Water distiller + filter system modeled on cold brew coffee drippers
Goals
- Lab grade effectiveness w/ respect to distillation + filtration
- Aesthetically awesome
A few years ago I was looking for a water filtration system and I ran into a confusing morass of opinions and products. I found it really hard to sort through it all and figure out even the most basic things:
- How clean + safe is my water? I wanted to know specifically about the water that comes out of my kitchen faucet. I was fairly confident that the water that my municipality supplies was safe + clean. I was less confident about what was happening with my water. While I have no reason to believe there's anything wrong with it, since I'm drinking a lot of it I felt like it'd be nice to know that it's safe.
- What is the best water cleaning system? Is distillation better? Is filtration better? Should I be doing both?
- And then, again, how do I know that the water that comes out at the end of any cleaning process is truly clean?
I never found a single resource that presented a high-trust answer to all of these questions. Which, given that water is one of the few basic constituents of human existence, seems fucking crazy.
What are we doing if we can't reach strong consensus on something so basic?
In part this could be seen as a good thing: Most people in the rich world have easy and cheap access to clean drinking water. So much so that answering questions like mine just isn't that important to 98% of rich-world people.
And many of the 2% who do care are inhabiting a world of concerns that don't overlap with my own - people who have deep concern about their water ever touching any plastics, or don't trust municipal water systems at all, or...
Anyway, it got me wanting to find answers to these questions. And to create a water system that looks really cool and meets stands at the far end of the spectrum in terms of delivering safe, clean water. And looks really cool too.
The basic idea is to use lab-grade equipment to design a really amazing water filtration and distillation system - every component is super-safe (no plastic involved at any step of the process). And we'd open a channel that allows people to have their (i) tap water tested and (ii) cleaned water tested.
This system is heavily over-engineered. It's almost certainly not necessary. Still, I have a desire to create it. and I feel like there's some value in creating a product that lives at the furthest edge of the spectrum of that product category - bcs then it opens up the space between what currently exists and what's possible.
Hopefully someone will come along and make more practical, less-expensive versions that are 99.7% as effective and trustworthy.