Boil the seawater. Once it begins to a boil you make a cover that collects the steam. The cover needs to have a hole in it that you put surgical tubing into. The steam comes up and travels through the tube and into another pot. The steam condenses back into water in the second pot and is pure water. I've done it before as a test and it works really well.
Hmmm. Ray Mears did something like that in his recent Australian series, and it didn't work too well. The problem was cooling. He got some water out of it at first, but then the steam heated up the tubing and everything else it touched, and started escaping to the air before it condensed. He ran it for several hours without getting much water. And it used a lot of fuel.
A third pot might help, full of (sea) water that you can run the tube through, to cool it.
Presumably we are aiming to produce between two and four litres of water a day. I imagine even with half-decent cooling, much of the source water would be lost as steam, so you'd have to put more water in than you got out. How long does it take to boil 8 litres of water dry? Is this really practical?
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