stops IR coming in (or out) - and heats up doing it. It has less thermal conductivity due to being glass, and being in general thicker. This means the outside air will cool it less, and it will condense less water all other things equal - but they're not - less heat gets in too.

The bad stuff they put in plastic does leach out, no question - people who think bottled water is a good idea make me wonder...even without that, the regs mean it might not even be as good as your tap water anyway.

On the other hand, a simple rule of the conservation of stuff says that if it leaches out, it gets gone. If it stays, it's not leaching out - can't have both. One could make a very reliable guess that after some time in use, pretty much everything that was going to come out of that plastic already had. In other words, it might be fine after a break-in period. Some sorts of plastic also have less or none of this junk in them from the start - plastisizer is used more for the plastics that need some flexibility - so polycarbonate or plexiglas might have a lot less than the junk they make water and soda bottles out of.

So if you were going to design and build one of these - you might take this into account. My guess would be plastic film would be nearly the worst material there is from this point of view, since it's meant to be super flexible.
 
Perhaps Lexan, which is by far the most stable form of plastic. I would suspect that very little in the way of plasticizers will leach out of this material. However, it is VERY expensive relative to the alternatives which would include acrylic sheets and plexiglass.
 
Fyi - lexan is a Tm trade name for polycarbonate. Plexiglas is the same for acrylic.
Like "pyrex" means "borosilicate glass" - but only Corning can call it Pyrex, Kimble has to call it K-33. Neither plastic has any plasticizer added at manufacture, but some of the catalyst that makes the monomer polymerize might be left, along with whatever mold release agent. Clean before using!

No matter what - I'd ditch the first few batches if that worried me. The nose is pretty good at detecting that kind of thing.
 
Do you think my Berkey would catch the release agents, et. al.? It has the dual, up-down filters for flouride etcetera.
 
I don't know if I'd trust a filter (which might itself have leaching-things in it). Our experience here with them - admittedly with much more contaminated water, was that to the extent they work, they fail. They get full of junk, and more often than not, that junk finds a way to support something growing in there - even the ones with "anti-bacterial" characteristics. You wind up spending a fortune to replace elements - which are a point of failure if things go bad - the supply might dry up. We struggled along with a multi stage setup (so as to collect most junk in easy to clean elements first) for a few years, but gave it up as not being worth the effort - easier to just collect better water in the first place, even if you have to transport it some.

I think the thing to do would be to find out if there's a problem, if so, what it is, and then work on how to mitigate it. I might be able to find out what they use for mold release (probably a silicone "mostly harmless?") for example, so as to just get rid of it before putting the thing in operation.

I can get sheets of plex .080" thick (the thinnest that's easy to find) which would make a good inlet/condenser window. It's about time that I go over to the wood shop guy and brainstorm a unit that could be built easily so we can just test one.
Nothing beats a guess like a test! I'd have to look around for thin polycarb, which would almost certainly be better for this.
 
I have some Lexan pieces that are off-cuts thrown out at Nasa. I would wash them well with Simple Green before using.
 
I see some good stuff here, not terribly expensive. But of course you have to design and build a real one with the right features to really know how well it's going to work.
http://www.mcmaster.com/#polycarbonate-sheets/=fhld8k

Little stuff like fill/drain details, and flushing, matter, as well as how much the distilled water can re evaporate, and whether you'd condense other volatiles present in the source water. Sea water is kind of nasty that way, there's more than just salts in it. Also true of any other water that has a high content of organics.

For example - using black paint to make the bottom of the evap tray black, hmmm, then you get all the nasties from the paint in the system...some more details to work out.

I see this kind of thing, unless you get pretty elaborate with it, as an emergency-only kind of source where you'd be willing (you'd have to) tolerate some imperfections.
If I were in FLA - I'd not be using seawater myself, I'd look for brackish groundwater that had less organic junk in it - you might not have to go too deep to find that.
 
Might be good, I've got the stuff for powder coating. Sure stinks while it's curing, though I suspect that stuff isn't volatile at closer to room temps. Black anodized aluminum might be workable too.

So, we're looking at a sort of A frame thing, clear front, reflective and insulated back (so stuff doesn't condense on it) divided pan on the bottom with fittings, sides of maybe wood (for prototype certainly), a trick curve on the bottom of the front for a drip line, a relatively narrow slot in the top of the collection tank to prevent/reduce re evaporation...2'x4' front window (cheap standard size).

