: Why is it advised to not drink distilled water? And why is distilled water used in machinery like in inverters?
In: Biology
Distilled water is just pure water that contains no dissolved minerals… It is inadvisable because water provides us with an important amount of minerals our body needs. Packaged water is even called mineral water.
For inverters, the chemical reaction in there converts water to oxygen and hydrogen, and if there are dissolved minerals, they’ll we left behind or may even take part in the reaction, so to prevent that, distilled water is used.
Distilled water is deprived of all forms of nutrition.
Believe it or not, your body actually needs the trace minerals that are typically found in water – for all number of things.
Distilled water, though, acts in a negative way. It leeches nutrients from the body and even fails to aid in digestion. In this way, distilled water is something of a poison, and will in no way appropriately hydrate you.
Sadly I don’t know the technical reasons for its usage in such machinery however.
It’s the purest water around, void of any contaminates, and harmless. Some machines manufacturers recommend distilled water to keep sediments and minerals found in tap water from building up on their inner workings.
It’s unwise to drink it long term because there are naturally occurring minerals in non-distilled water that your body needs. If you continue to drink distilled water you’ll succomb to vitamin deficiencies.
As for the transformers, I haven’t heard of this practice but distilled water doesn’t conduct electricity, so that would be why.
Distilled water is not that bad for you, but it is technically worse (effects are small but they’re there). Reasons range from having low osmolarity (zero vs 20-30, which is practically nothing for cells since body osmolarity is around 280-300 mOsm), no trace minerals and micronutrients (deficiency of those and the fact they will migrate out of your body as you urinate the same osmolarity but ingest zero, but this is also meh.. Kinda negligible as you get a lot of this from food although it’s been argued its bad for when you’re actually drinking because it sucks out some minerals from the teeth), and also pH (distilled water has a pH of 7, drinking water is usually slight alkaline but some is acidic so… But anyway, it affects acid-base balance in the body which is negligible but there..). There are also other reasons, I suppose the effects are small but you might notice some detrimental effects after a lifetime of drinking distilled water.
Here’s a nice ref https://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/dwq/nutrientschap12.pdf
Distilled water (actually deionized water) is used in high power electrical equipment such as variable speed drives and inverters as a cooling medium. It’s non-conductive and non-corrosive.
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