Oh, distilled water, how I missed thee!

I never liked tap water. Coming from a place where drinking unfiltered, unboiled tap water will put you in the hospital, it didn't take much for me to find some other source of drinking water even though tap water is safe to drink here. The first 3 years I lived in an apartment building with a nice water fountain in the lobby, so I would just fill a gallon jug every other day and bring it to my room to drink. It was okay-ish, I didn't really like the taste, but it was better than tap water.

And then I found distilled water. For the next few years (up till early this year) I would buy half a dozen gallon jugs and lug them all the way home every 10 days or so. It was not fun. And it was getting a tad bit costly. It was still cheaper than bottled water.

Earlier this year my roommate introduced me to Brita. And I thought, maybe that's what I should do. Buy one and use it to filter tap water. After all, that's what we do back home and it turned out fine. It tastes horrible though. Still better than unfiltered tap water, but I hated the taste. I put up with it for a few months, but I noticed I was drinking a lot less now.

Last week I got a loan from my parents, and I ordered one of those $400 water distiller. I figured it should pay itself off in about one and a half years. Not too bad actually. 

Yesterday the unit arrived, and after the initial cleaning and discarding, I poured some into my cup.

And heaven was back.

It took a while for me to adjust to water here on the coast, even with a Brita pitcher.  Even then, water straight from the tap tastes "off" to me.

I don't like distilled water. . .tastes flat. I do prefer reverse osmosis water. In the town my parents live in, the tap water is AWFUL. Since I lived there as a teenager I got used to drinking RO water (from the dispenser at the grocery store---39 cents a gallon), and even though the tap water in the town I live in now is better, it still has that tap water taste, so I continue to buy RO water. I sometimes drink tap water with a bit of lemon juice, but yes, good taste-free water is heaven .

You're lucky to have it at home! So much more convenient.

If you are actually talking "Distilled" water and not filtered or reverse osmosis water, then I would encourage you to NOT drink Distilled water.

The lack of salt balance will deplete your body of its natural salt balance and cause you to become dehydrated.  The lack of salt in the Distilled water, causes the salt (and potassium) to move from your cells into your blood stream, causing dehydration.  Where salt (sodium) goes, potassium follows. Too little or too much potassium in the body affects your heart and could ultimately lead to death if it got bad enough.

Natalie_ca said:

 
If you are actually talking "Distilled" water and not filtered or reverse osmosis water, then I would encourage you to NOT drink Distilled water.

The lack of salt balance will deplete your body of its natural salt balance and cause you to become dehydrated.  The lack of salt in the Distilled water, causes the salt (and potassium) to move from your cells into your blood stream, causing dehydration.  Where salt (sodium) goes, potassium follows. Too little or too much potassium in the body affects your heart and could ultimately lead to death if it got bad enough.

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I've heard about those. I"m not entirely convinced either way (i.e I don't know if that is true or untrue). I haven't been able to find any scientific studies that either confirm or deny that. I've seen plenty of articles from "reputable" individuals arguing for and against distilled water. Unfortunately those are usually from parties who have vested interest - companies who sell distillation equipment tell us that distilled water is completely healthy, and others will say it's not. 

For me, I am on the okay camp as long as distilled water isn't my sole source of water. Tap water gives me tummy upset. And I noticed that I was drinking less water when it was tap or filtered. Surely that can't be worse than distillation.

There is an argument that distilled water lacks minerals, but I think that is way outweighed by the fact that tap has way too many chemicals, and to remove them you need top of the range filtering.  I'm absolutely with you on tap water.. I can taste the chlorine.. in fact I can smell it as it comes out of the tap.

They recently fluoridated our water and I'm furious as it's so jolly hard to get the stuff out.  I have a dual filtering process, but can't afford or fit the under sink osmosis systems.

I really baulk at buying water as I really can't be sure where it's from, and the packaging waste is huge.

If you like the distilled (and I really like the taste of it myself) then go for it.  You can get your minerals in other places and you're not drinking chemicals.

After years of having really bad well water, we finally installed a water system in the basement, which includes a reverse osmosis system and water softener. Honestly, it's probably one of the best things we did for ourselves. For years we had been drinking bottled water (Spring water, not distilled. Although I use distilled water in my iron.) 

