The Stovebolt Site Forums The Shop Area Engine Shop Distilled water temporary fill

If you live in a place like Dallas, just add a T with two ball valves to the condensate drain from your central air unit. Run one side of the T into your normal draining spot (usually the sewer after passing through a P trap and some people here let it run out on their lawn a distance away from their foundation) and the other side into a 5 gallon bucket. Turn off the normal drain side and divert the other side into the bucket. You'll be surprised how fast you have a bunch of distilled water. And yes...it will boil. And while this type of "distilled" water is useful for all sorts of things, drinking it is a really bad idea.

Isn't water from a dehumidifier simply water taken from the air by the air flowing across cooled fins?

Distilled water is created by collecting water vapor from boiled water, leaving impurities which do not vaporize at 212 degrees in the boiling container.

I suppose that water collected from a dehumidifier is no more contaminated than the air from which it came.

That's why I put one of the words "distilled" in quotation marks. You are correct, but certain scientific processes have been...liberalized for lack of a better word. There are at least a couple of schools of thought but in my mind the most supportable one says "don't drink it."