I have a question for those who use steam/vapour breathing to ease off their symptoms. Do you use distilled water, reagular tap water, or a saline solution? My specialist seemed puzzled when I asked her this, and said that, in principle, a saline solution is optimal. I currently use distilled water. The advantages of it are that it leaves no salt residue, it is not corrosive to the steel vessel, and I do not have to worry about contaminants in the tap water. But distilled/deionized water is expensive (16 liters to fill up), and I wonder if tap water would be OK. Along the same lines, I wonder if using a 0.9% bufferred salt is even better than water since it's osmotically identical to the mucus in the lungs. But then I am not creating a mist of droplets from the water surface, i.e. in principle there should be no salt in the vapour anyway, even if it's in the solution.
I posted about it about 2 months or so ago: I use a machine that, in addition to humidifying the air, removes the particulates and VOCs from the air and brings the air temperature to 37C. It delivers the air at up to 200 liters per min, allowing me to exercise on a stationary bike. I have been using a 1.2 kW humidifier up to now, but it struggled to maintain the temp and humidity, so I recently upgraded it to 3 kW (no fuses blown) and got a new more efficient stainless humidifier welded together by a UK small business.
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I may be wrong but if you are creating steam to breath are you not distilling the water wherever it came from and whatever it contains, using tap water with whatever it contains will just leave a residue in the boiler but distilled water will not but what you breathe in will be the same?
Technically, it should be the same, I agree. What I am breathing is "vapour", b.c. I am not boiling the water in the humidifier, so it should be even more likely for whatever in the water to end up in the vapour.
Another advantage of the d Water was that if you leave it in the can between sessions (I consume about 0.5L in 1/2 hr out of 16L) nothing grows in it -- unlike tap water which (at least in the UK) would get algae etc in a few weeks.
Just speaking as a chemist myself, I think you should be very careful of inhaling any water - distilled, de-ionised or otherwise that is not sterile. For the reasons you mention above. Even the distilled will ‘grow’ bugs if left in the light for a period of time.
This is why all nebs, infusions etc are diluted with sterile water or normal saline.
Good to hear a chemist's insight on this! If you do not mind, I might bounce some ideas off of you in the future.
I generally feel safe breathing the air from the humidifying machine, because I test the outcoming air with a particle counter before using it, and the counts are usually around 0-1 per second (about 60 per minute). The counter detects particles over 0.3 micron in diameter, so these counds should, in principle, account for bacteria and algae. In contrast, ambient air we breathe, when there is no obvious pollution (like smoke), is at least 100 particles per second. On a hot spring or summer day it can be 1000 per second. According to research papers I read on this, most of those particles are mold spores, soot, and pollen in season. So, as long as the air the machine gives me is much cleaner than ambient, I feel safe breathing it.
I've left distilled water in the sun before, and nothing grew in it for months; probably, not enough nutrients that are needed, in addition to CO2 and light.
I might get a water still though: this way I would not have to deal with plastic etc and other containers one get from Tesco. In the past, I had access to a research lab Elga deionizer, but I am currenly not working b.c. of the asthma, so, no deonizer is available.
As a biochemist, I've looked at samples tap water in the UK under a microscope... it's a zoo :).
So you are not actually inhaling a mist directly..? Just the air generated? Difficult to comment then about the relevance of water quality to your process.
In my lab any water left for a reasonable time in the light will grow bugs… 🤷♂️ We wouldn’t use it for analysis so I wouldn’t inhale it.
Are you wanting to distill or deionise?
Yes.. dont use tap water at all for any lab analysis as I’m sure you are aware.
No mist generated: the clean (HEPA_filtered) air is blown of the surface of warm water, but there is no ultrasound etc. Water droplets are not detected by the particle counter, unless one over-heats the water, and then it rains out. This is why the 37C is the highest I heat the output air. The latter is another reason why I do not understand protocols in which people breathe in acutal steam. That air must be holding, like, 4x the amount of water compared to 37C. I would be worried about all this extra water in my lungs.
diWater supplied by my former department also grew alage, so I passed it through an ELGA, then it was fine (no bugs under the microscope, and no algae growth). People kept all house water lines in dark hoses to prevent the algae from growing. I thought it was a bit like taping to cover a "check engine" light in a car. At some point I wanted to rig a UV light at the input, but I gave up b.c. I did not want there to be a leak, and then to be blamed for it by the estates.
I guess I like distillation more b.c. there is no surface of the di column for bugs to grow in, and there are not as many consumables to deal with. Do you use a distiller in your lab as well? In my postdoc biochemistry lab, we had a double still, it was enormous and awesome. But my guess it consumed about 6kW -- not a home-user solution...
Not sure I really understand your equipment set up - so I guess that’s your baby..
We use Sartorius systems - pre filtered, RO, polished then UV…. Also have small still then RO… which is very good but will still grow under the right conditions.. all have cond of < 0.01 uS.
Agree about the use of columns and bugs but that’s why I caution you trying any ‘home made’ method of sterile water production as presumably you have no means to check for bugs other than particle size/counts?
My home setup is a stainless steel tray which holds 16L of water and has two heating coils (Fisher recirculators, 1.6kW each), with an acrylic lid on top, with silicone gaskets etc. The lid has 316L tri-link connectors for air in and out and for sensors. Sort of like a CPAP humidifier, but on steroids (scaled up ten-fold for air-flow, power, and water volume ). Particle counts are the only way to measure the particles, yes. Theoretically, I could discard the freshly produced distilled water after each use. It seems wasteful, but it can be done.
If I decide to produce distilled water at home I would try and get a semi-professional still. My lab diWater was 18 MOhm... I think it's 5x worse than your 0.01uS then (1/0.01 = 100,000,000 == 100 MOhm), but prob OK for biochemists! This is what I used to steal for home use when I had a lab (pre-desiability), and I would not change that diWater for 1-2 months at a time, I would just add more as it got consumed. Particle counts were still OK, nothing grew and no precipitates etc.
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