Yuck! No, it is contaminated by whatever is in your air. The entire volume of room air is run through the dehumidifier at least every hour or so. The coils are designed to maximize turbulence, so much of the dust is deposited onto the water, which eventually drains into the bucket. If your air is free of soluble dirt, then filtering the water should give you back pretty clean water. If the area being dehumidified is dirty, then even filtering may not help.
Jon
Is the water from a dehumidifier considered distilled? I assume it would be better for an automotive radiator than tap water?
you might consider an r/o or r/o di instead. they're pretty cheap, or in my area, you can buy water for .25/gallon. how often do you need to top your radiator off?
Well, yes and no.
Bottled, distilled water is generally considered to be high purity and drinkable. The steam and condensate are inside a system and are not exposed to the atmosphere.
A dehumidifier pulls water vapor from the air. Since the system is open, it may also be pulling in mold, yeast, bacteria and dust. The system itself provides a warm and damp environment where mold and bacteria might grow. I'd absolutely not drink that water or equate it's quality with bottled distilled water.
If you have good quality snow-melt tap water, use that. If you have mineral-laden well water, use bottled distilled or purified water.
On the subject of dehumidifiers, why is it that I can only get two or three years out of a dehumidifier before it begins freezing up? Once that starts, no amount of cleaning of the coils and fan blades will fix it. No matter what size, or how much I spend, seems to make any difference. I've tried Sears, Friedrich, and one other brand that I can't remember. Same result for each. I need at least one in my basement all summer.
Most likely some of the refrigerant charge is lost causing the pressure to drop thus causing it to run colder.
Wayne Cook Shamrock, TX
There should be a frost sensor. Maybe they fail after two or three years.
Water from a dehumidifier is probably more contaminated than the effluent from your local sewage plant. On the other hand, my local supermarket carries distilled water in 4 litre jugs for 99 cents. Gerry :-)} London, Canada
Mine is 10+ years old. The manual says to never run it when the
*outside* air temp is below 65 degF. I did (just once) and it iced up in about 20 minutes.- Carl
Funny, mine is at LEAST 15 years old - I've owned it that long, and it was used when I got it. I've put 2 fan motors in it.Dominion Electrohome, made in Kitchener Ontario somewhere before 1989. Runs steady all summer, and off and on through spring and fall.
Well it's "distilled", but it has also had the workshop equivalent of emptying the vacuum cleaner into it. The stuff is full of all manner of airborne crud. If you're that fussy, use defrosted ice from the freezer. That's still suffered a bit but it's far cleaner than the dehumidifier.
Personally I only ever top my radiator up with neat antifreeze. If I'm refilling from scratch, then I just use tapwater (and antifreeze). The issue with radiator water in a car is ensuring a sufficiency of the additives, not an absence of minerals. Only if you're boiling and condensing the stuf do you start to care about that.
I do happen to have an RO unit sitting around somewhere, but have never bothered to use it. I can buy the stuff for pennies, for the small quantity I need.
As other's have said, I doubt it. If you live in a hard water area and have a water softener, add an R/O unit at the kitchen sink. It gives very pure water and makes better tea and coffee than either the well water or the softener output.
Ted
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