In our case, the sulfur content in our water was off the charts. Our bathtub had a black ring that no amount of cleaning would remove as did our toilet. When we turned the hot water on in the shower, you smelled eggs. Nasty stuff. Just nasty. The iron content in our water was off the charts, too, and I was trying to clean with Iron-Out. Our "tidy whities" were more grey than white and no amount of bleach would whiten our clothes. The water pretty much killed our dishwasher and we started doing dishes by hand because we couldn't see buying another dishwasher til our water problem was cleared up.

One very hot summer we came home from a week-long vacation to find our pool infested with algae. It took me days to get the water clear again and I ended up having to "flock" the water. That's ugly, because it means that you pour the flocking chemical into the pool, then vacuum to Waste. It uses an incredible amount of water and, since we're on a well, it takes a long time to get that water back into the pool. Anyway, it took me a long time to get the water cleared up. I finally got it all done and was got ready to put more (well) water into the pool. Stuck the garden hose in the pool, turned the water on......and watched my pool water turn a lovely shade of green. I called the pool company and the green color was from the high level of iron in our water. Ran down to the pool place and got the equilavent of Iron-Out for pool water. 

Thanks to the water system, we can finally drink our well water again....and it has a good taste and it is safe. Since our cats are used to bottled water, however, and since I worry about crystals and such, especially for BooBoo, our resident feline male, all of the cats still drink bottled spring water. I won't change them over to the well water at this point.

I have noticed that since we got the new fridge with the water and ice in the door, I am drinking more water. That's a good thing, too.

Fhi09 said:

 
I've heard about those. I"m not entirely convinced either way (i.e I don't know if that is true or untrue)

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I'm a nurse who excelled at anatomy and physiology and chemistry.  There is a great deal of chemistry going on inside your body where electrolytes go. And when I was working on the ward I really ha to know what solution types did what inside the body, because giving the wrong solution could really hurt someone, maybe even kill them.

hypertonic = solution that has low water concentration and high salt concentration than cells

Hypertonic means  that the solution has more things dissolved material in it, making the concentration higher.

hypotonic = solution that has high water concentration and low salt concentration than cells.

Hypotonic means that the solution has less of the dissolved material in it, making the concentration lower.

This is there Distilled water fits in

Isotonic = solution that has the same water and salt concentration as the cells.

This is where tap or bottled or filtered water fits in. Basically undistilled water.

When solutions pass through a membrane ( in the case of people we tare talking about  the blood cell linings and the cell membranes)  they travel from the one that is most concentrated to the one that is less concentrated. So if distilled water and tap water were on either side of the membrane, the tap water would flow through to the distilled water.  This is called osmosis.  In the case of anatomy, think of the cells in your body as "the tap water" for this example. 

The distilled water would be drawing the sodium and potassium from your cells through osmosis,  into the blood and would continue to do so until a perfect balance of electrolytes was reached on either side of that membrane. Which by that time your  cells have less sodium and potassium and magnesium and calcium in them than they need to function with. There is also another consequence. 

Red Blood cells have about t0.9% salt (a mineral) in them.  Distilled water has no minerals so at all.

Through osmosis, blood which is now diluted with Distilled water and lower in salt than it should be starts to draw out the salt from the blood cells   As the water enteres the cell to get the salt and the salt leaves it, the pressure inside the blood cell increases from the extra water, and the cell membrane can burst.

Again, I strongly encourage you to NOT drink distilled water!

Ack!

I'm going to call them to see if I can return the unit in exchange for a reverse osmosis one.

We live on a well which produces very good, but hard water. I have never liked the taste of this however so I currently get reverse osmosis water for drinking but use the well water for cooking. I tried the distilled water for a bit and while there are many forms of this, I found that they are not all created equal. Some of it was good, other stuff tasted really horrible.

Our cats have been drinking well water for some time with no problem. They seem to prefer this to the reverse osmosis. As we don't soften our water however, we need to use the reverse osmosis water in the cat's drinking fountain.

oneandahalfcats said:

 
They seem to prefer this to the reverse osmosis. As we don't soften our water however, we need to use the reverse osmosis water in the cat's drinking fountain.

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My cat likes the distilled one. I think he drinks it for fun. Since he's on raw, and he likes his food mushy like porridge, he gets all the water he needs from his food. I've never seen him touch his water bowl, BUT he would come and drink out of my cup. When I was on filtered water for the few months, he stopped drinking out of my cup.

