My dad used one of these toward the end of his life. He used the water for his CPAP machine. He had to wear the device even while awake. And he couldn't rely on a constant supply of plastic bottles of distilled water for the machine. He often mentioned that he'd like to change the temperature to 160 degrees Fahrenheit and make moonshine. Always a bright spot in the day to see a Big Clive video!
You don't control the temperature when you use a pot still, you reduce the power and leave the still to it. Easiest way is a small box with a diode in it and a switch to bypass the diode. Use it in bypass mode to heat up the fluid, then to half power to run the distillate. Don't try and control the temperature, that isn't how it works. The only thing the vapour temperature you is when you are separating the different components in the distillate, but if you don't produce methanol in the first place it's not really an issue.
People also use distilled water for medical devices such as for sleep apnea (Constant Pulmonary Air Pressure Machine)or CPAP. Also useful in humidifiers for avoiding scale.
Thanks for the vid. I've got one of those and actually use it to make distilled water (mainly for technical uses). I make batches (store it in 2L fizzy drink bottles - well rinsed of course) of distilled water only in the winter so I get the benefit of the house being heated by the unit instead of wasting the heat in the summer.
@@KeritechElectronics there is apparently a distinction between demineralised and distilled water. Not enough to worry most people, but I believe distilled is not pure enough for some applications. Sorry to be that anorak.
@@rowgli distilled is produced through boiling water and condensing the vapor, and demineralized is made by passing water through layers of anionite and cationite, effectively binding all anions and cations (or, to be more precise, substituting them for hydroxyl anions and hydrogen cations which recombine into water molecules).
I figured that out the hard way. I bought an iron for the first time ever in my life and it lasted about six months before the holes were blocked up and it started sputtering dirty water/steam onto my clothes. I tried to clean it out with vinegar, and got enough of it that it stopped spitting mineral mud, but I couldn’t get enough of the build up to get it to steam worth a damn. Then the seal between the water reservoir and steam chamber started leaking and there was more steam coming up from between the hot plate and the plastic handle bit, and burning the shit out of me, than there was coming out of the steam holes. So, I bought a new one and just buy $1-something gallons of distilled water from the grocery store that seem to work well
I actually use one of these, specifically sold for Alcohol - but basically the same unit in all ways. But I use it for cleaning IPA after it's been used for resin printing. Recovers the bulk of the IPA for reuse. I'm not sure from an energy perspective it's a whole lot more cost effective than buying IPA, but during the height of covid response it certainly was as IPA had gone through the roof and was even difficult to get in volume. I mean I suppose from pure math it's a better value to distill it - though it is a pain in the rump for a bunch of reasons..
Very clever George, very clever. 👍 I wish I was using quantities of IPA that I could do that to now because the power would cost me almost nothing due to my roof being covered with solar panels.
I've been researching this. So far, putting the IPA in a clear soda bottle out in the sun causes it to make a semi solid snot substance. I used a colander to separate it. Then I funneled it back with a coffee filter. It left a little residue, I don't really care that much. I use a three-stage system. Got a container to dunk prints right off the printer. Then it goes into the cleaning machine. Then a final dunking in clean IPA. The residue really doesn't need to be removed for the first dunk. My plan to deal with the residue is run it through a Britta water filter. If it can make rotgut vodka drinkable after a couple of passes, my hypothesis is it'll make it good enough for the cleaning machine. I just left the snot in the sun until it was a solid. Took a couple of days, but it was partly cloudy. Next time I think I might squeeze it with cheesecloth. Works for cheese. I am a mad scientist though so YMMV.
I still have a Liebig condenser and a range of quick connect joints with a large 3lt boiling flask to make distilled water, I end up with tubes all over to supply the condenser with its cold cooling water, but it produces the purest of distilled water with zero risk of the water being boiled reaching the condenser and contaminating the distilled outflow. I used to have a number of very high-capacity lead acid batteries, which is why I made the setup, but the batteries have long gone, and it's been a year or three since I used it. Using an off-the-shelf condenser, like the one shown, is that alcohol boils at a slightly lower temperature than water and an off-the-shelf water condenser will not give you pure distilled alcohol, you'll end up with a large amount of water and some alcohol. I'll not say I did try distilling alcohol from homemade beer, and I'll not say I was careful to keep the boiling temperature at the boiling point of alcohol, and I'll not say I made sure that the temperature never went above the alcohol boiling point. I didn't end up with a small bottle of alcohol and I didn't try a few drops on a spoon and set light to it, there may not be any residue left in the spoon, thus it would be a very pure undiluted alcohol, not for drinking purposes unless you close one and only risk going blind in the one eye you keep open! K.
6:20 Actually the fan pushes air out the top of the unit, Look at the curvature of the blades, the way you describe the blades would be running backwards and would be most inefficient. Since heat rises, you would not want to fight that effect, so air is pulled in from the sides and the heated air is pushed out the top.
You are correct. It sucks cooler air through the cooling disc fins soldered onto the condenser tube and blows the waste heat directly up. Can confirm as I own one. Not recommended to run in the middle of summer as it can quickly make a room uncomfortably hot.
@@MikeTrieu Does it also increase the humidity in the room, or is the vessel pressurized during use? I currently only make RO for drinking/cooking but have noticed that it is also really good for coffee/tea and other devices that would normally develop deposits. I no longer have a serious need for distilled water, although it is always handy to have around.
We have used one (not the same unit)now for 4 years making vodka, rum, gin and essential oils. Great hobby Please do not use the kettle lead it comes with as can be aluminium! Also replace the wire which connects earth from the plug on the side to the distiller's metal work for something you know is copper and thicker.
I use distilled water for CPAP. I used to buy it premade at the grocery store, but then some time into COVID, the hospitals sucked up the supply and you couldn't find it on the shelf any more, so I bought a distiller to make my own. However, I got a stovetop version (something like a double boiler, but with three pans instead of two), so considerably less intricate than this device.
@@mobility_criteria 1 US gallon of water uses about 2.7kWh of energy to boil dry (350Wh to heat from 20c to 100c, then 2.35kWh for enthalpy of vaporization), not including heat losses or energy for the fan. Unless your energy is less than about 50c/kWh it's cheaper to buy than make.
Great Video Clive! I bought one of these a couple of years back after watching your "Trash wine" video :) I didn't know that the spout came off I guess I learned something new!
My unit was supplied with a kettle lead made of ALUMINIUM and the element failed to earth! The earth wire melted before RCD tripping. It gave me burns could not use two my fingers for a week and the worst shock in 30 years. Had to have a week off work. I work as an industrial/theatre electrician in highly dangerous environments and proud not to have a shock at work. Ok minor tingling as always test everything then back of hand first I did replace RCD afterwards but on testing it was still within scope.
I really enjoy your videos, but if I could make a minor suggestion, a lot of the devices you take to bits I've never heard of, or seen, or seen in action. Maybe you could show them run before tearing them down? Like, I know the process of distilling water but it just never occurred to me that there were countertop water distilling devices like this. It was neat to see its innards but I really wanted to see it in action too. Anyway, your videos are always very fun to watch and thanks for making them!
When distilling you should really use the mid stream flow as the early stuff will have more volatile contaminants (such as ethanol) and the end of the run will contain heavier oils etc.
I once worked at an organisation that used a lot of lead acid batteries for remote chart recorders etc. and we had a magnificent still made with copper tubing to supply distilled water. Apparently they had replaced it a while before and some years after that "The Revenue" came snooping around to see that they old setup hadn't been put to other uses ! Life is easier with these devices so commonly available.
Many years ago I saw a secondhand water distiller - the glass system that every school chemistry lab had - and long regretted not buying it. But then the common thing to buy instead of distilled water (eg for batteries) was deionised water, I think produced by reverse osmosis. It was apparently just as good for most purposes. If deonised water truly removes all the ions that aren't H or O, then what is the remaining advantage of true distilling ?
theelmonk, iirc deionized uses an ion exchange resin although you could then run that thru ro. I think you can substitute distilled for deionized but not always the other way round. Deionized is cheaper. Note as the universal solvent 100% pure h2o is unobtainium.
deionized water does have organic impurities- contamination from sewer will have ammonia that will not be removed by distillation. same way alcohol and acids (acetic acid) will be removed only partly by distillation. for lab quality water, you need to distill the distilled water and use a quartz still and heating without producing bubbles.
