My wife uses the distilled water for a humidifier. I think that's overkill. It does prevent mineral build-up, so simpler cleaning. But humidifiers go through a ton of water, which is not cheap when you're paying $1.29 per gallon. I tell her she should just run the humidifier until it dies, then buy a new one. It would probably be cheaper than buying all that distilled water (which is so hard to find nowadys anyway).
For CPAP, I would think that the only thing you really need is biologically safe water, which you can get by simply boiling the water. Distilling also gets rid of minerals. But for the CPAP machines that I have seen, the water is held in it's own little container and the water does not directly touch the heating element. The water container sits atop the heating element like a pot on a stove, and the air is pumped through the water container for humidification. So you don't have any mineral build up to worry about. You just want bacteria-safe water. But I have only seen a few different CPAP machines, and maybe they don't all work that way. Distilled water is the safer/easier method though. Once it's distilled, you know it is safe. When boiling, you have to time the length of the boiling, and that depends on altitude. I don't know what length of time is required - I'd just go for a good ten minutes and that would surely do it (I would think).
I was not aware that home distillers were even a thing until I saw your post. So I checked them out on Amazon. They're expensive, but not ridiculously expensive. But once I saw the power that they draw (750+ watts), I ruled them out for my wife's humidifier use. For the volume of water the humidifier needs, that distiller would probably cost us as much in electricity as our hot tub! It would be OK for smaller volumes of water, like for CPAP or nasal rinses. I may still look into one for those uses. Distilling would probably be much simpler than boiling. Less things to mess with - it looks like all the parts needed are right there in the home distilling kit. No separate pots or things like that you'd have to buy and keep track of.
The shelves were cleared of all of those.