Sailors in the US Navy drink distilled water while at sea, for months at a time :dk:. Plus a lot of people on no-sodium diets. So I've never believed that drinking it is bad for you. If it was all you put into your body, yeah, that would be bad. But obviously it's going into your stomach to mix with whatever else you've had that day, so whatever trace minerals are missing in the water will certainly be made up somehow.

Willowy said:

Sailors in the US Navy drink distilled water while at sea, for months at a time

. Plus a lot of people on no-sodium diets. So I've never believed that drinking it is bad for you. If it was all you put into your body, yeah, that would be bad. But obviously it's going into your stomach to mix with whatever else you've had that day, so whatever trace minerals are missing in the water will certainly be made up somehow.

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I agree.  Plus all water aquafers (underground) are not created equal.  Well water in the center of this state, Atlanta/mountains, and the coast are all different.  Yet none of these areas are being told to add something to their diet to make up for lack of or to eliminate minerals from their diet.  The additions of filtering systems are put in place for the reasons Winchester mentioned:  the water wasn't dangerous, just difficult to manage with.

Fhi09 said:

I never liked tap water. Coming from a place where drinking unfiltered, unboiled tap water will put you in the hospital, it didn't take much for me to find some other source of drinking water even though tap water is safe to drink here. The first 3 years I lived in an apartment building with a nice water fountain in the lobby, so I would just fill a gallon jug every other day and bring it to my room to drink. It was okay-ish, I didn't really like the taste, but it was better than tap water.

And then I found distilled water. For the next few years (up till early this year) I would buy half a dozen gallon jugs and lug them all the way home every 10 days or so. It was not fun. And it was getting a tad bit costly. It was still cheaper than bottled water.

Earlier this year my roommate introduced me to Brita. And I thought, maybe that's what I should do. Buy one and use it to filter tap water. After all, that's what we do back home and it turned out fine. It tastes horrible though. Still better than unfiltered tap water, but I hated the taste. I put up with it for a few months, but I noticed I was drinking a lot less now.

Last week I got a loan from my parents, and I ordered one of those $400 water distiller. I figured it should pay itself off in about one and a half years. Not too bad actually. 

Yesterday the unit arrived, and after the initial cleaning and discarding, I poured some into my cup.

And heaven was back.

Click to expand...

I have heard things that there are places where tap water would be poor, but I never knew it would be that bad =:-0

Worst water in our country that I have drank was at western coast where water tasted 'dry', there bottled water was close to same.

However bottled water tastes quite bad compared to tap water I get here, we have even competitions of tap water quality in this silly country of ours and where I live has won title of best tap water few years back.

With bottled water I taste that plastic bottle in water and it is terrible taste really, same it is with lemonade, I need glass bottle as plastic bottle has taste of plastic. I do have over sensitive taste, hearing and also bright lights tend to hurt eyes, so for me tap water is the best one.

There is something called rose salt, not sure if direct translation is working, but some put bit of that to water when hot days and need to drink as it gives all the minerals but no bad effects of normal salt.

Natural/herb shops probably carry that. I have not used it myself, I consume enough that bad regular sea salt that extra water will make things only better, also I burn around 4000kcal/day as an average, so I need to drink more than average as well as I need to intake minerals more because of sweating and drinking a lot. Having high blood pressure I should cut on salt, but I can't cut off much until I start to feel really odd when my physical work nears the end in a day.

I live middle of gravel hills and swamps + forests, this area is know to be one of the most important ground water creation areas for whole country, any water that rains gets filtered by gravel, kind of natures own water purifying machine, also water is so plenty that it is considered almost never ending source. In that sense I have been very lucky and for me it is hard to imagine how horrible water some have to suffer from

Willowy said:

I don't like distilled water. . .tastes flat. I do prefer reverse osmosis water.

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I buy it for my aquariums, but wouldn't drink it because of the flat taste. It doesn't make a good cup of tea either! The RO water is good though.

JTbo said:

However bottled water tastes quite bad compared to tap water I get here, we have even competitions of tap water quality in this silly country of ours and where I live has won title of best tap water few years back.

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Where I'm from in New Zealand we used to boast about having the best tap water in the world. I never appreciated it until I moved to England. Nowadays though, Christchurch has bad water because of the big earthquakes.