...continued...
From there the actual construction materials are of significant issue. To have a .8m deep body for it to travel thru sand is first. This could be
solved using wide PVC pipe, but this technology causes many potential problems in any concept of single step water filtration. Swimming pool
filters are often about 2' high instead of 8'.
It gets easier with activated charcoal, in a gravity fed system as stacking several 5 gallon buckets full of AC could suffice. But ideally the silver
chanber will be long and narrow to allow the slowest flow thru this stage. With area of necessity issues DE might be of most concern, having to match
filter element specs with recharging apparatus specs.
Um...
Discuss!
DIY inexpensive high volume crystal clear Drinking Water Filtration, page 1
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ATS Members have flagged this thread 11 times
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Topic started on 12-10-2009 @ 12:49 AM by IgnoranceIsntBlisss
Using Diatomaceous Earth, Sand, Silver Mesh, and homemade Activated Charcoal inexpensive high volume water filters can be no prolem for extensive
periods.
Please do add any other potantial filter stage elements that would fit here!
Key Technologies:
Diatomaceous Earth (DE): Microscopic fossils with amazing capabilities. You can drink it to annihilate internal parasites, dust your garden for the ultimate organic pesticide, and use it for large scale water purification. One pound can treat many thousands of gallons. In fact, there are over 200 municipal DE water purification plants in the US. The major downside is you cant expect to dig this stuff up as you need it.
Cost: My initial searches have it as low as 50lb bags at $50.
Silver: Silver has unique inherent antibacterial & antimicrobial properties. It also helps reduce slime buildup. So this is obviously an ideal substrate for screening purposes in the different filter elements, but I also see the potential for a special filter stage consisting of many layers of silver mesh. If we can find pure silver mesh then obviously you could bake it to help clean it better for resuse. Of course, if you have actual silver (coins, jewelry) you could have a chamber filled with silver bits.
Costs: I havent yet tracked down pure silver mesh, but have found silver coated nylon mesh at about $4 per square foot. Pure silver is spot priced at just under $20 per ounce these days.
Sand Bed: Sand beds are another key municipal water filitration method. But the sand needs to be very fine and not saline. Sifting screens (which have many other food and chemistry uses) can be used to process your own sand, and a hydrometer (needed for measuring salt levels in marine aquaria) can be used to measure salinity, but a good glass type will be needed above the cheap plastic ones for best results. Of course you can always buy sand of this grade.
Costs: Sand - depends, but cheap. Hydrometer - <$20.
DIY Activated Charcoal (note the 3 links): An important, but limited filtration media. While it is inferior to modern carbon pellet type materials, it is readily available if you have any wood available to burn. In fact, if you build a methane / methanol (Wood Gas) producing wood gasifier apparatus you will have have an endless supply of this as a by product.
Costs: FREE!
Useful:
Gravity: Gravity is the ideal in my view as you dont want to have to count on a pump with moving parts and thirst for potentially precious electricty.
TDS Meter: Measures Total Dissolved Solids, in Parts Per Million (PPM). Solids can be filtered with something like a coffee filter (also useful), not dissolved solids cannot. TDS meters are important when you have any drinking water filtration system so you can measure when it is actually time to change the media.
Cost: <$20, and up.
Rainwater: Filtering rainwater is like cleansing laundry after just removing it from the machine. But rainwater is NOT pure water and should be filtered anyways. But what is nice about it, like any 'clean' water, it wont tax your system as much as 'dirty' water. Costs of rainwater are free once you have the system to catch it with. I built a rainwater collection system (PHOTOS) this year for my garden using 2 275 gallon water "totes" that I got for $70 each from Craigslist, and about $12 in downspout fittings and pipe. PVC piping for your system in particular can range from cheap to expensive.
Boiling the water: An obvious remedy to biological sorts of threats. You can do this as either pre or post filtration, depending on whether or not you want the bio matter traveling thru dead or alive. MY preference would be before not after. Boiling the water first and having a silver (coin, etc) chamber as a filtration stage would result in excellence. Costs: FREE!
Discuss!
Concept:
So the idea is you boil (preferably) rainwater, and then 'dump it' into the multistage filtration apparatus / system. The stages in rough order would be multilayered and ever finer layers of filter screening / mesh, sandbed (1+), activated charcoil (2+), silver chamber (1), and DE (1+).
Since the silver chamber is the most 'renewable', assuming you have it, as there is technically nothing to replace, it should go above the DE, which is the least renewable in any sort of Mad Max scenario. If you intend to do a sand filter your setup will be more of a system than an apparatus, as this paper states that the bed in sand filters should be at least .8m in depth.
More with DE:
My research indicates that well known "Berkey" filter elements are made from DE, judging by comparing it to this Berkey clone that reveals their technology unlike what I've seen at the Berkey site. But the Berkey clone also uses silver; probably has the DE 'caked' into a ceramic onto silver mesh. So its safe to assume that you could match "the worlds best filter" by using DE and silver only. One could actually get by quite well off of boiled water & activated charcoal or sand alone, but when it comes to drinking water, I know I dont play shortcut.
