Re: I have been notified, very politely I might ad
Bird I think your exactly right about the racket part and other things.
As a development engineer in the filtration industry, once I had a request from a company to help "purify" their already bottled water. Your also right there aren't any real FDA standards for bottled water. Anyway, those 5 gal jugs of water that you may perceive to be good for you, well you may be better off drinking out of a faucet in the bathroom. This is because the units they plop them into aren't cleaned that often and harbor algae, bacteria, and other things. Also, the jugs are handled around the neck in open air by everyone. That neck sits in the water when its up-side-down, furthering the soup of contaminates in the chiller.
Cindi
Yes RO is a filter, its also known as a molecular weight cut off filter or tangential flow filter. The filter is sized for the small water molecule, this means molecules of certain molecular weight (water) are allowed to pass through, while others are flushed off the filter surface like organics (pesticides, solvents, etc) and metals (iron, calcium, mercury etc).
Boiling won't do a whole lot for you, except kill anything living, it may also precipitate the calcium and iron, and release some organics, but most of the stuff you don't want will still be there in one form or anther. Water is the universal solvent; it loves to keep everything in solution.
Distilled water should be as clean as RO water. It's all about how clean their filling equipment is and containers are. This is a little off the subject but it’s a testament as to how pure distilled water can be. Over the winter, I had a gallon jug of water sitting on the shelf in the barn. The jug wasn't frozen, it should have been because it was only 5-10° F out. I picked it up and shook it, and it froze instantly. It was pure enough that there wasn't anything to nucleate an ice crystal, so it was super cooled on the self.
