I Think I Finally Found It.

Ironing out the last CPaP problem . . . .

I’ve been searching for a comfortable CPAP pillow ever since I was diagnosed with OSA a few years ago. The result has been that I’ve wasted a lot of money. The discomfort I’ve coped with has never been enough to affect my compliance with therapy–I’ve never missed a single night on the machine, and I even use it for afternoon naps (which rarely happen any more).

Eventually I settled for a rather flat “travel size” pillow (approximately half the size of a standard pillow). It worked reasonably well for more than a year, although I had to elevate the edge that was under the CPAP mask and slant the pillow towards my back (I always sleep on my left side, for reasons more numerous than can be discussed here).

Then I thought about what I was really doing with that configuration: I was sleeping on a sort of triangle shape. Immediately I remembered the large L-shaped “body pillows” I’d seen over the years, which are usually marketed to pregnant women.

The problem was that I didn’t need a big pillow just to adequately support my CPAP mask and upper back. I looked online and found that now they make small ones, too, with arms that measure about 20 inches each.

I’ve got a bunch of old standard pillows, so I suppose I could have remodeled one of them into the shape I thought would work, but my hand neuropathy has been very bad lately, and I don’t have access to my sewing machine, so I decided to splurge one more time on a new specialty pillow.

The Major Online Retailer delivered my purchase promptly enough; however, I could tell right away there was going to be a problem I’ve encountered before: it was stuffed so full of fiberfill, it was HARD. There was no way I was going to be able to sleep comfortably on it.

But there was an easy solution to that: the pillow came with its own fitted, zippered pillowcase, which I could fill with the excess stuffing in the pillow, and then I’d have two softer, flatter pillows for the price of one.

So that’s what I did: I opened the end seam and pulled out half of the fiberfill. After shoving that into the zippered case and distributing it, I distributed the remaining filling in the original pillow and re-stitched the seam without too much discomfort from my simultaneously numb and painful neuropathy fingers.

Of course, that meant I no longer had a custom pillowcase, but that was easily remedied. I cut two 4-foot lengths of 6-inch wide, white polyester stretch stockinette, a huge roll of which had been ordered for me a year ago by a homecare nursing agency (which was visiting me after a hospitalization and a 2-month stint in a rehab home last spring). I hemmed both open ends of each piece–a leisurely day’s work–and then I stuffed the pillows into the tubes.

With the angled pillow positioned at the head of the bed as shown in the illustration above, and with my head resting at the apex (essentially with the pillow hooked over my bottom shoulder), I get the right height of support for my inflated cloth CPAP mask, and perfect support behind my neck and upper back. After controlling for other factors that affect my ability to have quality sleep, meaning an AHI of less than 2 (actually, I prefer it to be less than 1, but I’m a perfectionist), I’ve eliminated the neck- or shoulder-ache problems that I had experienced with all of the other pillows I’ve tried.

Success at last!

If you’ve been having issues with neck or shoulder pain, or poor support for your CPAP mask, maybe you should try a right-angle pillow, too.

Indiana Christine and the Riddle of Wee Hours’ Awakening.

NOT a product endorsement. I find this machine to be poorly designed and difficult to use because of that.

Nearly 2 years of life with Darth CPAP has helped with understanding why I wake up at 3 am. A significant amount of n=1 experimentation has gone on during this time, and I’m satisfied that if Darth says I had an excellent 5 1/2 hours of sleep with an AHI of only 0.9/hr (as happened lately), I don’t need to spoil that by trying to get back to sleep, when it would usually result in only a short doze that would have a flurry of sleep apnea events which would negate the prior period of actually “sleeping like a baby” (in pediatrics, anything over an AHI of 1.0/hr is considered sleep apnea).

Awakening after a mediocre short night (AHI >2 and <5) will result in my suddenly needing a siesta exactly 12 hours after the time I woke up (anywhere between 0200-0400). Naps are always on the machine, and are almost always very good, at 1-2 hours and usually anywhere from 0.0 to 2.0/hr, although now and then I’ll have a horrific >5 events/hr during that short time.