The one major catch with DE is in 'charging' it. I used it long ago in my salt water aquarium days. To do so I had to mix it up in a bucket with water and hook the ("Magnum HOT") filter tubes into the bucket and just let it cycle until all the DE stuck to the filter cartidge, then hook it back up to the tank. So that is how you would charge a substrate with DE. In municpal systems, to clean it, they rush water flow in reverse to 'blast' of the dirt and DE. So the catch with a DE stage is you'll need a pump (that needs electricity) to cycle your substrate media with the DE slurry. BUT, play your cards right and you wont need some high pressure reverse flow system to clean your media.
According to this paper, which also explains facility construction (with schematics), with DE you need <0.20 lb/ft2 of filter surface area, which filters ... argh I cant yet find the exact numbers anywhere of how much water is filtered per pound of DE. I also havent found any data on the effiency of ceramic-DE. I havent even yet tried to learn out how to turn into a ceramic. Could use some help here. But technically, even if the Berkey ceramic rate was the same as your slurry-media "leaf" system, you'd be vastly more efficient as the DE filter is the last stage of a system, instead of being essentially the entire system.
More with Silver:
It's appropriate that silver would be an ideal material as a mesh screening material, wherever mesh would be needed anyways. But why stop there, why not have a whoel chamber full of silver, assuming you own some silver. The more you own the bigger the antimicrobial stage you have at your disposal. As I'm thinking this it's potentially possible to use silver plated jewelry / whatever instead of having to buy silver just for this purpose, but you may face issues with the base metal and quality of silver plating. I'm going to have to call a good jeweler friend and try to get some better insights here to report back.
While in a survival situation you might be better off adding some plated silver stuffs in, but I'd be weary of only using the least handled and freshest silver plated chain etc. A quick guess at what base metal would be aluminum. But even aluminum, the most abundant metal on earth, is potentially harmful say if you cook in and aged and heavily pourous pot too often.
When it comes to non pure silver bits we seemingly have the most least troublesome in the form of 55% silver impregnated nylon. Off hand I cant think of nylon's use as a plumbing fitting component being harmful. From the Argenmesh offered by this siteit's unclear how they silver lies on the surface on the material, or what the micron rating is. I emailed asking about the micron rating and will report back.
Concept Issues:
The filter body is of issue, with either vacuum pump driven or gravity based systems. Each unique, and depending on how you intend to feed it water. With gravity you're pulling on the source with a pump, whereas with a city water pressurized hookup you'd be pushing the water thru it as you use it. But in a survival situation you wouldn't be able to count on either pre-pressure or electricity, which might influence building a filter that can handle your level of extremist specifications.
...continued...
[edit on 12-10-2009 by IgnoranceIsntBlisss]
[edit on 12-10-2009 by IgnoranceIsntBlisss]
[edit on 12-10-2009 by IgnoranceIsntBlisss]
Please do add any other potantial filter stage elements that would fit here!
Key Technologies:
Diatomaceous Earth (DE): Microscopic fossils with amazing capabilities. You can drink it to annihilate internal parasites, dust your garden for the ultimate organic pesticide, and use it for large scale water purification. One pound can treat many thousands of gallons. In fact, there are over 200 municipal DE water purification plants in the US. The major downside is you cant expect to dig this stuff up as you need it.
Cost: My initial searches have it as low as 50lb bags at $50.
Silver: Silver has unique inherent antibacterial & antimicrobial properties. It also helps reduce slime buildup. So this is obviously an ideal substrate for screening purposes in the different filter elements, but I also see the potential for a special filter stage consisting of many layers of silver mesh. If we can find pure silver mesh then obviously you could bake it to help clean it better for resuse. Of course, if you have actual silver (coins, jewelry) you could have a chamber filled with silver bits.
Costs: I havent yet tracked down pure silver mesh, but have found silver coated nylon mesh at about $4 per square foot. Pure silver is spot priced at just under $20 per ounce these days.
Sand Bed: Sand beds are another key municipal water filitration method. But the sand needs to be very fine and not saline. Sifting screens (which have many other food and chemistry uses) can be used to process your own sand, and a hydrometer (needed for measuring salt levels in marine aquaria) can be used to measure salinity, but a good glass type will be needed above the cheap plastic ones for best results. Of course you can always buy sand of this grade.
Costs: Sand - depends, but cheap. Hydrometer - <$20.
DIY Activated Charcoal (note the 3 links): An important, but limited filtration media. While it is inferior to modern carbon pellet type materials, it is readily available if you have any wood available to burn. In fact, if you build a methane / methanol (Wood Gas) producing wood gasifier apparatus you will have have an endless supply of this as a by product.
