What I've learned Homesteading - Preservaraffic!

Maybe homesteading isn't for the faint of heart, as it does require some work that those residing primarily in the big cities will likely never experience. My favorite thing? Water purification in the form of solar distillation! The process is very simple, water evaporates, and condenses on a surface as water without the impurities. Really simple stuff. But a lot of people tend to not understand how to perform distillation in this manner, so let's get started.

You will need the following.

1. Your own property or a rental out in the country that'll allow you to modify the yard.
2. Have relatively sunny area you can reserve for the solar distillery
3. Two large plastic tarps
4. Several very long pegs (used to hold one of the tarps in place)
5. One 5 to 10 gallon bucket
6. A shovel
7. Lots of heavy rocks

What happens is fairly simple. You dig a hole roughly 3 to 4 feet deep, enough to give at least 1 foot clearance above the bucket, and wide enough so that the bucket has 1.5 to 2.5 feet surrounding it on all sides. Tarp in the ground is inset in the hole with pegs around it's perimeter in order to secure it into place and prevent the water from seeping into the ground. You can use any water source poured into the area surrounding the bucket, can be from a dirty creek, lake, ocean, and yes even urine though I suggest against that.

Once you have your water supply inside, surrounding the bucket, you'll need to cover it with the other tarp. Use the big rocks to secure the tarp at the top around the edges of the hole. Once secured, you'll use one final rock placed in the middle (over where the bucket is) which will indent the tarp so the water condenses and drips down into the bucket over time.

If you have enough water surrounding your bucket that your bucket is free floating, you can weight it down with some tungsten or an already well cleaned rock.

For increased efficiency, I've spray painted the outside of my tarp (the top one covering the hole) black to absorb additional sunlight to increase evaporation inside the distillation well, though you'll need to leave roughly 50% of the tarp unpainted I've noticed to achieve the best results.