So, time to go get the wood guy to help draw up the pieces so it can be made not-stupid-sloppy. Slots in the sides to hold the panels and suchlike, tray design to make it almost airtight but slide in and out. Then some test runs. I wouldn't expect super performance around the winter solstice up here, but you never know. Put it where it couples to the warmer ground well and you might get a decent amount since condensation would be almost 100% in the cold air.

In summer, you might do fairly well without the evap tray - the ground moisture is there and any gardener knows that any plastic over that gets very wet very quick.
Around here the issue would be finding any level-enough ground also in the sun for that to work. I don't *quite* have to terrace my garden...
 
Fyi - lexan is a Tm trade name for polycarbonate. Plexiglas is the same for acrylic.
Like "pyrex" means "borosilicate glass" - but only Corning can call it Pyrex, Kimble has to call it K-33. Neither plastic has any plasticizer added at manufacture, but some of the catalyst that makes the monomer polymerize might be left, along with whatever mold release agent. Clean before using!

No matter what - I'd ditch the first few batches if that worried me. The nose is pretty good at detecting that kind of thing.

Lexan is a registered trademark for SABIC Innovative Plastics' (formerly General Electric Plastics) brand of polycarbonate resin thermoplastic. Polycarbonate polymer is produced by reacting bisphenol A with carbonyl dichloride, also known as phosgene. Lexan is the brand name for polycarbonate sheet and resin in a wide range of grades. Applications are mainly in three domains–building (glazing and domes), industry (machine protection and fabricated parts) and communication and signage. Common usages include space and sports helmets, clear high performance windshields and aircraft canopies, and bullet resistant windows.

Interesting, as said polycarbonate's favorability in water bottles made by several companies has faded, and now plastic warnings upon bottles.
Plastic containers release has a cumulative effect similar to radiation. Diabetes increase is being linked to plasticizer consumption, among other ailments which are rising. Seek European study.
Leaching of plasticizer ends with the flexibility, clarity, and strength of the plastic ending as well. Therefore plastic is as plastic does Forest, it poisons. Never assume plastic is safe, anywhere with consumption.
The sham of plastic is industry/oligarchy driven. Just wait a generation or two and see the absence of antiques(I do not enjoy time wasted upon old stuff) due to shelf life of plastic.
Plastic stored near 0 degrees kelvin in complete darkness, breaks down as designed, or lack thereof.
Consider using a solar oven to distill water. Precise and controllable heat generation.
 
Quick update on Bugout One water supply -

I re-engineered the stream banks with a couple of large boulders to try and induce some swirl in the stream flow around the buried intake, as per Viktor Schaubergers early work on river management, and its worked far better than I could have hoped.

Recent heavy rain has moved the usual amount of fine material and gravel downstream and I now have a perfect sand bed filter, about a foot deep, covering the intake area with the bulk of the stream flow passing a decent distance beyond the intake.

Working with nature rather than trying to fight it.

Sorry Im off topic but Im all excited about this, as it might explain why the bath water is looking so much clearer (-;

Dissappointing to have to deliver it in plastic pipes then ....
 
RB2,

Is your system a water ram? Is it spring fed or mountain run-off? It may be off topic, but it is certainly iunteresting. Here in Florida, we do not have the luxury of gravity to feed anything.
 
RB2,

Here in Florida, we do not have the luxury of gravity

Is that why NASA set up camp there ? :rotflmbo:

My water supply comes from a low moorland stream that is mainly spring fed in its source zone.
It seems to continue to flow even during the driest of times.
It starts about 600 ft above sea level and I am about 200 ft above sea level, about two miles downstream from the source. There is no commercial farming along its length, just woodland, rough grazing and a few properties. Probably the biggest threat being fecal bacty from septic tank discharge but a tumbling brook will normally sort this in about 50 yards.

Everything I do for life support systems is as near to invisible as possible. All the water management, ie filtration, pressure tank, UV treatment is hidden in a below ground bunker ( gotta have a digger ).

In the event of the SHTF , the hidden electric pump that jacks it up to 3bar ( approx 30m head), will be replaced by a spiral pump-



As this is high profile and will upset the Enviro Feds/ natives, it must wait until the poo is flying.

While this gets done, a diesel genny will keep the electric pump working.

Im not planning for a permanent off grid, live off the land scenario, just something that could last for a few months, perhaps a year of Argentinian type collapse, then some semblance of order that will allow the Zurich stored shiny stuff to eerr shine.

