When it comes to the water you drink, there are a number of different choices. If you want the purest water you can find, you may opt for distilled or purified water…but which one is better? What’s the difference between purified and distilled water? Before we get into that, let’s first take a look at the different types of water to give you some initial background.

Different Types of Water

There are many other types of water in addition to tap/municipal, but what exactly are the differences between them?

Spring water – spring water is water from a natural underground source, containing a healthy amount of nutrients and minerals. It is collected at the source, usually with a borehole. Though appealing because it’s natural, spring water doesn’t have the highest levels of purity.

Mineral water – mineral water naturally contains many dissolved minerals – iron, calcium, sulfate, potassium, etc, and it has at least 250 PPM (parts-per-million) of total dissolved solids (TDS). To bring some perspective to this statement, tap water generally has 300 to 400 PPM.

Purified water – the purest water out there, purified water refers to the quality of water. There a number of different ways it can reach this quality, including distillation, reverse osmosis, ion exchange and more. To be classified as purified, the water must have less than 10 PPM. Our bottled water goes through a 10-step purification process that removes 99.9% of impurities, so you can rest assured you’re drinking the purest water possible!

Distilled water – a type of purified water, distilled water goes through a process called distillation. This includes boiling the water, capturing the steam (pure H2O) and condensing it back into water. Distilled water contains no bacteria and a very little amount of contaminants; with a PPM of about 1, it can be classified as purified water!

So What’s the Difference Between Distilled and Purified Water?

Essentially, there are no differences between distilled and purified except the process the water went through to reach purification! Remember – the definition of purified water is a TDS count of less than 10 parts-per-million (PPM), and both distilled water and purified water have between zero and one PPM.

Many people think only distilled water (because of its lack of minerals) is the best type of water to put in their iron, coffee pot or use for medical and dental equipment, but since purified water also contains virtually no minerals, it works just as well! In fact, distilled water costs more because of the energy required to boil the water and remove the impurities – and the prices keep rising!

The only difference between distilled and purified water is distilled water goes through distillation while purified water goes through other processes such as reverse osmosis, ion exchange, Ozonation, sand filtration, etc.

Endless Waters uses a state-of-the-art filtration process that uses 10 steps to ensure the highest levels of purity. This process includes:

• 10 micron pleated paper filtration (filters out the big particles such as grit and sediment)

• Ion exchange (removes the metal from the water)

• Activated carbon (eliminates organic and volatile organic contaminants like chlorine and chlorine byproducts)

• 5 micron carbon block filtration (captures particles larger than 5 microns)

• 1 micron carbon block filtration (filters out the smaller particles, between 1 and 5 microns)

• Ultraviolet sterilization (chemical-free disinfection method to kill any bacteria and other biological contaminants)

• Reverse Osmosis (an efficient pump removes the sterilized organisms left from the previous UV sterilization step)

• Ozonation (the 2nd chemical-free disinfection step of our process; Ozone dissipates from the water, leaving just oxygen behind)

• Recirculation (water is constantly circulated in the holding tanks and ozone is added)

• Bottling (all bottles are sanitized, disinfected and rinsed before they are filled with the pure water)

So do you choose distilled or purified water? Both are free of bacteria and most impurities – so the difference lies in the price. If you live in the Maryland, Washington, DC and Virginia area and are ready to try purified water from Endless Waters, call us today!