How to purify urine with to water bottles and sun light.

Why do people keep saying to filter or boil this water, provided you didn't contaminate the rig setting it up or emptying it the water collected form it is "distilled" meaning the vaporized water that moved into the upper bottle was pure hydrogen and oxygen, as clean as it gets. The exception to this will be if your bottle was dirty, or if some little critter crawls from the urine side to the water side, which as a risk I doubt you could even calculate. With this method you could distill almost anything that CONTAINS water, and drink it right out of bottle #2. Nice post Edwood:thumbup:
 
Correct--and that's what's great about this method. You can create pure water pretty readily, so long as you have 60% clear skies for a few hours. Other SODIS methods, however, require you start with filtered water.

Interesting point you raise, too: if you can boil water, you don't need this method. This method works for the 99.999% of the time you don't happen to have a large pot and cooking fire going in the wild. God knows it isn't hard to find water bottles everywhere.

I would, by the way, recommend the use of PET plastic bottles, exactly as Edwood has shown in the photos.
 
A 2 ltr bottle works better if you can find them as they have a steeper "neck" and makes it easier to not contaminate the "clean" bottle . Ive seen this demo'd in Tx and they buried/covered the "clean" bottle in damp sand. Works quicker than you would think. You need to be very careful taking them apart. The demo that I saw used 2 band-aids from a 1st aid kit to seal them up.--KV
 
Great post with very clear pics. Learn something new everyday!
I've got plenty of sun here in Singapore :)
 
Call_to_Arms said:
Why do people keep saying to filter or boil this water, provided you didn't contaminate the rig setting it up or emptying it the water collected form it is "distilled" meaning the vaporized water that moved into the upper bottle was pure hydrogen and oxygen, as clean as it gets. The exception to this will be if your bottle was dirty, or if some little critter crawls from the urine side to the water side, which as a risk I doubt you could even calculate. With this method you could distill almost anything that CONTAINS water, and drink it right out of bottle #2. Nice post Edwood:thumbup:
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Distilled water tastes yuck. If you can store it in a granite container, however, it'll mineralise quite quickly.
 
Watchful said:
Interesting point you raise, too: if you can boil water, you don't need this method.
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Sure you do...boiling won't remove various nasty, toxic chemicals present due to industrial and agricultural runoff.

If I had the option, I'd do both.
Double sure and not sick as all hell=good.:)
 
Stabby,

If you can boil water and have plastic bottles, you can distill it all in one go.

...Is what I meant.
 
Watchful said:
Correct--and that's what's great about this method. You can create pure water pretty readily, so long as you have 60% clear skies for a few hours. Other SODIS methods, however, require you start with filtered water.

Interesting point you raise, too: if you can boil water, you don't need this method. This method works for the 99.999% of the time you don't happen to have a large pot and cooking fire going in the wild. God knows it isn't hard to find water bottles everywhere.

I would, by the way, recommend the use of PET plastic bottles, exactly as Edwood has shown in the photos.
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I'm going to tell you this one more time. this IS NOT solar disinfection (SODIS). It's solar distillation, which is something else entirely.

Watchful said:
Stabby,

If you can boil water and have plastic bottles, you can distill it all in one go.

...Is what I meant.
Click to expand...

How do you distill any appreciable amount of water with a large pot and a PET bottle?
 
Thats a neat little solar still, thanks for sharing it with us. I've seen and made a few but never one that just uses 2 bottles. Way cool!
 
I wish I could have seen this before my weekend shark fishing on the beach. I could have easily tried it out just re-using water bottles and testing it on the salt water :D

It would be great in a tight spot, but if you have the time and materials you can get "clean" water from the bottles and boil afterwards just in case.

I like it :thumbup:
 
scouter27 said:
I'm going to tell you this one more time. this IS NOT solar disinfection (SODIS). It's solar distillation, which is something else entirely.
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You are welcome to point out where I said it was SODIS. I am comparing the method against SODIS and pointinng out why this method is far superior to SODIS, because it accomplishes more for the same amount of work.


scouter27 said:
How do you distill any appreciable amount of water with a large pot and a PET bottle?
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You put a weighted bottle at the bottom of a pot. Fill the pot as high as you can with water without displacing the bottle, and then begin boiling the water. Invert the pot cover and position the handle over the center of the PET bottle (you can cut the bottle if it is too high, or the neck not wide enough), and let condensed water distill itself into the bottle. As long as you don't let the bottom of the bottle melt in direct contact with the pot, you'll accumulate quite a bit of water.
 
Watchful said:
You put a weighted bottle at the bottom of a pot. Fill the pot as high as you can with water without displacing the bottle, and then begin boiling the water. Invert the pot cover and position the handle over the center of the PET bottle (you can cut the bottle if it is too high, or the neck not wide enough), and let condensed water distill itself into the bottle. As long as you don't let the bottom of the bottle melt in direct contact with the pot, you'll accumulate quite a bit of water.
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I've used this method but with two steel containers so I know it works.
 
You can get those tornado tubes they sell at school science supply places to join them. Should work quite well. Thanks for the post, this is a very interesting method that would not require a massive amount of effort.
 
Watchful said:
You are welcome to point out where I said it was SODIS. I am comparing the method against SODIS and pointinng out why this method is far superior to SODIS, because it accomplishes more for the same amount of work.
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Well to be honest, the SODIS method is probably slower and less potent, but it will produce much more water. Let's just say it's better to know both. Output is important, some methods work "in theory" but are useless in practice as they require too much effort for too little result.
Regarding this particular method, we can probably trust Edwood on it working ok in the desert, but in less hot/sunny area, I'm not sure would be as effective.
Regarding distillation method, while it is a very potent method (is able to remove anything biological and many chemicals, mineral, including salt) it isn't completly fool proof as some chemicals are volatile too, and would evaporate and recondensate with water. That said, again, it's potent.
 
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