Adding a settable thermostat, possibly even a PID controller, in just the heater leg of the circuit would allow precise temp control (below 100c) unless you replace the temp cutouts. Someone mentioned using reverse osmosis to "deionize" water.. It won't work. You need a deionizer column with "water softener" beads in the column. Lab stills are made of a special glass tubing.. metal will leave all sorts of ions in the output. Thanks for the look inside.
Rather serendipitous! I just started using my Megahome Water distiller very recently. I used sink tap water filtered by a premium collagen filter & am surprised by all the crusty sediment!!!
That one is way posher than mine! I've had mine for absolutely years and apart from that "burping" issue I had a while back it's always been great. I've made literally gallons and gallons of booze with it! It's not illegal to do over here in Portugal either! You have to keep the cooling fins very clean over here because if it gets fluffed up it barely copes with the higher ambient air temperature.
I always pictured glass tubes in a lab seting for water distillers. I guess this works too. It's amazing how simple it is. A heat source, something to collect and condense the steam, and somewhere for that water to go. I like this idea.
The reason laboratory distillation setups use glass (usually borosilicate pyrex glass as this is more resilient to thermal stress) is because they are usually not used for distilling anything so innocuous as water. Most chemistry labs get through a lot of "distilled" water for rinsing glassware after washing it, since you don't want residues from tap water contaminating your flasks. So it would be highly energy inefficient to run actual distillation systems for this - most labs use ion-exchange resin columns for purifying water since these are much cheaper to run and produce mineral-free water which is perfectly acceptable for rinsing purposes. Anyway, the actual distillation sets are typically used for distilling solvents, or purifying other liquid chemicals, some of which would react with metals or get contaminated by traces of metal oxides from the surfaces of metal condensers. Glass is chemically inert in nearly all situations, which is why labs use glass for reaction vessels and most other chemical handling equipment. Metal condensers do exist though - all you need is the two standard diameters of copper plumbing pipe plus some 8 millimetre copper tube and you can make your own copper "liebig" style condenser by soldering or brazing it all together. For distilling water this is perfectly fine, just not for some other stuff. It's also fine for distilling alcohol of course. In fact, every commercial system for making spirits by distilling some kind of fermented mash will have some copper components in direct physical contact with the alcohol being distilled - this is important since the copper reacts with and removes volatile organo-sulfur components which would otherwise give the distilled spirits a bad taste and/or smell.
You could fit a thermostat to it, so long as it's rated for mains voltage. Might need to check the wiring to ensure things are working just fine (perhaps even a solid state relay to take the load off the thermostat). Would make a nice little kit project.
Depending on the minerals in the water you can also have "soft water". Instead of hard water with calcium and magnesium you can have soft water with lots of sodium and potassium... Often from natural springs.
@@BedsitBob Which adds the elements that the hard water ions like to bind with so it can settle out or at least be inert in the chemical sense for washing up... Calcium Hydroxide (slaked lime) for example can be added to make the Magneisum Chrloide in hard water precipitate out as Magnesium Hydroxide, then since you added extra Calcium you now have a lot more of that than before (hard water can be MgCl2 (Magnesium Chloride) and Ca(OH)2) (Calsium Hydroxide)), so to get rid of that you then add Sodium Carbonate. Result is precipitate of of Calcium Carbonate. In addition you are left with Sodium Chloride in solution. That's just one example though. For such a process you need to know a lot of what is in the water to properly "cancel it out".
Fantastic take down .lots of room for modifications for control unit .Almost bought One on Amazon with the temperature control unit .basically it's the exact same thing with better temperature control .the advantage is you can cook beer and wort and wine and distil good alcohol .
I remember having had a bit of an argument with my dad a few years ago when he saw videos of people distilling all the tap water they were drinking with one of these and showing all the gunk it had pulled from water. What I was saying was that I think drinking distilled water isn't good for your health (As he wanted to convert the house to rain water instead of tap water even for drinking purposes) and also I did tell him that the gunk was more good minerals than pollutants or harmful chemicals but he didn't accept that idea and kept telling me that people in the video were doing all good, doing everything the way it should be done. I still drink water as it comes from the tap as usual though.
He was right, the chemicals in tap water isn't healthy for the body. Distilled water by these units is not dangerous at all. I've been drinking it for 3 years now, always funny when people say that.
Tap water in my CPAP heated humifier used to go musty after a day, but distilled water stays fresh for 3+ days & is more pleasant to breathe. Yeah, I know it says to clean them every day, but who actually does that? 😉.
"chemicals in tap water isn't healthy for the body": this is wankery. Dissolved minerals are fine, and in fact can be a significant source of dietary calcium. Safe tap water is one of the most important developments of human civilization; countries that don't have it waste huge amounts of daily human effort carrying water around.
@@bbrockert Unfortunately now tap water has chlorine, small amounts of pharma drugs, aluminium salts and in some places the known neurotoxin fluoride. This is all available information which has to be published by your local water provider so is not "wankery". Although yes you do lose out on disolved minerals in the water but it would probably be better to add some which have all necessary trace minerals in that perhaps are lacking in modern diets.
The electricity cost is significant. Carbon + RO/DI is cheaper and better than a still, for purifying water in significant quantities. You can add a UV unit if you need to kill bacteria etc.
I'm wondering if the internal cut out is controlling the temperature like a fixed value thermostat, easy to find out if the current cycles up and down. Drinking only distilled water can cause health problems, you would need to add essential minerals and nutrients, Nighthawkinglight covered this and said he added just a bit of the original (boiled) water into the distilled product.
I have one - best machine ever....in my humble opinion. I use it constantly for making pure water for drinking. You cannot get cleaner water. I love it.
To state the bleeding obvious, distilling water is not a good way of getting drinking water. It lacks minerals and electrolytes and, while it won't harm you directly, it won't quench your thirst or be taken up readily by your body. I learned this the hard way, when I was camping on an island in the Adria and did not realise that their tap water is desalinated sea water. I drank so much that my stomach was full and aching, I was feeling sick - but still thirsty. I wasted a day or two thinking I was ill and unable to do anything, until the friend I was with got me some water from the store, packed in a carton. Apparently locals drank only that. It tasted great, I suddenly wasn't thirsty and was bursting with energy. If you have dirty water, use a filtration system, which removes impurities but not the minerals. Distilled water however would be good for making beverages like tea and coffee, since the limescale dissolved in the water soaks up and removes the aroma from them. Distilled water also has less or no oxygen dissolved in it, which - I'm guessing here - might oxidise some of the ingredients and change the taste (for worse or for better). Technical uses almost always profit from demineralised water - I used it in my ultrasonic humidifier to avoid generating the white dust (microscopic mineral particles that remain after the microscopic drops of water evaporate).
Fascinating. I had no idea. I suppose you could then put rehydration tablets in the distilled water, but those I have tried taste pretty terrible, and in the circumstances given above it was obviously easier just to drink what the locals do.
In the case of emergency desalination, adding in some seawater, or a spoonful of the residue found in the bottom of the still, would help keep you healthier than just drinking the distilled water.
Just as a little sidenote: for tea and coffee purposes, you do also want some mineral content for better extraction and flavor. There's a good bit of discussion about water parameters in coffee nerd circles (likely the tea equivalent as well), and multiple commercial mixtures to remineralize distilled or RO water. I've been tempted myself to play around with cheap and simple DIY there, and likely would have already if we were still on London's liquid chalk. But, at any rate, straight distilled evidently doesn't work all that well for brewing hot drinks either.
@@jadsel Ah thanks, was not aware of that. I'm using water filter jugs/cartridges for that, those only remove limescale and a number of pollutants, leaving the minerals alone. The type I'm using also adds magnesium. Never tried straight distilled, now I'm tempted to give that a go.
