I have considered distilling more slowly; but I haven't tried it yet. I got very discouraged after, running the water through the still twice. That means I would have to have it running longer; and I would have to more carefully monitor the heat. Surely I would drink it if I was dying of thirst; but then, as a result, I might die of something else. I suppose that I should revisit it, and test it for use if I'm desperate. It is rather portable; and If I was dying of thirst; I would have incentive to be more patient. Distillation works! I've seen plenty of proof. lol. My immediate intent was to save me from buying water. I might have to build my own still, with a big copper coil, to do that.
That said, I would be wary of the system that you reported, in an emergency situation, like say in a flood, where the municipal water supply might be contaminated with human waste.
I used to run a countertop distiller that would make a gallon every few hours, I forget how long, and eventually it had problems but it was so long ago it's hard to recall precisely, but I think one is that you have to not only keep the scale clean on that kind (which has an electrical heater inside of it), but there is some types of scale that are harder to dissolve off, and that gradually built up, but I think it was some other problem, but then I moved to a place with fairly good tasting water and used a britta with that for quite a while. I also had a sinkside filter where it just uses the tap water at pressure to dispense, but of course those filters aren't cheap.
Later I learned that distilled water tends to pull minerals out of your body though.... (water naturally will pull out minerals at the rate of flow that the interface allows until it is more balanced in mineral content to the adjoining medium, such as yourself)
(also: (see volatiles: Contaminants
Not Removed from Water by Distillation)
But now, here in the new place we live, we've been using an RO for many years, and it lasts and lasts, and I just change the 3 filters that are not the RO itself about once every 2 years for about $70, and the RO filter itself about once in 5-6 years, so it's basically about $40 a year for filters, and that's all here in this location, where the tap water is fairly good to begin with, and won't clog the secondary filters very fast.
But the great thing is the RO is just superior for water quality to any other filter (which matters more for the reason that many water sources are contaminated with somewhat toxic man made chemicals in small amounts, and the RO filtration on those is superior -- even better than distilled because (see volatiles:
Contaminants Not Removed from Water by Distillation).
Our RO system has that 1 of the 3 secondary filters is actually a calcium source, so that outcome is the water tastes better than distilled, because it has the good calcium effect on taste.
The only thing that could compete with RO would be an unusually high quality filtering but that involves a lot of replacing the filtering material more often if you want to keep it even in the ballpark with RO typical year long performance.