If its worse than that, Im not sure I want the challenge of surviving :wave:
 
Absolutely positively sweet! I am now jealous! Good for you brother. A clean potable water source is nearly the same as a unicorn here where I live. We use the Big Berkey to filter our TAP WATER for cripes sake! I want to shoot a "sand well" about two hundred feet deep, but have held off over concerns about regulations and such. I may relent and go for a Saturday Night well shot, but haven't decided yet. I can save a grand if I do the midnight express deal, instead of doing a fucking survey, asking permission from neighbors [yes, that's a requirement now] and paying an aquifer fee to the St. Johns Water Management District.

Sometimes I wonder how our County Commissioners manage to continue stealing oxygen fromn the rest of us.........but I digress....:judge:
 
I can save a grand if I do the midnight express deal,

Can you explain this term ?
I cannot quite see a nocturnal drilling operation that the natives would somehow not be aware of, unless you could somehow time it to co-incide with another very noisy nocturnal event

So your only water is ancient aquifer, rain water or desalinated sea water ?

I guess that puts my little tumbling moorland stream into perspective.
It was a major attraction to the location.

Your comments serve to remind me of this and for that I thank you.
 
Actually, our aquifer can be tapped at sixty feet, and exists in a great sand bed from primeval sand dunes. If I go to 180 feet, the water is sweeter, meaning less sulphur and less iron. I can drill to 180 feet in two hours, and if done on a weekend, or over a holiday, I can avoid the hassle of permits, inspections, etc. etc.

If I offer to share teh tap with my neighbor, I get some back-up. In Florida, there are some pretty asinine rules regarding riparian rights, so lots of people will just use a pressure washer and lengths of PVC to shooit a small artesian well by themselves. While this method is effective, the water tends to vary greatly in quality and flow rate. Sometimes you only get 5 psi, while other times you can get 50 psi. At 180 feet, I will be guaranteed 45 psi or greater and no less than twenty gpm artesian flow. in addition, the water will be colder by about ten degrees.
 
RB2 - nice system man! I have similar things going on here, but am finally also lucky enough to own the springs themselves, so the water can be had pure as can be with no treatment - you just have to avoid getting it during hard rains and flash floods when it's full of junk carried on the big flow. That's why I use the truck/drum/pump system to bring up a lot at a time when it's super nice. I get fine results with just that floating pickup I detailed elsewhere. Filters can collect stuff that rots in there...

I am also simply collecting rain. When I first moved to Floyd, this was a BAD idea, the water was PH 4 or thereabouts - sulfur, nitrites and so on from coal plants to the west in Ohio, but the EPA actually seems to have done some good on that one. Now it's ph 7 all the time, and other than two months - one in spring, one in fall - pollen free and ready to go as is. I calculate that if I built a big enough cistern, the rain alone would do the job for me - but I use a LOT less water than most people. One toilet flush a day (which can be any quality of water), cooking - hardly any, a cup of tea and maybe make a casserole - washing dishes (any quality water - you dry them).

I bathe in about 5 gallons from a bucket I heat with one of the tank heaters from my electroplating setup...not too often, just enough to not smell bad.
Next time I fix up the pressurized system, I'll see if my water heater survived, it probably did, but the bucket is fine with me.

I use an ancient Maytag wringer retrofitted with a 1/6 hp motor to wash clothes. Rainwater (super soft) gets them clean better than the neighbors who use well water and $1000 machines. Line dry them of course - if it rains, I just get a fresher rinse.

Note, this is all by choice. I had a more complete system - 2 of my four buildings on campus with pumped water from taps at one point (including hot), but those oddball weather changes froze most of that - there were domestic issues with keeping some of the basements "tight" enough not to freeze in a cold snap, and I got tired of keeping up with the repairs required due to the malfeasance of others who used to live here.

Making water just a little harder to get than twisting a knob makes you think about it a lot more, and use a heck of a lot less of the stuff. You have to have a little, but twice daily hollywood showers are not a need - they are a luxury. And actually, not that good for you and your skin. Insects (biting types) are attracted to the deodorant soap/detergent smell, for what that's worth.

One issue here is that if I drill a well in the not-midnight-special manner, the building permit I have to get and show to get a well driller to do it raises my taxes from the rate on 4 worthless "barns" to that on four fine homes - I've not decided that the government deserves that much money from me yearly for well, nothing in return.

Here, we have rock - so the cool pressure washer method won't work. It's good for getting trenches dug to bury pipes, though, but the tree roots mean you still do one heck of a lot of labor per foot of buried pipe. Of course, you have to bootstrap having enough water in the first place to run a pressure washer.