You can always leave the lid ajar for the first 10 minutes of boiling to get rid of the VOCs, Similar to alcohol distilling where you toss out the heads that have a lot of the semi toxic amyl alcohol from the fermenting process that cause headaches and bad taste.
You used to need a Customs & Excise licence, even for a water still in the UK, I know because I had to renew our licence in several schools, I worked in. Not the glass version used for demos, but the ones used for producing distilled water. Many were made by a company called Manesty. They used a kettle element.
During the Covid thing and the year after I found it difficult to locate steady supplies of distilled water. I'm an older guy and I use a BiPAP machine during sleep that requires distilled water for humidifying the air. The solution to maintaining a supply of distilled water was to purchase a countertop distiller very similar to the one Clive has shown. Thanks to him, I now know how to replace the activated charcoal filter. No, I'm not too old to learn but you might have to talk a little slower. :)
The whole thing actually resembles an electric kettle (one of the fancy ones you leave plugged in and it keeps the water hot), down to the heating element and top part, I bet they're both made using the same molds and parts but just swap a few things around (ie some thermal switches and the top part). I might look into modifying mine actually
Distilled water isn’t great for drinking as it doesn’t contain the usual minerals but it is good for medical uses. I prefer using a Brita filter for drinking water as it keeps the minerals and still softens the water. Also I can keep it in the fridge.
The first thing I thought was for topping off batteries. People also use distilled water for baby formula. Somehow there was a distilled water shortage in parts of the US. Some local liquor distilleries chipped in and made water for a bit. Didn't effect me because I have one of these.
I got one of these for the.... Other uses. Works beautifully. Works best if you throw it out on your deck on a cool night. Less losses with cooler temperatures out there!
How does one control scale build-up in a device like this - whose sole function is to.....build up scale? Rinse it with vinegar after every use? We have hard water in this town. We're really tough here. Water squeezed out of rocks, or something.
I've got one of these. I need distilled water for my CPAP machine humidifier (sleep apnea). I ran out of dist water, and just wasn't finding any in any of the stores (it's always been harder to find than expected.) I also have a steam cleaner that needs dist water. The top portion wasn't very well assembled - the fan blades were striking the plastic housing making a racket. Other than mine running from 120V 60Hz, yours looks a lot like mine, even drawing about 725W (measured with a P4400 Kill-A-Watt, similar to your Hopi). I also don't trust these to "automatically" turn off - I use a countdown timer that I can set to turn off at 3.5 Hours. I don't think these actually "boil" the water. Rather, they heat the water enough to achieve rapid evaporation. Boiling throws water droplets up and can be collected by the condenser. Rapid evaporation is a much calmer operation to produce steam.
It avoids having a rolling, violent boil, but it does get the water just up to the boiling point. But the difference between evaporation and boiling is a matter of degree (hah) anyway.
If you add a heat conductive medium to the boiler that has a lot of surface area like copper wool, you can get more nucleation sites and it will indeed boil quite vigorously. Mine is so violent that the water sloshing around in there when it's full makes the whole apparatus kind of do a wobbling "dance" on the wire rack I have it situated on.
I've had one of those for around 10 years now an if you are going to fragment a sugar wash fermentation I recommend to chuck away the first 10ml as it might be methanol an to just keep 700ml to drink anything after that will be tales an taste horrible
Judging by the concave side of the fan blade being on top it blows upwards and draws cool air in the sides. Heat naturally rises so expelling the waste heat upwards where it cannot be recirculated in a loop makes a little more sense from a scientific point of view. 😉
Very similar to the water distiller I use. They don't do a good job on alcohol due to heating power and what chemist would call a low theoretical plate count. This means poor fractionation as the difference between boiling points isn't much..30 degrees or so. Water and total dissolved solids have a much higher boiling point difference. It is a lovely 750 Watt heater as the maximum temperature is below 100°C.
They also sell a version made for water, alcohol or oil distillation. The main difference is you can set a temperature and run time electronically on the unit. So no mod needed!
I wondered what the simplest design would be so the waste heat is not all released into the air, but used to heat up the next water close to boiling temperature, so evaporating it takes less energy. Just like in industrial distillation - heat recovery. I mean even just 50% recovery would be a huge efficiency gain.
usually done in a continuous flow apparatus. I suppose you could do a batch variation on that, but as the secondary pot gets warm, efficiency of condensation would drop, so you'd end up with either losing water vapor (humidifying the room) or need just as long a condenser anyway.
I'm thinking instead of a coil and fan, have the steam move through a 1/4" copper pipe that's inside of a 1/2" pipe. Water comes in through the 1/2" pipe, which cools the 1/4" enough to make it an evaporator, and that heat is transferred to the new water, pre-heating it before evaporation.
Oh my word, did you now go break that distiller did you? I have a similar one but really made for distilling alcohol. Has a fermentation function built in, good to know how it looks inside
Love this video! Please break down the air still pro - it has a built in reflux condenser and it's just been released.. I'm sure a lot of people will be keen to see how it's made and how it works
I bought a very similar distiller right at the beginning of the covid pandemic to distill water for my CPAP. With my local electric rates, I think it would be cheaper to buy bottled distilled water at the supermarket, but at the time the shelves were empty at the store. I continue to distill my own water rather than buying it in disposable plastic jugs.
So the base cutout actually works on a different principle to Alec's favorite rice cooker, which relies on the Curie point of a magnetic cutoff switch. Interesting.
With the simple internal construction, an enterprising individual could easily hack that with a u-controller and mains rated relay to maintain a given temperature in the boiling vessel. Fit a solid state relay and you could even PWM the heating element for PID control
We have a similar distiller we use to keep the scale out of our humidifiers during the winter. As there must be some heat loss through those coils, I had thought about adding a normally-open thermal switch to the side of the tank, with the idea of letting the heater bring the water temperature up before the coils get the active cooling. Thought is that maybe it'll cycle quicker and use less power.
A general question: Because of the Covid shortages, the 99% IPA is either unobtinium or very expensive. Would this work for concentrating the 70% IPA to higher percentage? Maybe redistilling it 2-3-4 times? Using the dimmer for the heater, would need lengthy calibration, and probably baby-sitting the still.
IPA forms an azeotrope with water at 91% concentration- so you could theoretically get that far, but no further even with repeated distilaltion. To get purer IPA you would need chemical drying agents or molecular sieves.
I think you can by "plug-in" dimmer switches; though they suggest only for use with lighting? I'm guessing that resistive loads work but that the switching of the dimmer causes voltage spikes? wouldn't anything with A/C as input need to sort out any induction anyhow?
Clive, I think there is a thermal fuse in the unit, it would be under the fibreglass sleeve under the manual reset switch on the red wire. I will be sending you an email later today, I have an interesting device to send to you for a teardown video. Coming back to the Isle for the TT next summer, see you then. Cheers.
I use one of these to produce distilled water for medical use, and whatever other uses come up in the home. Leading into COVID and throughout, supply chains for distilled water were disrupted at the retail level. This guaranteed that I had a source. They are slow to get ROI considering 1 hour of power consumption per liter of water.
