What Is a Distiller and What Is It Used For?
A water distiller is a machine that purifies water by boiling it and collecting the steam. It is one of the oldest and most reliable ways to clean water, and it is how we have made Morning Mist distilled water in Mississauga since 1986.
How a distiller works
- Boil: tap water is heated in a boiling chamber until it turns to steam.
- Separate: minerals, salts, metals and most other contaminants cannot turn to steam, so they stay behind in the chamber.
- Condense: the steam passes through a cooling coil and turns back into liquid water.
- Collect: the clean water drips into a storage tank or bottle. Many units also pass it through a carbon filter at the end.
The leftover scale in the boiling chamber is what would otherwise end up in your kettle, humidifier or CPAP machine.
What a distiller removes
- Hardness minerals like calcium and magnesium
- Dissolved salts and metals such as lead
- Bacteria and other microorganisms, which are killed by boiling
- Most other dissolved solids
Some chemicals that boil at a lower temperature than water can carry over with the steam, which is why good distillers add a carbon filter or a vent to deal with them.
What distillers are used for
- Drinking and cooking water at home
- Water for CPAP machines, humidifiers and steam irons
- Dental offices, clinics and autoclaves
- Labs and manufacturing
- Cafés and restaurants that want scale free equipment
Home distiller or delivered water?
A countertop distiller makes a few litres at a time and uses electricity for every batch, so it suits people who want to make their own water every day. If you only need distilled water now and then, or you need a lot of it at once, delivery is usually simpler. We do both: we sell machines and we deliver distilled water across the GTA.
Distillation compared with other methods
Reverse osmosis and filters remove some of the same things, but they work differently and need membranes or cartridges replaced. Our comparison of distilled, spring, RO and filtered water sets them side by side.
Distillation is not only a domestic technology. Whole cities run on it, and our piece on desalination around the world looks at how the same principle turns seawater into drinking water at national scale, and what happens to the waste heat.
If you have got as far as wanting one, we sell refurbished Dol-fyn distillers from $1,495, and that page also does the arithmetic on whether buying a machine beats having the water delivered.
