Best-kept secret for health and vitality
Of the half-dozen small practices in my life that give me more energy and stamina, I’ve found that drinking distilled water is one of the most effective. I wrote about this back in November, and that column generated questions about home distillation systems that I’ll answer here.
When steam from boiling water is condensed back into liquid, the result is distilled water. Home distillation systems are one of the best ways to make virtually pure drinking water, and there are two reasons this matters.
Besides removing chemical and hormonal contaminants that are measurably present in some municipal water supplies, distilled water is also free of naturally-occurring minerals such as calcium and magnesium. But don’t we need these minerals? Yes, we do, but there are two strikes against getting them as dissolved solids in hard water.
First, the amount of minerals in even very hard water is insignificant compared to our daily requirements. You’d have to drink a whopping 240 litres of hard water each day (containing 500 parts per million of dissolved calcium) to get your daily requirement of calcium in that way. And second, minerals that are present in hard water are in what’s called non-chelated form. This makes them more difficult for your body to use, and somewhat troublesome to deal with biologically. Eliminating waterborne minerals that end up as kidney stones and painful joint deposits is the main reason I prefer drinking distilled water. We have distilled water in abundance at our place because of the kind of distiller we have.
There are two main types of home distillers in the world. Smaller units that cost $200 to $600 and sit on your countertop, much like a coffee maker. You fill it with about three litres of tap water, and depending on what model you choose, four hours later you’ll have three litres of distilled water sitting in a jug. Cost in electricity is less than 50 cents per batch. My daughter has a countertop distiller like this for her family of five, and she runs it more or less constantly to keep up. It works, but it’s a fair amount of trouble filling and emptying each day. Avoiding this kind of hassle is why there’s such a thing as automatic water distillers. This is the kind I installed at my house and I’m impressed.
Automatic distillers are self-contained, floor-mounted units that connect to your home water supply. They fill themselves with tap water whenever necessary, they commence boiling on their own, then they gather the steam and condense it into distilled water before accumulating this purified water in an internal stainlesssteel reservoir. Automatic distillation units like this keep on filling and boiling by themselves until the reservoir is full. After that they shut off until you draw more water.
The automatic distiller we have is an Aquanui 10G. It’s made in the U.S. and produces distilled water at a rate of about one and a half litres per hour, with on-board storage for almost 40 litres. So, what’s the advantage compared with countertop models? Automatic distillers operate around the clock if needed, without intervention. All you do is draw water from the reservoir directly, or make use of a separate tap connected to a little dedicated pressure pump on the distiller. This option delivers distilled water to any sink in your house or your refrigerator.
The inner workings of an automatic distiller are interesting to see, and you can watch a video tour I made of the Aquanui 10G at Baileylineroad.com.
Besides being interesting, I love our distiller because it gives me better health and more energy that my family and I can feel.
The fact that the inside of our kettle always looks brand new and scale-free is an added bonus.