Hello, great video. Around 6:25 you mention that air is pulled in and goes out the sides. Which way around (clockwise or anti-clockwise) does the fan spin as you look down on it? Regards
I like the look of those and using one - as I also have a interest in ventilation fans, but we have already had a fling with those water filter jugs/kettles. I live in London and it has hard water and we get lime-scale in the toilets, shower heads, hot water/central heating system and in the kettle. And that Thames water says 🇬🇧 has the safest, cleanest water supply (in comparison to other countries) so those filter jugs are a financial drain/scam = buying and stocking the cartridge filters, commissioning the filter ~ filling and dumping the water 2x before using it and resetting the counter in the jugs lid - when it runs out you have to replace the filter. And most of the jugs are designed to put in the fridge, in the door pocket - taking/wasting space in your fridge, or you save used water bottles and put those in the fridge for cold water. With the more stylish ones to adorn your kitchen with, the filter kettles claim to remove the scum on tea and the kettle doesn’t scale-up = my mum puts milk in her tea and doesn’t see the scum and likes how it tastes, and we put vinegar in the kettle to de-scale it and most modern kettles now have a spout screen to stop the bits of scale from pouring into your hot drink so we don’t need a filter kettle. As for the taste; tap water has a distinct taste to it and a filter jug will remove it = making it bland and as water should taste - improving the squash drinks you make with it, but I am not fussed with the taste of tap water. And all modern dishwashers have a water softener built in you just set it and regularly put dishwasher salt in it. We put Calgon in the washer and it has a self-cleaning program so hasn’t got a scale problem. Unfortunately our mains water is shared with the neighbours - so we know where the stop-cock is but don’t know where it splits from there ~ to install a water softener. As for the distiller in the video - I assume it would be similar to a heater fan to run it
For distilling liquids with a lower boiling point, I bet that coil doesn't get cool enough to properly condense all of it. Like you said, you'll lose a lot. It looks like you could remove the low speed fan and mount a high power fan on top of the lid. Have you seen Linus Tech Tips' blowiematron? That would be ideal, albeit loud. All the cooling you need. What I like about this still is how it's all self-contained and the stainless steel is a good material. Not happy with the aluminum top though, maybe that tube needs to be electroplated on the inside with a better metal, if that's possible.
Is it really aluminium though? To me the fins look like aluminium but the tube looks like stainless steel. It's just a tiny bit darker, less silvery white. But yeah if it is aluminium that would be bad.
Interesting the element looks just like the inside of my jug on the bench (not just spot welded) , different switch setup of course as boiling ones jug dry sort of defeats the purpose. And I would fully expect aluminium for the condenser tube for obvious thermal reasons.
Hi Big Clive and All, interesting item. I want “processed water” with the lime scaling content removed so bought a dehumidifier. The power rating is 300watts and the amount of water recovered depends on the weather, the higher the humidity the better. I only need a few litres of “processed water for occasionally running small scale 16mm/foot and 7/8in/foot live steam locomotives. I tried a water filter jug but noticed a white coating on the tubing in the boiler after one filling and a refill. Not good. I’m going to use coffee filter papers to remove dust.
What is the mode of operation of the latching thermal switch? if it has a magnet it might be using the same mode of operation described by the channel Technology Connections for a rice cooker, and it is brilliant. Essentially it involves creating a ferromagnetic alloy with a carefully selected curie point for the magnet to latch on.
you could add the dimmer measurinuse a thermocouple set the tempriture of heater to biol off diffrent elements with in a liquid with some degree of acuacy. I guess you could also just poke a thrmocouple (between the lid and container )into the liquid and watch the temprature as it heats said liquid. Hany item to have about the home 2x👍
Great video Clive. Nice new table top. I shall tell my brother Karl, the accountant I'm marrying you off to, that you have a good sense of interior design.
So do you need a pitcher or kettle under the drip/pop out? My 1st thought was that there was going to be a small holding tank inside but it appears that I was wrong and this is like a coffee machine style machine regarding how it runs. Also, I've always thought you needed copper to distill some things because if you don't have copper touching the fluid, it doesn't neutralize a certain toxin/odor or flavoring. Maybe I'm wrong on that but I would def check before distilling anything other than water.
Looking on eBay, the same type of air-still is available with variable digital thermostatic control for a bit more money, wouldn't it be better to just buy one of those?
I bought one of those, and no. With the controller it's either heating flat out or not at all, and I found I had scorching on the bottom of the unit, and variation in heating. resulting in off flavours, and higher water evaporation. I ended up bypassing the controller, putting a power controller on the power in and cutting the power down to about 270-300W, result was a steady drip, less off flavours and a higher ethanol percentage (before was around 50-60%, after closer to 80-85%)
Thanks Clive. I have one of these to provide water for my carnivorous plants. Always wondered what went on inside so really good to have a video to save me breaking it ;) Also, alcohol eh?
Alcohol would need a slight change of preset temperature (78 rather than 100 degrees centigrade) and the heater's power might need some adjustment too. Easily done with a PID regulator.
@@KeritechElectronics It actually doesn't. When the alcohol boils off there is a state change and it holds the temperature down at 78 until it's almost all gone and then the temperature will rise to 100c and boil off the water. Doing it with a PID might be more elegant and accurate and allow you to use a meatier heater for faster results, so it would be a good edition.
Dimmer is easy! Dual gang box, one side plug in socket, other side dimmer. Top socket you wire direct to mains, bottom socket wire to dimmer. Plug heating pot into dimmer, the end of the Condenser cord is the female end of computer or tv power cord. Plug computer power cord into mains voltage socket, plug the other end of that cord into condenser fan power cord. Enjoy!
My dad used one of these toward the end of his life. He used the water for his CPAP machine. He had to wear the device even while awake. And he couldn't rely on a constant supply of plastic bottles of distilled water for the machine.
He often mentioned that he'd like to change the temperature to 160 degrees Fahrenheit and make moonshine.
Always a bright spot in the day to see a Big Clive video!
Just needs a potentiometer and a thermometer
You don't control the temperature when you use a pot still, you reduce the power and leave the still to it. Easiest way is a small box with a diode in it and a switch to bypass the diode. Use it in bypass mode to heat up the fluid, then to half power to run the distillate. Don't try and control the temperature, that isn't how it works. The only thing the vapour temperature you is when you are separating the different components in the distillate, but if you don't produce methanol in the first place it's not really an issue.
People also use distilled water for medical devices such as for sleep apnea (Constant Pulmonary Air Pressure Machine)or CPAP. Also useful in humidifiers for avoiding scale.
CPAP is Continuous Positive Air Pressure. I've used one for the last decade.
…although the distiller itself does have to be descaled as well…through a much easier process.
@@wirdy1 15 years here.
That moment when you try and sound smart but it backfires
@@Doc_Hawk I made a mistake, and if you are woefully ignorant of the concept.....Ask you dad.
Thanks for the vid.
I've got one of those and actually use it to make distilled water (mainly for technical uses).
I make batches (store it in 2L fizzy drink bottles - well rinsed of course) of distilled water only in the winter so I get the benefit of the house being heated by the unit instead of wasting the heat in the summer.
These units really do make good room heaters when distilling water. More volatile substances produce little waste heat.
this is an excellent room heater plus a humidifier! two in one.
Get a glass jug.
Such an elegantly simple device!Steam irons are another common use for distilled water.
Agreed. Anything that has water channels that could be obstructed with lime is a good candidate for using demineralized water.
@@KeritechElectronics there is apparently a distinction between demineralised and distilled water. Not enough to worry most people, but I believe distilled is not pure enough for some applications. Sorry to be that anorak.
@@rowgli distilled is produced through boiling water and condensing the vapor, and demineralized is made by passing water through layers of anionite and cationite, effectively binding all anions and cations (or, to be more precise, substituting them for hydroxyl anions and hydrogen cations which recombine into water molecules).
I figured that out the hard way. I bought an iron for the first time ever in my life and it lasted about six months before the holes were blocked up and it started sputtering dirty water/steam onto my clothes. I tried to clean it out with vinegar, and got enough of it that it stopped spitting mineral mud, but I couldn’t get enough of the build up to get it to steam worth a damn. Then the seal between the water reservoir and steam chamber started leaking and there was more steam coming up from between the hot plate and the plastic handle bit, and burning the shit out of me, than there was coming out of the steam holes. So, I bought a new one and just buy $1-something gallons of distilled water from the grocery store that seem to work well
@@RandomBogey In the future, use citric acid rather than vinegar to dissolve lime scale. It works so much more effectively.
I actually use one of these, specifically sold for Alcohol - but basically the same unit in all ways. But I use it for cleaning IPA after it's been used for resin printing. Recovers the bulk of the IPA for reuse. I'm not sure from an energy perspective it's a whole lot more cost effective than buying IPA, but during the height of covid response it certainly was as IPA had gone through the roof and was even difficult to get in volume. I mean I suppose from pure math it's a better value to distill it - though it is a pain in the rump for a bunch of reasons..
Does the residual resin cause issues in the chamber?
@@bigclivedotcom
For me it's entirely up to what resin that was mostly used.
