Water experiment

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This post will go into the water subseries of the off-the-grid type posts.

Curiosity set in, so I set up an experiment to see how long it would take for the stove to evaporate 1 pint of water.  It took 25 minutes.  If the cooking element used 1500 watts, then that used about x kilowatt hours of electricity to boil off the water.  To solve for x, we assume 1/2 hr for time, and 1.5 for kilowatts, then it used 3/4 of a kilowatt hour to boil off 1 pint of water.  To extrapolate that out, it would use 8 times that for a gallon, or 6 kilowatt hours per gallon.

This is not the most efficient means of obtaining distilled water, but it gives an idea of what it would take.

A gallon of gasoline has about 36 kilowatt hours of energy in it, but to convert that to electricity would reduce that to maybe 9 or 10 kilowatt hours electric.  You would use up roughly a gallon of gas to obtain a gallon of distilled water.   But a pretty dumb way of doing it.

A better way would be to use the system I wrote about earlier.  It would use wood.  A pound of wood per pint, or 8 pounds of wood for a gallon.  Wood is cheap to collect off the property and can be used to obtain the distilled water if you wish.  Better yet, it may be best to truck in drinking water, and collect rainwater for washing and other things.

Yet, another way would be to use a reverse osmosis system.