b0ogger wrote:
I don't see why you couldn't put used salt water through a distiller
and reclaim almost all of it.

Why would you want to do this? What are the benefits?

Well, you see when you distill water you separate the pure water from
all other dissolved minerals. You can take salt water and distill it
and what you get is pure water and a pile of salt and other minerals.
You do this by boiling the water off and then condensing it somewhere
else. When you boil the water the vapor that is formed only contains
H2O, everything else is left behind.

The question is whether it is worth the effort you'd put into
running a gallon at a time through the thing plus the cost of
electricity to run the thing.

Doubtful.

I agree that in most situations the cost of electricity to run such an
apparatus is going to be much greater than the cost of tap water + RO
filtration. However, the original poster had said they were in a
situation were there were restrictions on water consumption, thus it
might be worth while to use electricity, which might be in greater
supply, to reclaim the water.

You'd probably want to clean the salt
and minerals left behind out between every gallon, too.

How would you 'clean' the salt and minerals?

Sorry, what I should have said was, "You'd probably want to remove the
salt and minerals left behind in the evaporation chamber between uses."
If you'll recall from mixing salt water for use in a marine
environment it takes about one half cup of salt mix per US gallon of
pure water to make salt water, so after you've distilled that water
you'll have about half a cup of salt left over that you'd probably want
to clean out before putting the next gallon of salt water into the
chamber.


I'm curious now and maybe I'll go ahead and take some of the water from
my next change and put it through the distiller and see what I get.

What is the advantage of distilling your water from a water change versus
water from the tap? You will NOT be able to separate the crap from your
salt and minerals for reuse.

Again, the goal here is to conserve water. I am not sure there was
also any incentive to reuse the salt.

Lastly, why are you doing water changes to begin with? I don't do water
changes and my fish, inverts and live rock are doing fine.

That's very good for you, congratulations. However, I believe the this
subject is probably beyond the scope of this discussion.

Cheers,
Blake.