Very clever George, very clever. 👍 I wish I was using quantities of IPA that I could do that to now because the power would cost me almost nothing due to my roof being covered with solar panels.
Isn't boiling resin alcohol going to produce lots of nasty fumes
I've been researching this.
So far, putting the IPA in a clear soda bottle out in the sun causes it to make a semi solid snot substance. I used a colander to separate it.
Then I funneled it back with a coffee filter.
It left a little residue, I don't really care that much. I use a three-stage system. Got a container to dunk prints right off the printer. Then it goes into the cleaning machine. Then a final dunking in clean IPA.
The residue really doesn't need to be removed for the first dunk.
My plan to deal with the residue is run it through a Britta water filter. If it can make rotgut vodka drinkable after a couple of passes, my hypothesis is it'll make it good enough for the cleaning machine.
I just left the snot in the sun until it was a solid. Took a couple of days, but it was partly cloudy. Next time I think I might squeeze it with cheesecloth. Works for cheese.
I am a mad scientist though so YMMV.
I still have a Liebig condenser and a range of quick connect joints with a large 3lt boiling flask to make distilled water, I end up with tubes all over to supply the condenser with its cold cooling water, but it produces the purest of distilled water with zero risk of the water being boiled reaching the condenser and contaminating the distilled outflow.
I used to have a number of very high-capacity lead acid batteries, which is why I made the setup, but the batteries have long gone, and it's been a year or three since I used it.
Using an off-the-shelf condenser, like the one shown, is that alcohol boils at a slightly lower temperature than water and an off-the-shelf water condenser will not give you pure distilled alcohol, you'll end up with a large amount of water and some alcohol.
I'll not say I did try distilling alcohol from homemade beer, and I'll not say I was careful to keep the boiling temperature at the boiling point of alcohol, and I'll not say I made sure that the temperature never went above the alcohol boiling point. I didn't end up with a small bottle of alcohol and I didn't try a few drops on a spoon and set light to it, there may not be any residue left in the spoon, thus it would be a very pure undiluted alcohol, not for drinking purposes unless you close one and only risk going blind in the one eye you keep open!
K.
Love the color change for the table, but the wooden one was like a signature of this channel.
It's just a second filming area for bigger items.
@@bigclivedotcom happy to hear, have a great day
6:20 Actually the fan pushes air out the top of the unit, Look at the curvature of the blades, the way you describe the blades would be running backwards and would be most inefficient. Since heat rises, you would not want to fight that effect, so air is pulled in from the sides and the heated air is pushed out the top.
You are correct. It sucks cooler air through the cooling disc fins soldered onto the condenser tube and blows the waste heat directly up. Can confirm as I own one. Not recommended to run in the middle of summer as it can quickly make a room uncomfortably hot.
@@MikeTrieu I was thinking the same thing as soon as he said it drew air from the top. Good eye gentlemen
Similar behaviour/output to a condenser tumble dryer ~ needs to be operated in a cold garage, house with the heating off in the winter
True. Hot air comes out the top. My garage is always noticeable warmer when I've distilled 5L of pure water 😊.
@@MikeTrieu Does it also increase the humidity in the room, or is the vessel pressurized during use? I currently only make RO for drinking/cooking but have noticed that it is also really good for coffee/tea and other devices that would normally develop deposits. I no longer have a serious need for distilled water, although it is always handy to have around.
I literally bought one of these yesterday on Amazon Prime Day, and the next day Clive’s posting a video teardown. How convenient!
We have used one (not the same unit)now for 4 years making vodka, rum, gin and essential oils.
Great hobby
Please do not use the kettle lead it comes with as can be aluminium!
Also replace the wire which connects earth from the plug on the side to the distiller's metal work for something you know is copper and thicker.
I was pondering if the internal earth connections were big enough too.
@@bigclivedotcom test it be interesting.
Is the lead supplied with your distiller safe?
Chineseum crap? 😠
@@bigclivedotcom it just needs to trip the RCCB, that is usually set around 5-10mA, right?
Thanks for the dimmer idea. I purchased different thermal switches to zero in on the evaporation neutral spirits.
Quite a rare and unusual occurrence actually being able to see you in the frame while you're filming your workbench as usual... :)
That LED panel under the shelf above the workbench looks absolutely enormous.
I use distilled water for CPAP. I used to buy it premade at the grocery store, but then some time into COVID, the hospitals sucked up the supply and you couldn't find it on the shelf any more, so I bought a distiller to make my own. However, I got a stovetop version (something like a double boiler, but with three pans instead of two), so considerably less intricate than this device.
@@mobility_criteria 1 US gallon of water uses about 2.7kWh of energy to boil dry (350Wh to heat from 20c to 100c, then 2.35kWh for enthalpy of vaporization), not including heat losses or energy for the fan. Unless your energy is less than about 50c/kWh it's cheaper to buy than make.
Great Video Clive! I bought one of these a couple of years back after watching your "Trash wine" video :) I didn't know that the spout came off I guess I learned something new!
@@BlondieHappyGuy good idea with the filter bags. I've been doing similar with aquarium pellets for a pet water fountain for the last few years.
My unit was supplied with a kettle lead made of ALUMINIUM and the element failed to earth!
The earth wire melted before RCD tripping.
It gave me burns could not use two my fingers for a week and the worst shock in 30 years. Had to have a week off work.
I work as an industrial/theatre electrician in highly dangerous environments and proud not to have a shock at work. Ok minor tingling as always test everything then back of hand first
I did replace RCD afterwards but on testing it was still within scope.
I really enjoy your videos, but if I could make a minor suggestion, a lot of the devices you take to bits I've never heard of, or seen, or seen in action. Maybe you could show them run before tearing them down? Like, I know the process of distilling water but it just never occurred to me that there were countertop water distilling devices like this. It was neat to see its innards but I really wanted to see it in action too. Anyway, your videos are always very fun to watch and thanks for making them!
It's not terribly exciting. It makes a boiling noise like a kettle and water dribbles from the spout.
don't turn it on, take it apart.😎😎
@@bigclivedotcom but I have never seen such a gadget! I have seen how water is distilled in glass stills, though.
When distilling you should really use the mid stream flow as the early stuff will have more volatile contaminants (such as ethanol) and the end of the run will contain heavier oils etc.
I once worked at an organisation that used a lot of lead acid batteries for remote chart recorders etc. and we had a magnificent still made with copper tubing to supply distilled water. Apparently they had replaced it a while before and some years after that "The Revenue" came snooping around to see that they old setup hadn't been put to other uses ! Life is easier with these devices so commonly available.
Many years ago I saw a secondhand water distiller - the glass system that every school chemistry lab had - and long regretted not buying it. But then the common thing to buy instead of distilled water (eg for batteries) was deionised water, I think produced by reverse osmosis. It was apparently just as good for most purposes.
If deonised water truly removes all the ions that aren't H or O, then what is the remaining advantage of true distilling ?
theelmonk, iirc deionized uses an ion exchange resin although you could then run that thru ro. I think you can substitute distilled for deionized but not always the other way round. Deionized is cheaper. Note as the universal solvent 100% pure h2o is unobtainium.
Semiconductor manufacturing uses ultra high purity water. So pure it is actually toxic.
deionized water does have organic impurities- contamination from sewer will have ammonia that will not be removed by distillation. same way alcohol and acids (acetic acid) will be removed only partly by distillation. for lab quality water, you need to distill the distilled water and use a quartz still and heating without producing bubbles.
?@@marossgnv
Adding a settable thermostat, possibly even a PID controller, in just the heater leg of the circuit would allow precise temp control (below 100c) unless you replace the temp cutouts.
Someone mentioned using reverse osmosis to "deionize" water.. It won't work.
You need a deionizer column with "water softener" beads in the column.
Lab stills are made of a special glass tubing.. metal will leave all sorts of ions in the output.
Thanks for the look inside.
If one wanted to control the heat, it's easy enough to power the fan separately from the heater since they've provided a convenient connector.
Can't beat that little bacho 1/4 drive set, always using mine.