I’m pretty sure my sleep pattern involves a natural diurnal rhythm, which entails dividing sleep into two periods per 24 hours, rather than trying to cram it all together during the dark time, as has become widely expected since the Industrial Revolution. That makes the doctrine of “get 7-9 hours of sleep per night” into a dogma that does more harm than good. The Spanish siesta makes a whole lot more sense.

Even a nap as late as 1600 (regardless of AHI) doesn’t mess up bedtime: I start losing oomph at 2000, and it can take me upwards of 2 hrs to get the nightly chores out of the way and get in 15 minutes of reading in bed (from a real paper book), before donning the mask, lights out, and adjusting the bed (head and knee gatch slightly elevated). It doesn’t take long for me to fall asleep; rarely it may take 45 minutes, which is the ramp setting I put on the machine, so I’m aware when the air pressure begins to climb (the prescribed setting is 4-8).

As they say in the advertisements, “Results may vary.” All I’m sure of now is that if I have a sterling, albeit short, night on the machine (as I did the other night), I don’t need to try to catch more shut-eye, and I’ll steam through the whole day without a yawn.

Except for pain (which always leads to poor AHI results), I can’t pin down what else may contribute to my having a good, middling, or bad night of OSA, but I’m beginning to suspect that a combination of hormones, neurotransmitters, and blood glucose level may be involved: I do somewhat worse if I go to bed hungry, whether I feel hunger, or I just haven’t eaten in six hours or more (because I’ve had no appetite); I do somewhat better after a bedtime snack of oatmeal. (Contrary to the advice not to eat after 6 pm, a bedtime snack of half a banana and some graham crackers is offered in nursing homes.) Coincidentally, oatmeal has hormonal (melatonin), neurotransmitter (serotonin), and blood glucose (carb-loading) effects. Oats are the grain with the highest protein, which would be part of the pathway involved in carbs triggering serotonin; drinking a mug of atole, made from masa harina (corn flour) and milk, or eating a bowl of reheated white rice with milk or melted cheese don’t have the same effect.

Whether or not I’ve had a nap, or going to bed too late or too early, or whether I’m playing white noise or the room is quiet, or regardless of how tired or sleepy I feel (there’s a difference), and even whether or not I can remember dreaming (indicating changes in brain-wave activity), all yield mixed results.

Getting any deeper into understanding the mechanism of obstructive sleep apnea (at least so far as it applies to me) is going to take detailed analysis of what I get from running the OSCAR software against the data on Darth CPAP’s SD card.

How about you? If you’re a CPAP user who’s had enough time on the mask to have noticed some trends, please share your experience.

More Adventures with CPAP.

D-I-Y solutions to minor but vexing problems.

After having accumulated six gallons of home-distilled water in the spring, I didn’t have to fuss with the distiller all summer and the early autumn. But when I fired it up again, I had problems getting a good yield out of fill-ups.

Room temperature likely has something to do with it, because of how that affects the way the top chambers cool the steam into collectible condensate, but I still haven’t figured out what the best temperature may be to facilitate that.

I decided that maybe I was filling the boiler too much. If there’s not enough space between the surface of the hot water and the condensate collection container, the steam wouldn’t be able to circulate to the cone and move upwards to condense, and it would just keep dripping back into the boiler section until enough water had boiled away and escaped from between the parts of the still for an adequate draft to pull the steam upwards through the cone. Using as a guide the top edge of the calcium deposit on the inside of the boiler, I put in a little less water, and indeed, that did increase the yield.

There also seemed to be a problem with water flow through the drain spigot. Long ago the control lever on the spigot got stuck in the open position, so apparently that wasn’t a factor. Then I noticed that if drainage into the collection jar was unaccountably delayed, a slight bump to the still would get the water flowing. Perhaps that means an air bubble forms at the interior end of the drainage tube, impeding flow. The solution to that was to raise the back of the electric hob about an eighth of an inch, so gravity would help overcome any such surface tension problems.

