Distilled water for cheap/free

I use regular tap water for my grows; the quality here is excellent (55-65ppm) simply removing the chloramine before use. But for other stuff, I make my own distilled water, it's cheap and easy. Here's how...

You will need:

One 25L Bucket.
One 10L Bucket.
A powerful aquarium heater. (maybe 100W, capable of going up to 50+C)
Something to sit the 10L bucket on (like a 10L bucket with the top 2/3rds cut off)

How to:

You put water in the 10L bucket, and drop in the heater. Sit it inside the big bucket, on top of the half-bucket (so it's raised off the floor), close the big bucket (you will need to drill a hole in the lid to get the cable from the heater out.). Switch on.

Water vapourizes from the small bucket, collects on the sides, and drips, distilled, into the big bucket. In a few days, quite a lot of it. It's handy for all sorts of things, as you may know.

0ppm water is perfectly attainable.

I got the idea from AmazingStill.com where you can get loads more details, download PDFs and all sorts. Yeah, okay, it's designed for making hooch, but works great for water, too!

NOTE: If your water has Chlorine/Chloramine added to it, you will need to remove that first, as distillation does not remove Chlorine, and not getting your distilled water down to 0ppm will annoy.

Chlorine can dissipate overnight, but Chloramine can take weeks. 0.25g of Sodium Metabisulphite will treat 75L of water, completely removing all traces of both. Obviously this is a tiny amount, but if you add more, it's okay, the extra sulphur will, of course, be removed during distillation!

-mu