Rather serendipitous! I just started using my Megahome Water distiller very recently. I used sink tap water filtered by a premium collagen filter & am surprised by all the crusty sediment!!!
Thank you, Clive! I have wanted a look at the fintube coil in an airstill for years.
That one is way posher than mine! I've had mine for absolutely years and apart from that "burping" issue I had a while back it's always been great. I've made literally gallons and gallons of booze with it! It's not illegal to do over here in Portugal either! You have to keep the cooling fins very clean over here because if it gets fluffed up it barely copes with the higher ambient air temperature.
I always pictured glass tubes in a lab seting for water distillers. I guess this works too.
It's amazing how simple it is. A heat source, something to collect and condense the steam, and somewhere for that water to go. I like this idea.
The reason laboratory distillation setups use glass (usually borosilicate pyrex glass as this is more resilient to thermal stress) is because they are usually not used for distilling anything so innocuous as water. Most chemistry labs get through a lot of "distilled" water for rinsing glassware after washing it, since you don't want residues from tap water contaminating your flasks. So it would be highly energy inefficient to run actual distillation systems for this - most labs use ion-exchange resin columns for purifying water since these are much cheaper to run and produce mineral-free water which is perfectly acceptable for rinsing purposes.
Anyway, the actual distillation sets are typically used for distilling solvents, or purifying other liquid chemicals, some of which would react with metals or get contaminated by traces of metal oxides from the surfaces of metal condensers. Glass is chemically inert in nearly all situations, which is why labs use glass for reaction vessels and most other chemical handling equipment.
Metal condensers do exist though - all you need is the two standard diameters of copper plumbing pipe plus some 8 millimetre copper tube and you can make your own copper "liebig" style condenser by soldering or brazing it all together. For distilling water this is perfectly fine, just not for some other stuff. It's also fine for distilling alcohol of course. In fact, every commercial system for making spirits by distilling some kind of fermented mash will have some copper components in direct physical contact with the alcohol being distilled - this is important since the copper reacts with and removes volatile organo-sulfur components which would otherwise give the distilled spirits a bad taste and/or smell.
Great work Clive. I love your work
You could fit a thermostat to it, so long as it's rated for mains voltage. Might need to check the wiring to ensure things are working just fine (perhaps even a solid state relay to take the load off the thermostat).
Would make a nice little kit project.
The best thing about this video was seeing you from an alternate perspective!
There is a secret livestream channel that is basically a drunken pub meeting for around 1000 people. But it's not to everyone's taste.
BigCliveLive.
Depending on the minerals in the water you can also have "soft water". Instead of hard water with calcium and magnesium you can have soft water with lots of sodium and potassium... Often from natural springs.
You can soften hard water chemically.
@@BedsitBob Which adds the elements that the hard water ions like to bind with so it can settle out or at least be inert in the chemical sense for washing up...
Calcium Hydroxide (slaked lime) for example can be added to make the Magneisum Chrloide in hard water precipitate out as Magnesium Hydroxide, then since you added extra Calcium you now have a lot more of that than before (hard water can be MgCl2 (Magnesium Chloride) and Ca(OH)2) (Calsium Hydroxide)), so to get rid of that you then add Sodium Carbonate. Result is precipitate of of Calcium Carbonate. In addition you are left with Sodium Chloride in solution. That's just one example though.
For such a process you need to know a lot of what is in the water to properly "cancel it out".
Fantastic take down .lots of room for modifications for control unit .Almost bought One on Amazon with the temperature control unit .basically it's the exact same thing with better temperature control .the advantage is you can cook beer and wort and wine and distil good alcohol .
I remember having had a bit of an argument with my dad a few years ago when he saw videos of people distilling all the tap water they were drinking with one of these and showing all the gunk it had pulled from water.
What I was saying was that I think drinking distilled water isn't good for your health (As he wanted to convert the house to rain water instead of tap water even for drinking purposes) and also I did tell him that the gunk was more good minerals than pollutants or harmful chemicals but he didn't accept that idea and kept telling me that people in the video were doing all good, doing everything the way it should be done.
I still drink water as it comes from the tap as usual though.
He was right, the chemicals in tap water isn't healthy for the body. Distilled water by these units is not dangerous at all. I've been drinking it for 3 years now, always funny when people say that.
Tap water in my CPAP heated humifier used to go musty after a day, but distilled water stays fresh for 3+ days & is more pleasant to breathe. Yeah, I know it says to clean them every day, but who actually does that? 😉.
"chemicals in tap water isn't healthy for the body": this is wankery. Dissolved minerals are fine, and in fact can be a significant source of dietary calcium. Safe tap water is one of the most important developments of human civilization; countries that don't have it waste huge amounts of daily human effort carrying water around.
@@bbrockert Unfortunately now tap water has chlorine, small amounts of pharma drugs, aluminium salts and in some places the known neurotoxin fluoride. This is all available information which has to be published by your local water provider so is not "wankery".
Although yes you do lose out on disolved minerals in the water but it would probably be better to add some which have all necessary trace minerals in that perhaps are lacking in modern diets.
"the known neurotoxin fluoride" thanks for making it clear that you're going for wankery.
The electricity cost is significant. Carbon + RO/DI is cheaper and better than a still, for purifying water in significant quantities. You can add a UV unit if you need to kill bacteria etc.
I'm wondering if the internal cut out is controlling the temperature like a fixed value thermostat, easy to find out if the current cycles up and down.
Drinking only distilled water can cause health problems, you would need to add essential minerals and nutrients, Nighthawkinglight covered this and said he added just a bit of the original (boiled) water into the distilled product.
As someone who pays for youtube premium, soly to not see ads, I thank you for not having a VPN/hairloss sponsor message in this video!
I have one - best machine ever....in my humble opinion. I use it constantly for making pure water for drinking. You cannot get cleaner water. I love it.
To state the bleeding obvious, distilling water is not a good way of getting drinking water. It lacks minerals and electrolytes and, while it won't harm you directly, it won't quench your thirst or be taken up readily by your body. I learned this the hard way, when I was camping on an island in the Adria and did not realise that their tap water is desalinated sea water. I drank so much that my stomach was full and aching, I was feeling sick - but still thirsty. I wasted a day or two thinking I was ill and unable to do anything, until the friend I was with got me some water from the store, packed in a carton. Apparently locals drank only that. It tasted great, I suddenly wasn't thirsty and was bursting with energy. If you have dirty water, use a filtration system, which removes impurities but not the minerals.
Distilled water however would be good for making beverages like tea and coffee, since the limescale dissolved in the water soaks up and removes the aroma from them. Distilled water also has less or no oxygen dissolved in it, which - I'm guessing here - might oxidise some of the ingredients and change the taste (for worse or for better). Technical uses almost always profit from demineralised water - I used it in my ultrasonic humidifier to avoid generating the white dust (microscopic mineral particles that remain after the microscopic drops of water evaporate).
Fascinating. I had no idea. I suppose you could then put rehydration tablets in the distilled water, but those I have tried taste pretty terrible, and in the circumstances given above it was obviously easier just to drink what the locals do.
Exactly. To think that few people know it nowadays...
In the case of emergency desalination, adding in some seawater, or a spoonful of the residue found in the bottom of the still, would help keep you healthier than just drinking the distilled water.
Just as a little sidenote: for tea and coffee purposes, you do also want some mineral content for better extraction and flavor. There's a good bit of discussion about water parameters in coffee nerd circles (likely the tea equivalent as well), and multiple commercial mixtures to remineralize distilled or RO water. I've been tempted myself to play around with cheap and simple DIY there, and likely would have already if we were still on London's liquid chalk. But, at any rate, straight distilled evidently doesn't work all that well for brewing hot drinks either.
@@jadsel Ah thanks, was not aware of that. I'm using water filter jugs/cartridges for that, those only remove limescale and a number of pollutants, leaving the minerals alone. The type I'm using also adds magnesium. Never tried straight distilled, now I'm tempted to give that a go.