Some municipalities figure that every drop of water you bring in, they have to waste treat going out - and that's one of the reasons they charge you so much for that. Here, we all just have a drainfield so it's more an issue of how much it would cost to run a pipe from the city to here through the mountains - it's too much, so no one does that.

///

I'd take some slight exception to dragonfly's remarks above. Plasticizers are surely bad for you - some of them act like hormones - and some of them are almost as potent as the ones you get in most treated city water from drugs people put into the waste system coming back around. That isn't cumulative anymore than your salt intake is, but it's bad enough anyway. Some plastic doesn't have plasticizers put in it and it doesn't turn opaque and fall to dust when it's all gone either. That's bunk for a case like a solar distiller window where it never needed to be flexible at all.

This is the trouble with scientific facts - the truth is never so simple as "plastic is bad, and avoiding it saves you" - nope, there are plenty of other things with similar characteristics to avoid - or decide to accept, even completely "natural" things, just as bad, and you can't avoid them all and still live on this planet. Forests emit ethylene sometimes in dangerous amounts!

Ask any organic gardener about plastic and decomposing - or not - it's a big issue for them because it DOESN'T and stays around in the soil "forever" ruining it for agriculture. Plastic diapers are filling up all our landfills - permanently.

The rise of diabetes might well be tied into this, but obesity is the usual stated cause, as it exercises the same body chemistry that fails in diabetes. I've not seen the studies that indicate this plastic trigger - but I would also not discard the possibility out of hand either. It's one of those "could be" things for sure. Could be the other hormones those on city water get just as easily. Or something completely else, like a better detection and reporting regime than in the past. I for one have noticed since a good while back that almost everyone in the small engine business winds up with bad diabetes even more prevalent than in the population at large - gasoline exposure seems to be the culprit there, since you are very much exposed all the time in that business. Some of those additives are truly wicked stuff chemically.
Every customer of course brings in their broken thing with a full tank of gas - they always try that first, and you have to get rid of it to work on their unit...somehow.

Radiation in low doses IS NOT cumulative, other than that the risk of a single fatal mutation that isn't corrected is the same for each independent event of absorbed ionizing radiation - whether it be UV, X rays, Gamma rays, or charged particles - the energy of the event is of course a factor. In other words, the more times you flip a coin, the more chances you have of getting "tails" - or 3 in a certain complex pattern. That's it.

DNA has an extremely wondrous error detection and correction system that has many aspects - from the paired strands to the self destruct trigger for whole cells when something goes wrong, it's much more amazing than the number theory stuff used in error correction in computer work - there are a number of levels of checking and correcting, with a kill the cell fallback when all else fails. It takes roughly three mutations in a single DNA to create cancer -- and you have to get those three (the p53 gene being a major one, it's the one that controls commanded cell death), without causing the cell death triggered by them or any other mutations that trigger it, quite a few. The numbers of damaged DNA per cancer is astronomical even in scientific notation - a large two digit exponent.

There is one other effect. Despite the error correction and cell death mechanism we have built in, enough radiation damage in a short time will kill you outright - all those dead cells are too much for the body to flush and live without. This is the opposite effect of cumulative. A number of rads that would kill you right now, if delivered in an hour, won't have any effect you can notice if spread out over a lifetime. That's measured and tested fact all over the business.

I DO have access to studies on what's called hormesis - the theory that by causing the more prone to mutate cells to self destruct, a little radiation is good for you.

While still a fight - there always will be as people like to fear-monger - there's good evidence this is the true case, it's just not something to worry about, especially after reaching a certain age level - if something causes a 1% rise in your chance of cancer 50 years from now - and you're already 60 years old, why worry about it? That's just silly. Your kids - different story of course.

The ultra conservative LNT theory used by the UN to scare people about radiation is surely just wrong - sorry. Without some mutations, we'd still all be single celled for one thing.
It's just part of that bubble wrap world theory. Better safe than sorry taken to a ridiculous extreme.
 
My understanding is that rainwater is not ideal for us to drink as it is 'immature' and seeking metal salts that it will strip from the salts in our body.
Distilled water is actually dangerous for us to drink except for short term detox.

The best water is water that has completed its cycle through the ground, picked up the salts it seeks and breaks the surface as a spring. The higher the spring breaks, the better it is for us apparently.
Water from a high mountain spring sounds good and is good for this reason.

Agree that cancer is often triggered by worry /stress, plenty of evidence for this and plenty of evidence for healing cancer with the opposite, with positive thought.
Stopped using big pharma years ago and the more I read the more convinced I become that we fix ourselves, although massive doses of radiation and very high g forces remain outside this approach.
 
