Works well - not very noisy, even. Fill up the bottom, put the plastic jar under the spout, and walk away - it will fill up the jar (not quite a gallon) and quit. The water seems fine - I don't have a way of testing it, but it's working in my CPAP machine with no scale showing. There is scale beginning in the bottom of the distiller; I need to scrub it a bit after each use (it comes with a cleaning solution, I haven't tried that yet because a light scrubbing seems to be enough). It also comes with two extra packets of charcoal, as filters - you tuck a packet inside the spout (one is already installed on arrival) and it does a little extra filtering as the distilled water comes through. This was worth it. It is quite large, though, I'm still moving it around and figuring out where it can live when I'm not using it - I don't need it to run every day, or even every week, so it doesn't need to live front and center in my kitchen.