| Summary: | Includes bibliography. === Communities living in the remote, arid parts of South Africa are often reliant on brackish groundwater for their drinking water, sometimes to the detriment of their health. The quality of their drinking water is of concern to these communities and they are willing to pay for the means of improving their drinking water quality. A market survey indicated that an affordable price for a family desalination unit producing an average of 20 litres of drinking water per day would be R750. Conventional technologies such as Reverse Osmosis, Electrodialysis and Ion Exchange are generally too expensive and complex for application at demands of below 100 litres per day. Solar distillation, on the other hand, is well suited to such micro-scale applications. The technology has been widely reported on internationally, particularly since 1945, but is little known in South Africa. Experimental work was done on both a basin still and on inclined wick stills, single and multiple effect, in order to ascertain reliability and cost-effectiveness. The single effect inclined wick still was found to be the most promising and its design was investigated for the effect of parameters such as basin depth, feed rate, feed salinity and wick type.
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