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Distilled Water

Earlier today the subject of distilled water came up. I thought to myself 'ok, I have a bottle of distilled water in the kitchen by the kettle, etc'. Then it occured to me that bottled water is not distilled water.

I did a B&B search for the term 'distilled water' and found that many people are using the terms distilled water and bottled water interchangeably, especially when discussing water hardness. They are not the same.

Distilled water has had all of its impurities removed, including mineral salts, ionic compounds and micro organisms. This is achieved by heating water past its boiling point, collecting the vapour and condesing it back back into liquid.

Purified water is not intended for human consumption because the lack of minerals make it bad tasting and nutritionally unbeneficial. Continually drinking it would remove the existing minerals and electrolytes from the body.

Spring water and mineral water are the two most commonly bottled forms of drinking water because they contain the natural mineral content that best hydrates the body. They are filtered, but not distilled.

More can be found here: Is Bottled Water Distilled? | ReAgent Chemicals Ltd - https://www.chemicals.co.uk/blog/is-bottled-water-distilled

Wes
 
This is interesting but highly controversial.

Which "tastes better," hard water or soft water, is subjective and not objective.

Soft water has few or no minerals. Are we to conclude that those who live in natural soft water areas are at a health risk? I have trouble with that assumption. Most of our nutrients, including minerals, come from food, not from water.

Lets see what others have to say. I think we all would agree, though, that soft water of whatever stripe is a joy to shave with!

Brother TinyT, thanks for introducing an interesting subject.
 
I use distilled water for honing, soft for shaving.
Bottled water is certainly not distilled water. Can't see why anyone would think so.
 
You are good to point this out. I've not tried bottled water (drinking water) for making lather but have tried distilled and it works a treat.

I can say that drinking distilled water doesn't necessarily have adverse effects though. When I was in the third grade back in the 70's my parents put me on a special diet. It required drinking 3 oz (for my weight and age) of distilled water every waking hour. I did this for a whole school year with no adverse effects.

Turns out the doctor who prescribed it got his license to practice taken away for questionable practices (this is what I remember I was told as a third grader but who knows what the real story is). Thus my parents discontinued the practice. I remember no adverse effects from the discontinuation either. Maybe my age and station in life was a mitigating factor but I'll never know.

In the end the practice seemingly didn't do anything for me or against me.

Chris
 

Chandu

I Waxed The Badger.
Distilled water is perfectly fine to drink. It won't leach our minerals from our bodies and kill us. I actually prefer the taste or lack thereof of distilled water over most other water.
 
Distilled water is perfectly fine to drink. It won't leach our minerals from our bodies and kill us. I actually prefer the taste or lack thereof of distilled water over most other water.

We used to use it to make espresso... and the distilled water does seem to make the coffee's flavor come through better as a side benefit (of course, hard water can damage an espresso maker in time, requiring descaling... it was easier just to buy bottled distilled water)
 

The Count of Merkur Cristo

B&B's Emperor of Emojis
Wes:
The Mrs. and I after many years of travel, hearing that sage advice hammered into us..."Don't drink the water", and having since grown from drinking tap water as a child, teenager and young man (and since joined the Service in the 80's), we strated drinking (but I shave w/ tap water), distilled water over 30yrs ago. :thumbsup:

Why
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Because...I guess it's the 'cleanest' type of water to drink (keeping in mind the deployments and countries we visited).
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"Water is the driving force of all nature". Leonardo da Vinci
 
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Rain water may have gone through the vapor to condensate process, it is far from distilled. I use distilled in my humidifier. I drink and shave with tap water.
 

Chandu

I Waxed The Badger.
Remember too, acid rain. Rain water picks up all manner of things in the air it is formed in and falls through.
 
Yes, I suppose there's all sorts of concerns about potential problems, real or imagined, about any source of water. Even a distillation plant may have unsanitary conditions, and so forth.

