1 gal. CO-Z Distilled Water Maker. Are they trying to say “cozy?” Or does this have to do with carbon monoxide? Colorado? Company?
Description
It’s a one-gallon electric water boiler with a stainless steel inside, plastic outside, and single button for “on.” The removable top has a silicone gasket to keep the water in, and a built-in water distilling system with cooling fan. The power for the top plugs into the bottom unit. They use a computer power supply type connection on the power cable, I think it’s called a C13.
Narrative
I previously mentioned that our water is stinky. Before it became so stinky, it was still pretty bad tasting. The total dissolved solids are somewhere around 1000 ppm.
Shortly after we moved in, we purchased this water distiller because we quickly realized that purchasing 5-gallon water jugs every few days was going to break both the bank and my back.
This has been a lifesaver. Figuratively, but not by much. We could technically drink the well water, but I have a feeling it would be more like in medieval times when the safer and more fun option was mead or something like that. We would have ended up drinking less water and more calories.
It’s a bit of a hassle to use a few KWh of electricity and get 750W of heat dumped into your kitchen for a few hours, but it sure is nice to have pure water. So I’d call it a highly useful inconvenience.
It’s also good to have the ability to make distilled water for other things that require it, e.g., mixing with concentrated automotive coolant.
Functionality
It’s a pretty simple design. It has one button. You fill it up to the line and put on the top and plug it in and position the water container and press “on.” Then you wait a few hours for the water to boil into vapor, go through the condenser, and drip back out into the water container. It comes with a little charcoal pouch to enhance the water flavor before it drips into the water container, but I have since taken that out since we never replaced it.
Quality
It’s pretty solidly built and looks to be of suitable quality. It’s not fancy but it serves its purpose and blends in nicely among our uncoordinated countertop hodgepodge.
Reliability
Due to its relative mechanical and electronic simplicity, it is steadfastly reliable. Or reliably steadfast.
It did develop this mysterious issue – and I do mean mysterious because I don’t have an answer for it yet – where sometimes I fill it up with water and run it and come back and there’s little to no water in the container. Where did it all go? Did it drip off the side of the container? Wouldn’t we see evidence of an entire gallon of water on the countertop or floor? It remains a puzzlement. Because the process is so slow it’s hard to observe what exactly is happening. Most of the time it works fine. I’d say it’s about 80% reliable at this point. For the first year it was closer to 99% reliable.
Durability
So far it has been sufficiently durable. It has never taken a tumble off of the countertop and I keep it well out of the way of the reach of children.
Conclusion
I would absolutely buy this again if we were on, shall we say, zesty well water. Even if we were on perfectly fine water I’d probably still want one, although it would not get nearly as much use. It’s a very useful product.