Then, after a couple of years of frequent, prolonged use for distilling water, the portable electric hob gave up the ghost. Now I needed to figure out how to regulate distillation on the electric range, while I shopped for a replacement hot plate (the one I used had belonged to my son, the Chef). I think I’ll try an induction burner: perhaps because all the heat will be transferred directly to the magnetic bottom of the juice extractor-water still, the process will be more efficient.

Finally, the effort of getting the interior of Darth CPAP’s humidifier tub clean was getting frustrating. The opening of the tub is a tight fit even for my abnormally small hands, and the interior surfaces are irregular, creating corners in which residue remains. I needed to find something that was abrasive, flexible and small enough to be an effective and successful cleaner.

Then I had an epiphany: Darth CPAP’s rectangular filter pads are made of an abrasive material, are flexible, and are small enough to manipulate within the humidifier tub. Since the beginning of therapy, I had saved the used filters (they’re changed every two weeks), thinking “There must be some other use for these pads,” and now I had discovered that use. Each pad serves once as a miniature abrasive sponge, and then I discard it.

Monitor CPAP with OSCAR!

Open source software displays all the details!

I recently downloaded OSCAR – Open Source CPAP Analysis Reporter – and I couldn’t be more pleased. Now I have the complete record of everything measured by Darth CPAP, covering nearly all of the time I’ve been using a continuous positive airway pressure machine. (The first four months were recorded by a different machine from a different DME company, and they didn’t put an SD card into it, so the only record I have of that time is an abbreviated printout.)

OSCAR is available for several platforms, and their download page lists a baker’s dozen of human languages, so it serves the international community of CPAP users.

Not every user is going to want as much detail about the obstructive sleep apnea that afflicts them, but I’m a retired Registered Nurse, and have an inquiring mind that wants to know it all. When I had asked about getting complete metrics at my last (annual) sleep medicine appointment, I was told it couldn’t be done, but because I had been programming military computers before the last two generations of computer users were gleams in their daddies’ eyes, I knew better. If there’s code written for anything, some motivated and dedicated geek will find a way to crack it. The motivation for cracking CPAP code came to computer programmers who also have sleep apnea.

OSCAR is a tremendous gift from the hardworking people who wrote the code over several years, after various attempts by others to decipher CPAP secrets were abandoned. Now I can better track the things that either worsen or improve my breathing. This is health care empowerment on a truly grand scale.

Thank you, OSCAR developers (and all who came before you to blaze the trail) from a Very Happy CPAPer!

 

 

 

More CPAP Distilled Water Tweaks.

Getting the wrinkles ironed out.

Using the juice extractor with the fruit basket in place and the steel bowl upended inside it has worked out fine. It turns out that I didn’t really need the extra coffee filter draped over the outside of the bowl, but found that the filter I started putting over the cone in the middle section needs to be changed more frequently. This is because if I happen to forget to monitor the water level and the bottom boils dry, the final drops of condensate that drip back into the bottom section aerosolize the lime deposited there, and the fine powder sticks to the damp filter. With subsequent batches, the lime tends to migrate down into the distilled water in the middle section. Compared to how much is left in the boil chamber, it’s only a minuscule quantity of limestone, but sometimes enough does settle to the bottom of the collection jar to be visible, and of course it ends up in Darth CPAP’s water reservoir, where it doesn’t need to be.

Finding the right temperature for the still continues to be a challenge; a bit too high of a setting on the electric hob makes too much steam pressure, and the steam escapes from the various joints in the still, reducing the distilled water output. It seems that room temperature has more to do with that than I thought; during different seasons, even with the same heat setting on the hob, there’s a difference in how much water I get. I have to find the exact point where the water simmers enough to make plenty of steam, but it doesn’t come to a boil. On the rare occasions when conditions have been perfect, I’ve gotten as much as a liter and a half out of one fill-up.

