Freeze Distillation of High Mineral Well Water or Sea Water?

I guess this post sort of fits here ...

The problem: Our well water has a lot of dissolved minerals and salts. It's adequate for domestic use, but it slowly kills my wife's house plants. I need better quality water to go into my indoor fish pond and from there into the plant watering can.

In normal years, I would simply melt snow/ice while making char. This winter, there is no snow and it is unsafe (and illegal) to have open burns. Ugh. I can drive to town for municipal water and then treat it for the chlorine/chloramines, but that goes against the grain.

My solution: I'm planning to mimic what happens in the Arctic Ocean, where the ice that forms on salt water has almost no salt content. I think it's technically called "fractional freezing." I'll fill shallow containers with well water, periodically scoop off the ice that forms, and make it liquid over a tiny hunter stove with a triple layer spark screen.

I think it might work. Somehow I need to test the results -- conductivity change in the brine? Or a pH test? Not sure.

But then again -- is this nuts? What do you folks think?

I do this with maple...it should work, as long as the whole thing doesn't freeze solid. You can freeze it quite a way actually, like half.

Okay, this is super cool (haha). "The growth rate of an ice crystal affects its purity." Apparently seeding the brine with ice crystals causes an enormous increase in the purity of the ice produced. Wow.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41545-022-00158-1

Douglas, why not just replace water with beer, it should work!
Seriously, do you have total fire bans in winter at your place?
Can you distill water by using a tank filled with water under a tilted glass panel and use the sun to evaporate the water so it
condenses on the glass and runs to a storage system.
Some large ones are available?

I like the plan. It’s sort of the opposite of making applejack.

John C Daley wrote:Douglas, why not just replace water with beer, it should work!
Seriously, do you have total fire bans in winter at your place?
Can you distill water by using a tank filled with water under a tilted glass panel and use the sun to evaporate the water so it
condenses on the glass and runs to a storage system.
Some large ones are available?

Haha, I would never say a word against beer. Not great for house plants though -- they become delinquents.

Thankfully we had some snow in January, so I can start burning (and melting snow for house plants). But underneath the snow, the soil is dry; we're in a deep drought.

The fractional distillation concept still holds my interest. It turns winter from a liability into an asset if managed correctly. I can afford to draw a slow but steady amount of well water and place the distilled ice around trees, perennials, and on my gardens. They'll need the moisture come spring, which is 2-3 months away.

Why didn't I ever think to freeze distill water for aquatics and irrigation?

Very smart.

Now for low tech, homestead scale, I think, take a mineral  tub, fill with well water in the cold, flip over and empty the tub of ice on a CLEAN surface, scrape any salty ice off the bottom, place in another clean tub, thaw and repeat as needed.

Perhaps once or twice would be enough to remove the majority of issues in well water to begin with.

Then,  how to store for later?

Melt and pour into an IBC?  Risk of freeze thaws cracking your expensive tote, but it's ready when spring comes

Drain into an underground cistern? install expense of course but if testing proves significant water quality improvement with little embodied labor, perhaps worth it?

My purposes, similarly would be to top off aquatic and aquaponics systems, fish do fine in the well water but evaporation causes plant killing salt build up. Also storage above the swamp cooler to give that some clean water to run on.... hmmm.

I can understand your frustration and I fully understand about killing house plants.

Our water is alkaline so even though we made garden beds from lots of different organic materials,  every time I watered the garden I add that alkalinity back in.  A test with vinegar proved my point with the ground bubbling from the vinegar.

I like your idea.  Do you have space to freeze large quantities of water to test your idea?

This is a problem at my house too. Highly mineraLized well water slowly kills my plants. For the garden I just try to water half with well water and half with stored rain water I collect over the rainy season. Theoretically this will help "flush" some of the junk down farther into the ground. It does seem like things are happier the more rain water I use. I need more storage...

So about freezing and making the opposite of applejack. Why not stack functions? Brew 10,000 gallons of cider and freeze the water out of that!

Devon Olsen wrote:Now for low tech, homestead scale, I think, take a mineral  tub, fill with well water in the cold, flip over and empty the tub of ice on a CLEAN surface, scrape any salty ice off the bottom, place in another clean tub, thaw and repeat as needed.

Perhaps once or twice would be enough to remove the majority of issues in well water to begin with.

Then,  how to store for later?

Interesting! I think if it freezes solid, it would be mighty tough to scrape off the salty layer unless you shave it off with a drawknife, which is a ton of work. Ice always seems to fracture in exactly the wrong place and in the wrong direction.

It might be better to freeze halfway and yoink out the "distilled" chunk of ice. Embedding a loop of rope before freezing would provide a nice handle.

As for storage, I plan to move it as ice chunks and let the sun deal with it in spring. (Unless I need some for house plants.)  If it's put in a container as frozen chunks, it won't expand and cause damage.

Dan Fish wrote:So about freezing and making the opposite of applejack. Why not stack functions? Brew 10,000 gallons of cider and freeze the water out of that!

I like the way you think sir!

A caution though -- when I stored rainwater in discarded oak barrels from a distillery, the plants looked like they had severe hangovers. I had to soak and discard water for a season to rid the barrels of any traces of the creature.