Hi DavyLP:
Congratulations on the purchase of your water distiller. I've had mine since December and I have it running 3 shifts a day. (It takes 5 hours to distill 3 quarts.) I'm soooooo happy with it. As far as what type of water to put in, I think you'll have to experiment with it. I didn't realize how bad the water was in my area (Corona, CA) until I looked in the empty barrel after my first distill. There was a hard white cakey substance that I was not able to wash off. I was glad it was in the pot and not in me. Silly me though, I kept using the tap water and the pot kept getting more and more caked. Finally, the machine started to malfunction (after only 3 weeks!!!), shutting off every 10 minutes or so. Decided to try cleaning it out by soaking it in vinegar overnight and voila! most of the cakey stuff washed out, and it started working normally again. I decided that I needed to use filtered water at this point, so I bought one of those Brita filtered pitchers and I use that to run my water through before putting it in the distiller. If I had a source like you do so close by, I'd use that instead.

Hope this helps.

Nancy

The absolute best water to distill is rain water or river water as there in NO floride or chlorine. If any one has a better answer i am open to the sugestion--nicole

all water will work,naturally the cleaner the water, the less work for the distiller.

mh