I’ve had some success with changing my collection containers. I switched to half-liter jars (pints would also do, but I like having space for a little extra distillate), and found some great plastic lids to cover them during distillation, to conserve steam from the hot water inside the jars. With a plastic lid from an oatmeal canister upended under the jar, the assembly is exactly the right height for the spigot on the extractor to enter the hole in the spout and keep the jar from being jostled out of alignment under the spigot. (The oatmeal lid also makes a nice catch basin for overflow, if a jar begins to overflow through the tiny air hole in the side of the white spout lid.) The spout pours water neatly into the narrow mouth of a gallon jug. (The cover can also be used inverted, with the spout pointing down into the jar, like a funnel.)

I also found some nice plastic jar rings to use in place of the rust-prone tin rings. Screwed down firmly, they don’t leak around the jar lid when I pour the distilled water into a storage jug. I usually have two jars set up, and when one gets full, I quickly swap it for the empty one. When the second one’s full, there are usually another hundred milliliters left that I can drain into another jar, and use to start collection in a new jar the following day (the distilling process takes about nine hours). Now and then I get enough water to fill that third jar right away.

The lids and the rings come in sizes to fit both narrow- and wide-mouth jars.

One unlooked-for benefit of the still project has been a source of scouring powder! My water is so hard, it’s almost like rocks coming out of the tap. Heating it makes the limestone precipitate out – I wonder how deep the calcium sludge is in the bottom of my water heater tank, after these fifteen years of use (after heating only one liter of water in my electric kettle there are calcium granules in the bottom of the pot; the kettle’s element requires de-scaling weekly with a vinegar solution). When I periodically clean the boiling chamber of the still, I save the limestone powder by pouring any remaining sludgy residue into a little plastic cup I keep on the kitchen windowsill. There the water evaporates, leaving behind a fine powder that works well for scouring or polishing.

 

 

Living with Chronic Pain.

Hemp Oil: Effective, but No Magic Bullet.

Several months ago, my sister had a question about hemp oil, and I did some hunting for clinical studies, but didn’t come up with much. Recently I revisited the subject because my chronic pain has been made so much worse by some medical procedures being done on my back that I’ve become almost completely bedridden (more about that in a future post). This time, I tried different keywords, and came up with more information. (My plan is to add those links to this site’s library of medical journal articles.) Then I invested $7.99 USD in a bottle of hemp oil, to give it a try.

What follows is NOT a product endorsement. These are my observations on the performance of a bottle of oil containing 100 mg of a peppermint-flavored preparation. Bearing in mind that my chronic pain is sensitive to changes in atmospheric pressure as well as the phases of the moon, your results will undoubtedly vary from mine.

1. Provides analgesia when NSAIDS don’t. This is because it works on a different set of receptors. Depending on what’s causing the pain, you’ll probably still have to take an NSAID, but you may be able to reduce that dose, which is an advantage when NSAID adverse effects are a concern (especially gastric bleeding and peripheral edema).

2. Doesn’t have all the same adverse side effects of opiates (again, because it affects a different part of the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system). This can be helpful to those (like me) for whom narcotics are not an option because of the headache, stiff neck, nausea, vomiting, and respiratory depression that opiates cause.

3. Exercise caution with use of this product: It does cause brain fog, so don’t drive a motor vehicle or operate other dangerous equipment. The manufacturer adds rosemary extract in an effort to counteract this effect (hence the label claim of “sharpens brain function”) but the additional ingredient is not strong enough to justify that expectation.

4. Titrate your dosage. Start with a low dose (such as 2 or 3 drops every 3 to 6 hours), and see what works. Taking a full dropper (about 10 drops) may be too much at once; even only 4 or 5 drops at one time can induce somnolence (sleepiness), and while clinical studies indicate it doesn’t cause respiratory depression, a dose of 5 drops can cause mild dyspnea (difficulty breathing). For this reason, people with Obstructive Sleep Apnea should use this product with caution, even if they’re getting ventilatory assistance from a Positive Airway Pressure machine. Because of its pharmacological action, although it does provide pain relief, there may still be a degree of background pain. Increasing the dose may not make you pain-free, and could induce undesirable side effects.

