- Feb 4, 2013
- 28,175
Removing salts would be the biggest challenge. Even in the most arid regions of the world, this is not something any logical thinking person would consider.
Solar still.
Basically distillation using sun as the heat source. You can make a simple one with a piece of plastic, a wide mouth bottle or can, and a rock. And a shovel to dig a hole.
There are also commercial ones from survival rafts.
One thing you said at the beginning of the thread was that boiling does not remove anything. But it does. If you boil water in an open pot, all the lower boiling point volatiles will boil off first, into the open air. the heavy fractions would remain.
If you have source with a high chemical load from low boiling point compounds, boiling then distilling (as separate steps) would help. And if you do not boil the pot dry when distilling, you would get rid the higher boiling point fractions.
Also, there are many people around the world that use distilled water for drinking and cooking for many years. If you were ONLY drinking water, it would be an issue. But you also eat foods with minerals. And if you mix anything with the water (drink mix, coffee, tea, etc) it is no longer pure distilled water.