Ever imagined being stranded on an island for days? Would you be able to survive? How would you get yourself pure drinking water when all you could see would be salt water of the ocean(No, drinking your own pee is not a solution, Peter!).
If you think that’s not going to happen anytime soon, think about that Hawaii vacation you’ve been planning for the past few months! (well, I know Hawaii isn’t deserted; however, you can never deny the possibility of a zombie apocalypse, duh) The point is, anything can happen. So be prepared!
Bare with me and learn this life-saving trick of building a salt water distiller.
How to Build a Salt Water Distiller
In order to make drinking water out of salt water, the only thing you need to do is separate out water and salt from each other. The question is how you are going to do it! Here is a clue, you can either let the water stay and somehow remove the salt or do the opposite.
Things You’ll Need
- Two Glass Bottles
- Two shallow utensils (Preferably larger than the bottles)
- A small piece of cloth or rubber
- A heat source
- Sand
Step-1: Set up the Utensils
First of all, take whatever utensils you have and set them on a platform. Here, we will be using metal trays for convenience. However, you can make use of any metal utensil you can find. Another thing you may have noticed is that we have cut side ends of both the tray just so that the bottlenecks can easily peek out.
Make sure to level the utensils at the same height. Here, the tray which is going to be at the receiving end can be set up on anything, perhaps, a stone too. However, the tray which will be containing salt water bottle should be set on a fire or stove.
Step-2: Pour Some Sand
Now that you have set the bottles on a safe platform, you need to pour some sand inside those trays. Do not fully fill the trays with sand. Instead, keep them a little empty near the top edges. Sand is a great heat conductor. It will help to uniformly heat up the salt water bottle and the other one will play the role of cooling the vapour down.
Step-3: Seal the Bottle Mouths
Once you have set up the trays with sand in it, all you need to do is put the bottles inside those. Fill one of the bottles with salt water, keep the water level just a little less than half of the bottle. Put this bottle inside the utensil that you set on the fire. Take another bottle and lie it horizontally in the other tray.
Now, you need to put both the bottle mouths together and seal them away. For this, you can simply use a piece of cloth and wrap it up tightly around the mouth of both the bottles. Make sure not to keep the cloth too long or it may catch fire. And if you happen to have a piece of a rubber tube around you, that will be even better to seal the bottles.
Step-4: Wet the Receiving End
As you have set up the bottles in the trays filled with water. The next step will be preparing the receiving end.
Understand that once you heat up the salt water bottle, it will turn into vapour at some point and will travel in the empty space in both the bottles.
In order to capture this purified water vapour at the receiving end, it needs to be cold enough to transform the vapour into liquid water again. This phenomenon is known as condensation. For the process of condensation, we will be wetting the sand at the receiving end with some cold water.
Step-5: Turn up the Heat!
Your water distiller machine is ready! Now, all you’ve got to do is light up the fire or turn up the stove! Within a few minutes, as the salt water will reach its boiling point, the process of water distillation will begin!
A Few Tips
The EndNote
And fella, this is how you survive being stranded on an island!
We hope that this technique will help you if you ever get alienated on an uninhabited island! Do share your experience with us. We’d love to hear from you.
Cheers!