5. May cause a degree of urinary retention. This could be an adverse effect for some; for others it could be a benefit, because it may somewhat reduce urinary frequency or incontinence.

6. The label says it can be taken without regard to food, so if you don’t like the taste, the peppermint-flavored version can be mixed with a cup of hot cocoa, or a drop may be placed on an “Altoids” Brand mint tablet, or on a sugar cube.

7. This drug does stimulate the appetite. Again, this could be a benefit or a disadvantage, if weight is a concern.

8. ALWAYS discuss with your own medical care provider the use of ANY over-the-counter remedy. Just because it’s sold as a “nutrition supplement” doesn’t mean a product is harmless. In fact, any product that is ingested in a tiny dose rather than in the quantity that would be eaten as a food is a DRUG.

Remember, phytochemicals are produced by plants for their own benefit, not ours. Most phytochemicals which are extolled as nutrients are produced by plants as poisons that will inhibit plant predators from eating them and their offspring (the seeds inside fruits). People are plant predators, too, and thus are no different than gnus in this respect.

For example, a plant predator that becomes sluggish because it eats a lot of cabbage family vegetation (which contain anti-thyroid chemicals), will not forage as efficiently (allowing more plants to escape defoliation), and lacking the energy to keep up with the herd, it will be more likely to be caught by a carnivore.

Similarly, plants like poppies or hemp which produce phytochemicals that alleviate pain, will cause injured plant predators that eat them to fail to seek shelter to recuperate from painful injuries, and a herbivore incapacitated by sleepiness and limping along behind the herd presents prime provender for a meat-eater.

Be careful about what kind of plant products you consume. You may not end up as a big cat’s or wild canine’s dinner, but you can run other risks to your health and life from the components of a heavily plant-based diet (especially if the plants are raw) or from taking plant extracts, infusions or concentrates.

You can read more about the nefarious motives of plants at my posts BUTTERFLY IN THE CROSSHAIRS and GOING … GOING … GOITROGEN GONE.

 

Snoring: It’s No Laughing Matter.

Snoring must rank right up there with pratfalls as a prime cartoon character sight (and sound) gag. And in one respect, “gag” is a proper label for it: Someone who snores is gagging on his or her own body’s tissues, when they block the person’s upper airway during sleep. A blocked airway impedes air on its trip to the lungs, and thereby prevents sufficient oxygen from reaching the rest of the body. This process of unconscious choking and oxygen deprivation has a clinical name: Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA).

If you snore, you have Obstructive Sleep Apnea.

 

Hypoxemia (a low level of oxygen) during sleep damages the heart, kidneys, and other organs. No amount of “aerobic” exercise while awake will compensate for this lack, nor can it repair the damage.

The known positive associations of OSA with other disease states is impressively lengthy: from autoimmune disorders to cancer. The medical research which investigates these associations is multiplying daily; I’ve amassed an amazing number of journal articles, and continue to find new revelations. (My intention is to post a list of my findings at this blog.)

OSA is easily diagnosed by means of a procedure called polysomnography. During this test, electrodes are attached to the scalp (no shaving is done) and various parts of the body to detect changes in function, while you wear a mask with tubing that supplies room air and has sensors to detect breathing patterns. In a full-scale sleep study, you go to bed that night in a sleep lab, where the room is supplied with monitors to observe your sleep behavior. There’s no pain involved, and while the scalp electrode gel is messy, it shampoos out completely. A simplified test can be done at home.

OSA can be mild, moderate or severe; in the worst cases, a person may be unable to breathe more than 100 times per hour. Depending on what is causing the airway obstruction, a ventilatory support treatment can be prescribed, ranging from using a machine, to various dental or surgical procedures.

Once the severity of OSA is diagnosed, it’s usual to prescribe breathing assistance called Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP), provided by an apparatus with a mask that delivers a stream of humidified air to your upper airway during sleep. It can take some time to find a mask style that fits well, and to tailor the delivered air pressure to your needs, but it’s well worth the effort. Movement during sleep can cause the mask to need readjustment during the night, but otherwise, wearing the mask should cause little or no more sensation than wearing sunglasses.

