boiling water like a survivor??

[teena]

on survivor they boil the ocean water befor they can drink it. what if we boiled tap warter for ro & for sw mix. never heard any one bring that up. can it be done & would it do the trick?

 

[TippyToeX]

Boiling will kill bacteria, it will not remove all the impurities (metals, added chemicals, etc). It's doesn't do the trick like good ol RO or RO/DI can.

 

[teena]

i new it sounded to good to be true. just thought i would ask. thats just what the water man that works for the city told me to try, when i ask him what was in the water here.

 

[TippyToeX]

By law your city has to provide you with a list of all levels in your tap water. You can ask for a copy of that. Mine is online here Linky. Maybe yours has something just like that? It would give you a good idea of what you are dealing with.

 

[teena]

my husband also works for the city just not for water. so ill get him to pick one up for me. but i thought it realy had to be well water for it to be good enough.

 

[jrw]

And its freshwater they boil on the show "Survivor" not "ocean water". Boiling saltwater would just make it more salty.

 

[Javeo]

And drinking saltwater would most likely kill you!

 

[piranhaking]

exactly. It is fresh water. Thats why they have to go to the "wells" to get it instead of just getting it out of the ocean on the beach. Drinking saltwater in large amounts will kill you. For the same reason putting a fresh water fish in salt water or a salt water fish in freshwater will kill them. It is to big a shift in osmotic pressure on our cells. That is also why when people get IV's to rehydrate them it is a saline solution instead of pure water. If it was pure water it would cause our cells to explode because of the difference in osmotic pressure.

 

[sarduci]

When you boil water (just like when it evaporates out of your tank) it's pure water that you boil off.

You could boil tap water, and collect the steam into a container where it would cool and condense. That would be pure water.

Unfortunately, it would be extreamly inefficient to do it. The amount of energy to boil a gallon of water like that would cost far more than just using a ro/di to begin with.

 

[piranhaking]

the process sarduci referred to is distilling. The problem with using comercially distilled water is that some times copper tubing is used in the process and copper is highly toxic to inverts.

 

[Amphiprion]

MMM... I love Giardia, don't you? Off topic, but boiling may not even protect you, either.