You can always leave the lid ajar for the first 10 minutes of boiling to get rid of the VOCs, Similar to alcohol distilling where you toss out the heads that have a lot of the semi toxic amyl alcohol from the fermenting process that cause headaches and bad taste.
doing that can trigger natural gas leak detectors, though. be prepared
I was wondering if you could provide some more detail on the cooling fins around the condenser tube. E.g., coupling method
You used to need a Customs & Excise licence, even for a water still in the UK, I know because I had to renew our licence in several schools, I worked in. Not the glass version used for demos, but the ones used for producing distilled water. Many were made by a company called Manesty. They used a kettle element.
I can see everything, but I can't really see the camera.... Where is the camera? This is the question. Great video 😃
It's a virtual camera.
During the Covid thing and the year after I found it difficult to locate steady supplies of distilled water. I'm an older guy and I use a BiPAP machine during sleep that requires distilled water for humidifying the air. The solution to maintaining a supply of distilled water was to purchase a countertop distiller very similar to the one Clive has shown. Thanks to him, I now know how to replace the activated charcoal filter. No, I'm not too old to learn but you might have to talk a little slower. :)
That opening with the reflection of Clive, was like when Dave Lister was talking to Talkie the Toaster in Red Dwarf. Awesome.
The whole thing actually resembles an electric kettle (one of the fancy ones you leave plugged in and it keeps the water hot), down to the heating element and top part, I bet they're both made using the same molds and parts but just swap a few things around (ie some thermal switches and the top part). I might look into modifying mine actually
Be good to see it working. Never seen one of these before. Great video as usual, thanks.
Interesting to see your lighting comes from the LED COBs you did a teardown on several years back.
Distilled water isn’t great for drinking as it doesn’t contain the usual minerals but it is good for medical uses. I prefer using a Brita filter for drinking water as it keeps the minerals and still softens the water. Also I can keep it in the fridge.
Got one of these at a boot sale for £2. Works great for making distilled water for my cpap humidifier.
Cracking Beard in the reflection! Respect Big Clive!
The first thing I thought was for topping off batteries. People also use distilled water for baby formula. Somehow there was a distilled water shortage in parts of the US. Some local liquor distilleries chipped in and made water for a bit. Didn't effect me because I have one of these.
I got one of these for the.... Other uses. Works beautifully. Works best if you throw it out on your deck on a cool night. Less losses with cooler temperatures out there!
How does one control scale build-up in a device like this - whose sole function is to.....build up scale? Rinse it with vinegar after every use?
We have hard water in this town. We're really tough here. Water squeezed out of rocks, or something.
Citric Acid is what mine came with. Use a timer tho, avoid cleaning.
I've got one of these. I need distilled water for my CPAP machine humidifier (sleep apnea). I ran out of dist water, and just wasn't finding any in any of the stores (it's always been harder to find than expected.) I also have a steam cleaner that needs dist water.
The top portion wasn't very well assembled - the fan blades were striking the plastic housing making a racket. Other than mine running from 120V 60Hz, yours looks a lot like mine, even drawing about 725W (measured with a P4400 Kill-A-Watt, similar to your Hopi). I also don't trust these to "automatically" turn off - I use a countdown timer that I can set to turn off at 3.5 Hours.
I don't think these actually "boil" the water. Rather, they heat the water enough to achieve rapid evaporation. Boiling throws water droplets up and can be collected by the condenser. Rapid evaporation is a much calmer operation to produce steam.
It avoids having a rolling, violent boil, but it does get the water just up to the boiling point. But the difference between evaporation and boiling is a matter of degree (hah) anyway.
If you add a heat conductive medium to the boiler that has a lot of surface area like copper wool, you can get more nucleation sites and it will indeed boil quite vigorously. Mine is so violent that the water sloshing around in there when it's full makes the whole apparatus kind of do a wobbling "dance" on the wire rack I have it situated on.
Mine gently boils.
I've had one of those for around 10 years now an if you are going to fragment a sugar wash fermentation I recommend to chuck away the first 10ml as it might be methanol an to just keep 700ml to drink anything after that will be tales an taste horrible
if you put a diode in series with the heating element, would that half the power (since it wouldn't see half of the AC wave)?
I have what seems to be the same design but with plastic instead of chrome shell. I do use it to make distilled water!
Judging by the concave side of the fan blade being on top it blows upwards and draws cool air in the sides. Heat naturally rises so expelling the waste heat upwards where it cannot be recirculated in a loop makes a little more sense from a scientific point of view. 😉
The air blows in the opposite direction from what I described. It's different to my other one.
@@bigclivedotcom in any event, I'm still a big fan of your videos ❤️
Very similar to the water distiller I use. They don't do a good job on alcohol due to heating power and what chemist would call a low theoretical plate count. This means poor fractionation as the difference between boiling points isn't much..30 degrees or so.
Water and total dissolved solids have a much higher boiling point difference.
It is a lovely 750 Watt heater as the maximum temperature is below 100°C.
They also sell a version made for water, alcohol or oil distillation. The main difference is you can set a temperature and run time electronically on the unit. So no mod needed!
I wondered what the simplest design would be so the waste heat is not all released into the air, but used to heat up the next water close to boiling temperature, so evaporating it takes less energy. Just like in industrial distillation - heat recovery. I mean even just 50% recovery would be a huge efficiency gain.
usually done in a continuous flow apparatus. I suppose you could do a batch variation on that, but as the secondary pot gets warm, efficiency of condensation would drop, so you'd end up with either losing water vapor (humidifying the room) or need just as long a condenser anyway.
@@RossReedstrom You could probably do it using a heat pump, but would be terribly complicated for such a small distiller.
I'm thinking instead of a coil and fan, have the steam move through a 1/4" copper pipe that's inside of a 1/2" pipe. Water comes in through the 1/2" pipe, which cools the 1/4" enough to make it an evaporator, and that heat is transferred to the new water, pre-heating it before evaporation.
@@alexanderm2702 that's a pretty good description of one form of counterflow heat exchanger.
Oh my word, did you now go break that distiller did you?
I have a similar one but really made for distilling alcohol. Has a fermentation function built in, good to know how it looks inside
Love this video! Please break down the air still pro - it has a built in reflux condenser and it's just been released.. I'm sure a lot of people will be keen to see how it's made and how it works
It's also hideously expensive.
I bought a very similar distiller right at the beginning of the covid pandemic to distill water for my CPAP. With my local electric rates, I think it would be cheaper to buy bottled distilled water at the supermarket, but at the time the shelves were empty at the store. I continue to distill my own water rather than buying it in disposable plastic jugs.
I really like your voice and the understandings you share. /Sweden
So the base cutout actually works on a different principle to Alec's favorite rice cooker, which relies on the Curie point of a magnetic cutoff switch. Interesting.
With the simple internal construction, an enterprising individual could easily hack that with a u-controller and mains rated relay to maintain a given temperature in the boiling vessel. Fit a solid state relay and you could even PWM the heating element for PID control
We have a similar distiller we use to keep the scale out of our humidifiers during the winter. As there must be some heat loss through those coils, I had thought about adding a normally-open thermal switch to the side of the tank, with the idea of letting the heater bring the water temperature up before the coils get the active cooling. Thought is that maybe it'll cycle quicker and use less power.
The heat loss from the top section is very low relative to the power of the bottom section. It only really affects the steam.
@@bigclivedotcom Interesting. Oh well. I have so many other projects I should be working on that it wasn't likely to happen anyway. 😁
A general question: Because of the Covid shortages, the 99% IPA is either unobtinium or very expensive. Would this work for concentrating the 70% IPA to higher percentage? Maybe redistilling it 2-3-4 times? Using the dimmer for the heater, would need lengthy calibration, and probably baby-sitting the still.
IPA forms an azeotrope with water at 91% concentration- so you could theoretically get that far, but no further even with repeated distilaltion. To get purer IPA you would need chemical drying agents or molecular sieves.
Wow!! there really is a BigClive on the other side of those hands. Love your work.
Also for ovens with a water reservoir for steaming, sous vide and baking.
I think you can by "plug-in" dimmer switches; though they suggest only for use with lighting? I'm guessing that resistive loads work but that the switching of the dimmer causes voltage spikes? wouldn't anything with A/C as input need to sort out any induction anyhow?
