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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!

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!

It’s long-debated how one can build a solar-powered water distiller that turns salt water into fresh. Currently, many of the world’s countries are facing a water crisis. And oceans holding 96.5% of the Earth’s water, can be a great source of drinking water in the forthcoming water crisis.

While it is true that 71% of the earth’s surface is covered with water, it is also true that 96.5% of which is conveyed in the oceans. And of course, this water is not that suitable for drinking being salt water.

So is there a solution to turn the salt water into fresh drinking water? Apparently, the process is known as Desalination and Israel has just built one of the world’s biggest Reverse Osmosis plant that turns salt water into fresh water.

Prominent Methods to Turn  Salt Water into Fresh

The process of Desalination is pretty simple as all you need to do it separate out water and salt from each other. In fact, you can build a home solar water distiller that makes fresh water from saltwater.

The most prominent methods for Desalination is either heating the water the same as in hydrological cycle, or Reverse Osmosis. The former one makes use of either a heating source or sun to bring water to boil and in the process, the water vapour gets generated which is nothing but fresh water.

The process of reverse osmosis is a little complicated. It comprises multiple stages from which the salt water passes and the salt is eliminated from the water. So unlike heating the water where water itself gets excluded, here, the salt is extracted from water.

Can Fresh Water be Generated from Ocean on a Large Scale?

Generating fresh water is pretty simple, right? All you need to do is heat the water, the salt is set apart, and boom, done! Right?

Absolutely not! Generating fresh water using solar water distiller or conventional water distiller at a small scale is easy. However, when you try doing the same on a large scale, it is economically not feasible. To produce a certain amount of water, the required amount of energy is enormous and practically stupid!

Hence, building a plant that mimics such process is foolish. However, one can always make use of reverse osmosis to do it on a large scale just like Israel did. Even this process comes with certain drawbacks but in a nutshell, can possibly be performed.

How does Solar Powered Water Distiller Work?

Solar Powered Water Distiller, just like the name suggest, makes use of solar energy to turn salt water into fresh drinkable water.

First, a tank-like structure is set up with glass or plastic at the top that helps to increase the intensity of sun rays if set at certain degrees that focus on a particular position. Also, the darkened bottom helps in increasing the temperature. Once the water reaches its boiling temperature it starts to evaporate and getting through the condensation process turns into droplets while reaching the glass. And at the end, sliding towards the end gets stored in a storage place.

To turn this same concept into a large-scale one is almost impossible as heating a lot of water altogether and finding something that helps with the condensation process is greatly challenging.

The following illustration also suggests how one can build a rainwater catcher using the same arrangement. Rain Water is one of the most convenient ways people can conceive fresh water. However, due to lack of awareness, a large amount of this water gets wasted down the drainage. But with such arrangement, one can utilize such free resource of fresh water as well.

Coming back to the solar water distiller, this arrangement can be made more efficient by building it from solid iron sheets or similar metallic frame as metal easily conducts heat.

The EndNote

So in a nutshell, it is possible to turn salt water into fresh using a solar-powered water distiller. However, it is only feasible at a smaller scale and practically impossible on a large scale.

So can you save your life by building a solar-powered distiller if ever stranded on an island? Absolutely, yes! But can you generate enough for a population? Well, in the current scenario, no.