It is well known that water supplied to households from some wells and community water supplies often tastes unpleasant or is dangerous to drink because of minerals, chemicals, organisms and organic materials that are dissolved or suspended in the water. Widespread recognition of this information accounts for the variety of domestic water purification devices that have been developed and patented. However, use of water purifiers in homes is not as widespread as one would expect in view of the scope of the problem.
Most water distillers developed for home use have an electric heating element immersed in raw (that is, undistilled) water that is supplied to a boiler-evaporator from the water mains of a dwelling. The mass of water in the boiler is raised to boiling temperature. The resulting steam is conducted through a fin-type condenser coil from which the distillate emerges. In some designs a motor driven fan forces ambient air over the condenser fins for cooling and condensing the steam. In other designs the condenser coil is water cooled by locating it in a chamber into which the raw, comparatively cool water is fed before the raw water is conducted to the boiler, resulting in waste water. Most distillers on the market distill on a batch-by-batch basis rather than continually according to demand, as should be the case.
Among the reasons that installations of previously existing distiller designs have been small in number, although there is such a great need for them, is that the distillers are configured in a way that makes them difficult to install in a concealed and inconspicuous manner near the kitchen sink, where water is usually consumed in the home. Since an existing type of distiller would ordinarily be installed near the kitchen sink, one possibility is to stand the prior art types of distillers on a counter top next to the sink. Yet, most householders object to dedicating to a distiller precious counter top area, which is usually felt to be insufficient in most residences in the first place. Installation inconvenience becomes a factor in deciding not to buy any distiller presently on the market. Besides, most, if not all known prior art distillers can be characterized as lacking any redeeming aesthetic characteristics.
Another place in which a prior art distiller might be installed is in a cabinet near the kitchen sink. The problem with this is that prior art distillers are vertically oriented, that is, they have one component stacked on another so they have a tall profile or an inordinately great height dimension. As a practical matter, this means that they require dedication of a lot of below-the-counter top cabinet space, and it becomes impossible to use any of the space in the cabinet, above, below or on the sides of the distiller.
Besides deficiencies in aesthetic characteristics and excessive space utilization, prior art distillers are difficult to maintain in good operating condition, particularly, because of the difficulty of cleaning sediment and scale from the internal parts of the distiller. Most prior distillers require a substantial amount of disassembly and handling or working on multiple parts to fully clean the boiler of scale. This may be an aggravating factor that the user realizes only when the distiller fails to produce distilled water up to rated capacity. Facilitating easy and simple descaling and cleaning are problems that have frequently been attacked but have not been completely solved in prior distiller designs.