I'm guessing that without the fan you need a whole heap of extra windings to cool the steam off again ?
Clive, I think there is a thermal fuse in the unit, it would be under the fibreglass sleeve under the manual reset switch on the red wire.
I will be sending you an email later today, I have an interesting device to send to you for a teardown video.
Coming back to the Isle for the TT next summer, see you then. Cheers.
Worth it just for the peek at Clive's setup.
Interesting. Ive heard that humidifiers release a lot of "impurities" into the air so that seems contradictory.
I use one of these to produce distilled water for medical use, and whatever other uses come up in the home. Leading into COVID and throughout, supply chains for distilled water were disrupted at the retail level. This guaranteed that I had a source. They are slow to get ROI considering 1 hour of power consumption per liter of water.
Yeah Looks pretty nice and the fan looks like the shower head fan. Love theses kinds of machines
Dang buddy you find some cool stuff very interesting when I can’t sleep
You put it in lead acid battery or making distilled alcohol
I have one of these for making vodka. I have the fan plugged into the wall so it's running constantly and the element on a 15 minute on/off cycle.
Hello, great video. Around 6:25 you mention that air is pulled in and goes out the sides. Which way around (clockwise or anti-clockwise) does the fan spin as you look down on it?
Regards
Anticlockwise. It actually pulls air in at the sides and blows it out the top.
Jim Browning,you truly are a Renaissance Man.
I like the look of those and using one - as I also have a interest in ventilation fans, but we have already had a fling with those water filter jugs/kettles. I live in London and it has hard water and we get lime-scale in the toilets, shower heads, hot water/central heating system and in the kettle. And that Thames water says 🇬🇧 has the safest, cleanest water supply (in comparison to other countries) so those filter jugs are a financial drain/scam = buying and stocking the cartridge filters, commissioning the filter ~ filling and dumping the water 2x before using it and resetting the counter in the jugs lid - when it runs out you have to replace the filter. And most of the jugs are designed to put in the fridge, in the door pocket - taking/wasting space in your fridge, or you save used water bottles and put those in the fridge for cold water. With the more stylish ones to adorn your kitchen with, the filter kettles claim to remove the scum on tea and the kettle doesn’t scale-up = my mum puts milk in her tea and doesn’t see the scum and likes how it tastes, and we put vinegar in the kettle to de-scale it and most modern kettles now have a spout screen to stop the bits of scale from pouring into your hot drink so we don’t need a filter kettle. As for the taste; tap water has a distinct taste to it and a filter jug will remove it = making it bland and as water should taste - improving the squash drinks you make with it, but I am not fussed with the taste of tap water. And all modern dishwashers have a water softener built in you just set it and regularly put dishwasher salt in it. We put Calgon in the washer and it has a self-cleaning program so hasn’t got a scale problem. Unfortunately our mains water is shared with the neighbours - so we know where the stop-cock is but don’t know where it splits from there ~ to install a water softener. As for the distiller in the video - I assume it would be similar to a heater fan to run it
I'm wondering for CPAP use, is this more cost effective than purchasing distilled water in 5l containers, especially with the current energy prices.
We can't buy distilled water in supermarkets in the UK.
Love the cob light with missing led from a pervious episode.
For distilling liquids with a lower boiling point, I bet that coil doesn't get cool enough to properly condense all of it. Like you said, you'll lose a lot. It looks like you could remove the low speed fan and mount a high power fan on top of the lid. Have you seen Linus Tech Tips' blowiematron? That would be ideal, albeit loud. All the cooling you need. What I like about this still is how it's all self-contained and the stainless steel is a good material. Not happy with the aluminum top though, maybe that tube needs to be electroplated on the inside with a better metal, if that's possible.
This is that video: ua-cam.com/video/nAFB9w2Rh0Y/v-deo.html
Is it really aluminium though? To me the fins look like aluminium but the tube looks like stainless steel. It's just a tiny bit darker, less silvery white. But yeah if it is aluminium that would be bad.
I think the 2nd cutout is also for overly curious people who would hold the button in.
I bought one of these after you first showed this off when distilling wine! I make my own rum and use it for that haha.
Interesting the element looks just like the inside of my jug on the bench (not just spot welded) , different switch setup of course as boiling ones jug dry sort of defeats the purpose. And I would fully expect aluminium for the condenser tube for obvious thermal reasons.
Al reacts with water and copper internally plated or covered with tin is better. The condenser fins are Al (just like in the air conditioner units).
Hi Big Clive and All, interesting item.
I want “processed water” with the lime scaling content removed so bought a dehumidifier. The power rating is 300watts and the amount of water recovered depends on the weather, the higher the humidity the better. I only need a few litres of “processed water for occasionally running small scale 16mm/foot and 7/8in/foot live steam locomotives. I tried a water filter jug but noticed a white coating on the tubing in the boiler after one filling and a refill. Not good.
I’m going to use coffee filter papers to remove dust.
If you could operate the unit inside of a vacuum chamber, energy consumption should be very low. How do you think about that?
Boiling point of ethanol at 100 mm Hg is 31.5 deg C
What is the mode of operation of the latching thermal switch? if it has a magnet it might be using the same mode of operation described by the channel Technology Connections for a rice cooker, and it is brilliant. Essentially it involves creating a ferromagnetic alloy with a carefully selected curie point for the magnet to latch on.
It's a bimetallic disk.
you could add the dimmer measurinuse a thermocouple set the tempriture of heater to biol off diffrent elements with in a liquid with some degree of acuacy. I guess you could also just poke a thrmocouple (between the lid and container )into the liquid and watch the temprature as it heats said liquid. Hany item to have about the home 2x👍
i like the 70W led panel for smooth illumination.
Great video Clive. Nice new table top. I shall tell my brother Karl, the accountant I'm marrying you off to, that you have a good sense of interior design.
So do you need a pitcher or kettle under the drip/pop out? My 1st thought was that there was going to be a small holding tank inside but it appears that I was wrong and this is like a coffee machine style machine regarding how it runs. Also, I've always thought you needed copper to distill some things because if you don't have copper touching the fluid, it doesn't neutralize a certain toxin/odor or flavoring. Maybe I'm wrong on that but I would def check before distilling anything other than water.
It comes with a suitable container and ported lid to catch the distilled water.
Looking on eBay, the same type of air-still is available with variable digital thermostatic control for a bit more money, wouldn't it be better to just buy one of those?
I bought one of those, and no. With the controller it's either heating flat out or not at all, and I found I had scorching on the bottom of the unit, and variation in heating. resulting in off flavours, and higher water evaporation. I ended up bypassing the controller, putting a power controller on the power in and cutting the power down to about 270-300W, result was a steady drip, less off flavours and a higher ethanol percentage (before was around 50-60%, after closer to 80-85%)
It would depend on your application.
Thanks Clive. I have one of these to provide water for my carnivorous plants. Always wondered what went on inside so really good to have a video to save me breaking it ;)
Also, alcohol eh?
Alcohol would need a slight change of preset temperature (78 rather than 100 degrees centigrade) and the heater's power might need some adjustment too. Easily done with a PID regulator.
@@KeritechElectronics sounds interesting, wonder if I could use a temp controller I already have to do this non invasively (not really, of course ;) )
@@KeritechElectronics It actually doesn't. When the alcohol boils off there is a state change and it holds the temperature down at 78 until it's almost all gone and then the temperature will rise to 100c and boil off the water. Doing it with a PID might be more elegant and accurate and allow you to use a meatier heater for faster results, so it would be a good edition.
Oh, I just used hard water for mine..... I wonder if that's why I was never successful?
Do you grill steaks for them?
Also - this device seems to beg for a temp sensor (Pt100?), a PID regulator and some interesting contents that starts to boil at 78 degrees C.
Dimmer is easy! Dual gang box, one side plug in socket, other side dimmer. Top socket you wire direct to mains, bottom socket wire to dimmer. Plug heating pot into dimmer, the end of the Condenser cord is the female end of computer or tv power cord. Plug computer power cord into mains voltage socket, plug the other end of that cord into condenser fan power cord. Enjoy!