What is Distilled Water?
Obviously, the first question to be answered in differentiating purified water from other types of water – like distilled water – is simply – what exactly is distilled water? Well, distilled water is water that is created through the process of distillation. Basically, in the process of distillation, the pure H2O is boiled out of its contaminants. So, many of the contaminants found in water are inorganic minerals, metals etc. Those types of contaminants have very high melting points and even higher boiling points. Wayyyy higher than the boiling point of water at 212 Degrees F. So, as the water (with its contaminants) is boiled, the pure water turns into steam and is captured and cooled and thus becomes distilled water. The junk left behind is all of the contaminants. Now, there’s one small problem with that. There are many volatile organic compounds found in water – and many of them have boiling points below that of pure water. Like pesticides or herbicides and a whole lot of other volatile chemical compounds that have names far to difficult to pronounce much less spell. The point is that when the water gets heated, the volatiles boil off first, then the pure water next. So, it’s very important to have additional purification technologies – besides only distillation – to make sure all the bad stuff is removed.
What is Purified Water?
To meet the legal definition of “purified water”, water impurities must be removed or reduced to extremely low levels. The impurity load of dissolved solids in Purified Water cannot exceed 10 parts per million and water which meets this threshold is inherently of a higher purity than spring water, tap water or filtered water.
Purified water is often confused with filtered water. Many people believe the two terms to be synonymous, but this is not the case. While both types of water are subject to some sort of filtration (as is almost every spring water), purified water is cleansed and purified through additional purification processes, typically reverse osmosis, distillation or deionization. The resultant product, “purified” water, is of significantly higher purity than either spring water, tap water or filtered water.
Purified water may originate from either a spring or surface or groundwater source or directly from the tap. It simply doesn’t matter. Since, the purification process is designed to remove virtually all types of impurities, the quality of the source water has little bearing on the quality of the final product. Nevertheless, our source water meets the EPA minimum drinking water standards before any purification is even done!! Read that again – that’s what we start with. We purify that water extensively and literally remove more than 99.5% of all incoming impurities. A properly designed and functioning purification system will produce extremely high purity water every time, regardless of variations in the source water’s quality. This is not true of spring water, tap water or filtered water. For this reason, purified water is viewed as the objective benchmark against which the purity of other waters is judged.
Conclusion
The most interesting part of is the fact that distilled water is purified water. That’s correct. The process of distillation is one of the technologies used to purify water. Reverse osmosis is another technology that is used to purify water. The big difference is that boiling water consumes a tremendous amount of energy – think about it – all the water has to be boiled until there’s none left (it’s all turned to steam). That is a lot of energy. Conversely, reverse osmosis technology consumes far less energy – commercial systems like ours utilize energy efficient pumps to perform their purification – and the end result is considerably more cost effective.
The old adages about distilled water tasting flat or only being used for steam irons is bunk. The reason distilled water was recommended for irons is simply because the minerals which can clog up the little steam holes have been removed – which keeps your iron nice and clean. There’s nothing wrong with drinking it.