All sources of water have their theoretical advantages and theoretical disadvantages. How many deaths are there annually among the billions of persons on the planet in developed countries, who all drink daily water, have been clearly attributed to drinking water, be it from natural, manufactured, or distilled sources? Answer: Precious few!
 
Distilled water is not pure rain water. Soft water is not distilled water. Distilled water does not occur naturally. Most bottled drinking waters contain between 20 and 58 mg of calcium. In the UK, soft water is water with less than 50 percent calcium. In the US, soft water is water with less than 60 percent calcium. Soft water still contains calcium, magnesium and other mineral deposits. Just not as much as hard water. Distilled water is necessary for many industrial applications. You can drink it if you wish. It probably won't kill you. I still wouldn't recommend it, unless you only have access to salt water or water that is otherwise contaminated.

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I've mostly sought out distilled water for battery maintenance. The issue was always the risk of contaminates fouling the solution. Hard water usual contains calcium carbonates; calcium carbonates can react to battery acid and maybe precipitate out on the plates. Not good. At one time it was the suggested for use in contact solution, but don't know if that's true. If I wanted to mix something and not have an odd effect, like, maybe DIY aftershave, I'd look for distilled water.

The last time was for packing a wound. Wanted to make danged sure the water was sterile, and looked for a jug. Couldn't find it, but did find a jug of "Spring Water" that turned out to have come from a well tapped into the same aquifer we used for the farm deep well. That looked like it was purified and filtered enough, so we ended up using that. That was no guarantee that it was sterile, though. We would have probably had to find a medical supply house for that.

Potable water is usually a great unknown because you never precisely know what's in it. What are the minerals and in what concentrations? Unless you find somewhere that will test it, you don't really know. That holds for bottled water as well. Some labels say "Minerals for taste." What minerals? How much? Don't know. Sometimes it'll tell you it's ozonated or something like that, but there's still a good bit of unknowns. And yet, other than cases of outright contamination, either chemical or pathological, you seldom hear of someone dying from drinking water.

I don't really care. Like most of us, I've drank what came out of the tap with no worries at all. I've drank actual spring water from a spring, and distilled water once, and hard water and soft water and have lived to tell about it. It's true that distilled water has no minerals, but we don't know what's in the other water, either. You could deplete electrolytes and such by drinking only distilled water if you didn't get the necessary minerals elsewhere, but that holds true of anything we consume. Hard water has minerals, but look at the occurrence of kidney stones and water hardness. Soft water has stuff in it, too, and some of it might be troubling or maybe not.

The upshot is, we don't usually know what is and what isn't in the water we drink. I'm sure we have to compensate in our diet for a lot of extras and omissions in our water, and never give it any thought. If you look on the labels, a lot of bottled water will say "minerals added for taste." Nothing about adding it for health, unless you look into those "smart" waters, or whatever they're called.

As always, if anyone has any health concerns, the only reliable source of information is your doctor. Ask him or her about the water you drink.
 
Just glad that we have water at the turn of a tap, unlike vast numbers in Africa or Asia. I'm all for enjoying shaving, but when it gets to detailed discussion about water......GET A LIFE GUYS!!
 

musicman1951

three-tu-tu, three-tu-tu
I use distilled water (required) in my CPAP, but I've never tried drinking it. It's certainly cheap enough - way cheaper than bottled water (which is, in some cases, just tap water - and often has bits of plastic floating within).
 
Interesting discussion!

The practical point for shaving is that some folks with hard tap water have difficulty making a good lather. Switching to distilled water is often a good solution. Bottled water may prove better than their tap water for lathering, but it is not the same as distilled.

From a health standpoint, tap water is the US and most developed countries often has fewer pathogens and less plastic particles than bottled water. Taste is totally subjective as pointed out by many above.
 
In the real word of the common man, distilled water is H2O period. In the real world of shaving, rainwater is H20 period.

If we're talking about a science experiment the above may be only 97% true. If we're talking about shaving the above is 100% true.

I belong to the "97% is close enough" club.
 
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