My understanding is that rainwater is not ideal for us to drink as it is 'immature' and seeking metal salts that it will strip from the salts in our body.
Distilled water is actually dangerous for us to drink except for short term detox.

The best water is water that has completed its cycle through the ground, picked up the salts it seeks and breaks the surface as a spring. The higher the spring breaks, the better it is for us apparently.
Water from a high mountain spring sounds good and is good for this reason.

Agree that cancer is often triggered by worry /stress, plenty of evidence for this and plenty of evidence for healing cancer with the opposite, with positive thought.
Stopped using big pharma years ago and the more I read the more convinced I become that we fix ourselves, although massive doses of radiation and very high g forces remain outside this approach.

Wow. Now you have informed me of something about which I did not know. Thinking about it some more, it makes perfect sense that rainwater or distilled water would perhaps dissolve certain substances and carry them out of the body.

Would it make sense then to say that distilled water is a sort of chelator? I am going to look further in to this. You see, we have a fifty gallon supply of emergency water [living in a hurricane prone state] and much of it is distilled. Also, what about the water i get out of the Big Berkey water filter? Does it still contain the needed minerals or are they stripped out as well? DC? Chime in here as well my good man.
 
Berky will remove particulate and microbes down to sub micron but you have to go nano to start removing metal ions, hence my earlier comment regarding nano filters and sea water.
So your dissolved salts remain and in general are what our bodies need.

I reckon your stored emergency water is better than no water but theres no harm in checking it and if necessary blending it to get the salt/ion balance that is optimal.
Could be simply a matter of a couple litres of seawater through the Berky and into the store tank...

Then theres another discussion regarding long term storage of water and how it isnt so good if left static. The ancient Greeks learnt that the ampora was the optimal shape for this as it naturally triggered circulation, plus the small amount of porosity in the fired clay the ampora was made from, created evaporation and cooling.

If using mains water, I always draw off a slug before drinking it, especially first thing in the morning when I often notice a whiff of chlorine. Its not logical as its the same stuff further up the delivery pipe but the random movement as it flows seems to improve it, just as in the tumbling brook.

Water is awesome stuff and should never be taken for granted.
 
Ah yes. The deal with distilled water is that it has no salts/carbonates in it. It's not su much that it dissolves things out of your bones - it never reaches them while still pure, it goes through your digestive system the normal ways, just adding to what's there in your blood stream. But! You are naturally losing a little of just about everything whenever you pee - these minerals included. Not much, mind you, but some, your kidneys aren't a perfect separation device.

Normal mid-hard water has about enough minerals in it to almost compensate for that, so yes, it's better for you if you're on a water-only fast. But hey people, we're talking micrograms here of stuff you have pounds of in your bones...and most other foods have some of this stuff in them too.

If this was the audio business, this would be like arguing whether gold plated 8 ga speaker cable gave better sound than 10 ga copper in short lengths...even that super hyped business eventually called BS on that stuff, it was just a way to sell more overpriced junk. In a practical world, there's just no difference even if in theory, there is one - just that it's a millionth of what could actually matter.

Sorry to get wordy sometimes, I type very fast and it's been a boring day trading. Spxu bought this AM, then sold at close...that's it. No thrills today yet. Now to get to work in the shop!
 
Looks promising...

...
Now researchers from the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Marburg in Germany have developed a “water chip” that creates a small electrical field that separates salt from seawater. The technology, which is still under development and works at the nano scale, uses so little energy it can run off a store-bought battery!

The researchers apply a 3.0 volt electrical charge to the plastic water chip, which has a microchannel with two branches. By creating an “ion depletion zone” with an embedded electrode that neutralizes chloride ions, they are able to redirect the salts in the water down one channel, while the fresh water goes down another.

“Like a troll at the foot of the bridge, the ion depletion zone prevents salt from passing through, resulting in the production of freshwater,” the team wrote in a recent press release.

Less energy-intensive than current desalination plants, the water chip doesn’t rely on a membrane, and can be made portable so that just about anybody living near the sea can purify their own water at home.

Currently the technology purifies just one nanoliter at a time and only has a 25% efficiency rate, but the team is confident that their proof of concept can be first improved and then scaled up.
...

http://inhabitat.com/nano-water-chip-could-make-desalination-affordable-for-everyone/#ixzz2Y1LRTmzI

 
Very cool! Currently, only distillation and RO can purify salt water on a scale large enough to provide drinking water. If this can scale up, maybe places like Texas can build pipelines to the sea and make fresh water for agriculture in arid areas.
 
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