Last night as I slipped off to sleep, it occurred to me... I didn't discuss desalination at all.
It's kind of mind blowing when you consider the number of people who've never seen an ocean, yet only 1% of the earth's water is liquid freshwater. 97% is salt water and we can't drink it without removing that salt. To be quite honest I've lived on the West Coast pretty much all of my life. I spent most of the first 20 years just five minutes off the beach. That said, desalination is not something I would ever consider for my survival situation, unless I was on a boat stuck out at sea, not long-term anyway.
Personal filters life Lifestraw, Survivor Filter, and Sawyer do not remove salt. The big boys, Berkey and such, do not remove salt.
In my previous article, we discussed a few different ways to distill water. Solar distillation will remove salt, as well the various types of fire-heated (or propane, or whatever) distillation methods. The main issue with these is that they take time, so they aren't super convenient.
You can distill water using reverse osmosis, but I honestly, only know how to do this with raisins and have no clue how you would do this on a large scale.
There are units you can buy, mostly marketed for boats I think, but these have motors and require electricity and just don't seem incredibly feasible for the majority of the population.
If you're in a coastal region, it would be wise to really understand what brackish water is and how to avoid getting sick. Brackish waters are estuaries, swamps, rivers, etc, where fresh water meets saltwater. While the water may not taste overly salty, it can still contain too much salt for your body to handle. This questionable region can actually vary quite considerably in distance, there is no golden rule of 300 feet or a mile. It's always best to look for a small running stream that runs into a larger body that meets the ocean, especially if you can see that it comes from a raised elevation. My part of the world, Oregon, it's easy to find this. I encourage you to study your region and figure out how to best read your local ecosystems.
While knowing how to distill saltwater is an incredibly useful tool to have in your back-pocket, it's certainly not what I want to use as my water source plan A, B, or C.
It's kind of mind blowing when you consider the number of people who've never seen an ocean, yet only 1% of the earth's water is liquid freshwater. 97% is salt water and we can't drink it without removing that salt. To be quite honest I've lived on the West Coast pretty much all of my life. I spent most of the first 20 years just five minutes off the beach. That said, desalination is not something I would ever consider for my survival situation, unless I was on a boat stuck out at sea, not long-term anyway.
Personal filters life Lifestraw, Survivor Filter, and Sawyer do not remove salt. The big boys, Berkey and such, do not remove salt.
In my previous article, we discussed a few different ways to distill water. Solar distillation will remove salt, as well the various types of fire-heated (or propane, or whatever) distillation methods. The main issue with these is that they take time, so they aren't super convenient.
You can distill water using reverse osmosis, but I honestly, only know how to do this with raisins and have no clue how you would do this on a large scale.
There are units you can buy, mostly marketed for boats I think, but these have motors and require electricity and just don't seem incredibly feasible for the majority of the population.
If you're in a coastal region, it would be wise to really understand what brackish water is and how to avoid getting sick. Brackish waters are estuaries, swamps, rivers, etc, where fresh water meets saltwater. While the water may not taste overly salty, it can still contain too much salt for your body to handle. This questionable region can actually vary quite considerably in distance, there is no golden rule of 300 feet or a mile. It's always best to look for a small running stream that runs into a larger body that meets the ocean, especially if you can see that it comes from a raised elevation. My part of the world, Oregon, it's easy to find this. I encourage you to study your region and figure out how to best read your local ecosystems.
While knowing how to distill saltwater is an incredibly useful tool to have in your back-pocket, it's certainly not what I want to use as my water source plan A, B, or C.