Snoring is no joke.

It’s not just a bad habit, nor something that happens only when falling asleep after overeating at a feast. Neither is it a sign of sound (restful) sleep. Snoring is a symptom of a serious disorder – Obstructive Sleep Apnea – which can make life miserable with chronic fatigue, anxiety, depression, the worsening of other disorders, the development of other diseases – and even cause premature death.

 

CPAP Wrap-Up, 2018

In about 3 weeks will be my first anniversary on CPAP. I haven’t missed a night, my average usage is well over 8 hours a night, and my long-term AHI is <2. Darth CPAP and I regularly take refreshing afternoon naps of 1 to 1 1/2 hours’ length that register 0.0 events.

I’ve made a little progress in the vexed mask cushion misfit problem. After trying three manufacturers and nine sizes and styles of cushion, I’ve settled (for the time being) for the Philips Respironics Amara Gel (blue cushion, top and lower right).

The length of the cushion is a better fit, although the width of the bottom doesn’t seem to be right for my anatomy, leading to frequent sleep-disturbing air leaks at the lower corners, no matter how I try to adjust the straps. The blue “gel” material is thicker and stiffer, and there’s a complete double layer of it around the circumference of the cushion. The interior layer of “gel” is also thicker at its free edge (“beaded” may be the right description). This heavier-duty construction seems to be a plus, so far as the cushion’s overall ability to contain my maximum air pressure of 8.

I still don’t care for the feel of the cushion against my skin, but it’s slightly more comfortable than all the other cushions I’ve tried. My original “CPAP Sock” home-made mask liners feel a little thick when applied to the cushion, and in their original size (made with 2-inch ribbed cotton tubular stockinette) they fit better with the folded edge toward the frame and the sewn edge toward the opening. I’ve re-designed the “Sock” to be only one layer of stockinette, which still provides the comfort of cloth, but as always, Darth CPAP doesn’t like any cloth layer between the cushion and the skin, and it complains about excessive air leakage. Oddly enough, whether or not there’s a “bad” leak seems to have no effect on my nightly AHI: The only two times I’ve exceeded 5 events per hour has been while not using a liner, and with a liner in place, I’ve had the same range of results (0.5/hr to 4.0/hr) as I’ve had without a liner. Go figure.

The regular Amara (clear cushion, lower left) was no better than anybody else’s cushion for withstanding an air pressure of 8: it buzzed and flapped with the worst of them, probably because the flexible edge is soft and very thin. It also has only a partial double layer of flexible material around its circumference. It functioned slightly better with one of my handcrafted mask liners over it (which apparently stabilizes the edge to withstand the aerodynamics), but although I prefer the feeling of the cloth liner on my face, I’d really like not to have to fuss with another “attachment,” no matter how proud I am of my custom “CPAP Socks.”

The picture of the mask frame doesn’t show the straps, the two lower ones of which are attached to the frame with removable, snap-fit, flat hooked clips that are the devil for me to snap on and off (because of painful, arthritic fingers), so I have to peel open the hook-and-loop tab at the end of one lower strap to doff he mask. The straps of the harness also seem to be stretchier than those of other manufacturers, because I have to keep tightening the straps throughout the night, to minimize leakage from the lower corners of the cushion.

There’s a rhinoceros horn-like protuberance at the top of the frame. This is an an additional adjustment feature, combining hook-and-loop straps and a push-button contrivance, which is intended to improve the seal by compensating for the backward slope of a forehead. Unfortunately, as a female, I don’t need it, because females tend to have perpendicular foreheads (one of the traits which help anthropologists identify the sex of a skeleton), which means I have to mess with a useless extra set of straps when fitting the frame to my face. Moreover, the attachment rings through which the hook-and-loop straps pass are split, which means the slightest twist while donning the mask dislodges the straps, and they pop out through the gap. (I’m a Navy veteran, so I’m sorely tempted to curse like a sailor when this happens.) The horizontal part of the forehead adjustment device has a soft plastic pad on it, but that’s just another attachment to take off and clean; and while the “gel” cushion doesn’t mar my nose or face (as all the other cushions did), the rhino horn assembly still leaves a mark across my forehead.

