Storing water is almost always easier.

Wouldn't distillation be easier than all that filtering, treating and pumping stuff? It might be slow, but you could let it cook all day and wind up with plenty of purified water, right? Or do some impurities make it through the boiling/condensation process?

Besides which, the still could be used to produce grain alcohol for fuel and barter if SHTF.

Distillation is not without potential issues. Distillation will reliably remove contaminates that vaporize above 100C, like salts and minerals, but materials that vaporize at lower temperatures will come off before the water does. If the water is contaminated by alcohols and lighter petroleum products they will get through.

Generally, there are many finer points I'm skipping over and running a still is something of an art form, the timing of the distillation will go from the most to least volatile. In a commercial process or lab they they can finely separate the individual components by controlling the time and temperature.

There is also the matter of fuel use.

Any ideas on how long you'd have to boil the water before it would be safe to run it through the still, or any points to references I could read? The idea is attractive to me if I could make it work. Where I live there's no shortage of free wood, as long as you're willing to cut and split it yourself.

Mark_M, I am not qualified to answer, but I am guessing the time required to cook off (evaporate) volatile pollutants would very much depend on what those pollutants are, and their concentration.

A qualified chemist would probably give you a set of calculated "cook off" times for different scenarios, but it would be of little use in the real world, where you don't know what or how much that is in the water.

Depending on which resource you read, any boiling water is OK to drink (from a microbe perspective). Others say roiling boil for 10 minutes, some say the boil time changes based on altitude (since the boiling point temp changes)... yada yada yada, you can find support online for any of those positions.

I pretty much think once it boils, it's good. I haven't met a bacteria yet that lives past about 180 or so.

Then again, I'm a filter man myself.

Or at least those who do can't survive or do any harm inside your body...

Getting rid of chemicals in the water is a totally different matter, for which you need some knowledge of chemistry beyond my current expertise.

Um... ditto.

Ray Mears shows an improvised water column filter i.e. PET bottle with the cut top off stuffed with charcoal, sand, peat and sphagnum moss etc. This is reduce a lot of chemical contamination.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TvE5jv4KPo

Boiling the water afterwards takes care of any of the nasties that are left.

Wow, that guy is the man!
Great video.