These devices are intended for purifying water by boiling it and then recondensing the steam back into liquid. That removes any solid matter like minerals and salts, giving very pure water for technical uses and for drinking.
They're also used for distilling ethanol from sugar washes to make high percentage alcohol for cleaning, fuel, sanitising or drinking in countries where home distillation is allowed. But the primary purpose of distilling water means that these units are less optimal for alcohol use without doing multiple passes. There are dedicated units for that purpose that use much lower power to heat the liquid slower.
The wiring in the base is very simple. Live and neutral are both connected to the heating element via thermal cutouts. One is self resetting and one needs to be reset manually with an external button. The reason for the two thermal cutouts is partly built-in safety-redundancy, and also to protect against an element failure where current could flow to the grounded casing and bypass a thermal cutout. The earth/ground wires are connected directly to the case. The output socket for the fan is connected in parallel with the heating element, as is a simple LED indicator with sleeved resistors.
In use, the base is filled with the water to be purified, the lid placed on and plugged into its socket, and the start button pressed. (resetting the latching thermal cutout).
The water is all boiled into steam, which escapes via the spiral air-cooled tube in the lid, recondensing into water again as it passes through it.
Once the bulk of the water has boiled into steam the temperature of the base rises high enough to trip the latching thermal cutout and turns the unit off.
This particular unit actually pulls air in across the fins before blowing it out the top. Other seem to do it in the opposite direction.
Distilled water can be used for topping up lead acid batteries, rinsing surfaces without leaving mineral deposits, in steam generators to avoid scale build-up, in smoke fluid to avoid blocking the thin heater tube with minerals, in chemical dilution to avoid adding impurities and many other applications.
The unit can be used to desalinate and sterilise sea water for safer drinking. This technique is used on ships for drinking water.
Although the unit is not optimised for water/alcohol separation, the resultant distillate can be redistilled to increase its concentration to levels where it can function as a solvent and sanitiser. Given the shortage of suitable sanitising agents when the last pandemic struck, that could be useful as an emergency option.
While testing this unit with a batch of water I had a weird issue where the metal plate in the lid that possibly prevents droplets of water going into the inner section of the condenser tube was actually against the end of the tube, resulting in enough pressure to pop the lid off the unit. Slightly bending that plate away from the end of the tube fixed the problem.
These units can be found on eBay and other ecommerce sites if you search for the keywords - water distiller. Be aware that there's a wild price range for similar units.
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