As a final critique, the air escape ports on the tubing connection of the Philips Amara mask frame are noisier than the ring of tiny holes on the ResMed tubing connection. You win some, you lose some.

In other CPAP news, I’ve succeeded in increasing my juice extractor’s distilled water output again, this time by adding two large coffee filters to the mix. (I don’t drink coffee, but the filters are handy for a lot of other filtration and non-filtration uses around the house.)

I flatten one filter on the bottom of the fruit sieve part (under the upended steel bowl that catches most of the steam before it leaks out of the lid), which apparently encourages more of the steam that condenses inside the bowl to run into the collection container. Another coffee filter is draped over the flat bottom and curved sides of the steel bowl, where it catches the drips from the juicer lid that collect on the bottom surface of the bowl, and channels them down the outside of the bowl to the sieve, before they have a chance to evaporate again and be lost via the edge of the lid.

I’ve spent a lot of time tweaking my total CPAP system, and although it’s still not perfect, anything that helps CPAP work improves health and longevity, so I believe I’m coming out ahead.

Here’s hoping you have a healthy and happy New Year, from your Happy CPAP-er!

🙂

Update: CPAP Water Still

I’ve done a bit of tweaking to improve the yield of home-made distilled water to slake Darth CPAP’s thirst.

As you may recall from my first post on this subject, I had begun using the steam juicer without its fruit colander (the top section of the assembly). The rationale for that decision was that I thought the use of the top piece just supplied another outlet for steam to escape, around the sides of the pot.

Well, after distilling several gallons of water, I re-thought that decision. Perhaps my assumption was mistaken: perhaps the extra layer of space between the boiling water and the lid would help increase condensation. I began using the top piece of the juicer, too, and, indeed, I did start getting a bit more water with each boil.

But it still wasn’t enough to satisfy me, considering my investment in electricity to power the hotplate I’m using to heat the water (even though it’s cheaper to distill my own water than to buy it at the market).

Prior to this series of experiments, my only practical knowledge of D-I-Y water distilling had been from Outdoor Survival Skills, by Larry Dean Olsen.

My early 1970s edition of Outdoor Survival Skills, by L. D. Olsen

In that book, he described making a water collection device using a pit in the earth with crushed vegetation in its bottom, covered by a sheet of plastic weighted at the edges with rocks, and a rock placed in the center of the plastic, to direct the condensate from the soil and the vegetation into a container in the pit:

My interpretation of Olsen’s solar survival still.

The lid of the juicer was serving in the place of the plastic sheet in Olsen’s solar survival still, but the lid was curved in the opposite direction, which channeled the water towards the sides of the fruit holder – and towards the tiny space between the lid and the pot, from which too much moisture apparently was still escaping. Unfortunately, using something like a piece of aluminum foil under the lid of the pot would have directed the condensate down at the middle of the device, which would send the water through steam hole in the middle chamber (which is shaped like a tube cake pan), back into the bottom chamber, from which it had evaporated, to begin with.

What I needed was a diaphragm or dome oriented in the same direction as the lid, but positioned so as to intercept more of the steam before it got high enough in the fruit holder to escape from beneath the edges of the lid. Fortunately, I possessed exactly the right object to serve as that dome: a steel mixing bowl, similar to the one in this photo:

My bowl is the largest of a set of three, and I’ve owned them for more than forty years (they’re my favorites of all the mixing bowls I’ve owned, because of their swiveling ring-shaped handles). The inverted bowl fit nicely inside the perforated top chamber of the juicer, with only one row of the perforations showing around its edge. I figured that some of the steam that would still escape through those holes would condense on the outside of the steel bowl, and run back down to pass through the holes into the collection chamber.

When my stock of distilled water began to run low, I refilled the boiler at the bottom of the juicer, put it on the electric hob, and a few hours later, I’d harvested twice as much distilled water as before!

🙂