Costs: FREE!
Useful:
Gravity: Gravity is the ideal in my view as you dont want to have to count on a pump with moving parts and thirst for potentially precious electricty.
TDS Meter: Measures Total Dissolved Solids, in Parts Per Million (PPM). Solids can be filtered with something like a coffee filter (also useful), not dissolved solids cannot. TDS meters are important when you have any drinking water filtration system so you can measure when it is actually time to change the media.
Cost: <$20, and up.
Rainwater: Filtering rainwater is like cleansing laundry after just removing it from the machine. But rainwater is NOT pure water and should be filtered anyways. But what is nice about it, like any 'clean' water, it wont tax your system as much as 'dirty' water. Costs of rainwater are free once you have the system to catch it with. I built a rainwater collection system (PHOTOS) this year for my garden using 2 275 gallon water "totes" that I got for $70 each from Craigslist, and about $12 in downspout fittings and pipe. PVC piping for your system in particular can range from cheap to expensive.
Boiling the water: An obvious remedy to biological sorts of threats. You can do this as either pre or post filtration, depending on whether or not you want the bio matter traveling thru dead or alive. MY preference would be before not after. Boiling the water first and having a silver (coin, etc) chamber as a filtration stage would result in excellence. Costs: FREE!
Discuss!
Concept:
So the idea is you boil (preferably) rainwater, and then 'dump it' into the multistage filtration apparatus / system. The stages in rough order would be multilayered and ever finer layers of filter screening / mesh, sandbed (1+), activated charcoil (2+), silver chamber (1), and DE (1+).
Since the silver chamber is the most 'renewable', assuming you have it, as there is technically nothing to replace, it should go above the DE, which is the least renewable in any sort of Mad Max scenario. If you intend to do a sand filter your setup will be more of a system than an apparatus, as this paper states that the bed in sand filters should be at least .8m in depth.
More with DE:
My research indicates that well known "Berkey" filter elements are made from DE, judging by comparing it to this Berkey clone that reveals their technology unlike what I've seen at the Berkey site. But the Berkey clone also uses silver; probably has the DE 'caked' into a ceramic onto silver mesh. So its safe to assume that you could match "the worlds best filter" by using DE and silver only. One could actually get by quite well off of boiled water & activated charcoal or sand alone, but when it comes to drinking water, I know I dont play shortcut.
The one major catch with DE is in 'charging' it. I used it long ago in my salt water aquarium days. To do so I had to mix it up in a bucket with water and hook the ("Magnum HOT") filter tubes into the bucket and just let it cycle until all the DE stuck to the filter cartidge, then hook it back up to the tank. So that is how you would charge a substrate with DE. In municpal systems, to clean it, they rush water flow in reverse to 'blast' of the dirt and DE. So the catch with a DE stage is you'll need a pump (that needs electricity) to cycle your substrate media with the DE slurry. BUT, play your cards right and you wont need some high pressure reverse flow system to clean your media.
According to this paper, which also explains facility construction (with schematics), with DE you need <0.20 lb/ft2 of filter surface area, which filters ... argh I cant yet find the exact numbers anywhere of how much water is filtered per pound of DE. I also havent found any data on the effiency of ceramic-DE. I havent even yet tried to learn out how to turn into a ceramic. Could use some help here. But technically, even if the Berkey ceramic rate was the same as your slurry-media "leaf" system, you'd be vastly more efficient as the DE filter is the last stage of a system, instead of being essentially the entire system.
More with Silver:
It's appropriate that silver would be an ideal material as a mesh screening material, wherever mesh would be needed anyways. But why stop there, why not have a whoel chamber full of silver, assuming you own some silver. The more you own the bigger the antimicrobial stage you have at your disposal. As I'm thinking this it's potentially possible to use silver plated jewelry / whatever instead of having to buy silver just for this purpose, but you may face issues with the base metal and quality of silver plating. I'm going to have to call a good jeweler friend and try to get some better insights here to report back.
While in a survival situation you might be better off adding some plated silver stuffs in, but I'd be weary of only using the least handled and freshest silver plated chain etc. A quick guess at what base metal would be aluminum. But even aluminum, the most abundant metal on earth, is potentially harmful say if you cook in and aged and heavily pourous pot too often.
When it comes to non pure silver bits we seemingly have the most least troublesome in the form of 55% silver impregnated nylon. Off hand I cant think of nylon's use as a plumbing fitting component being harmful. From the Argenmesh offered by this siteit's unclear how they silver lies on the surface on the material, or what the micron rating is. I emailed asking about the micron rating and will report back.
Concept Issues:
The filter body is of issue, with either vacuum pump driven or gravity based systems. Each unique, and depending on how you intend to feed it water. With gravity you're pulling on the source with a pump, whereas with a city water pressurized hookup you'd be pushing the water thru it as you use it. But in a survival situation you wouldn't be able to count on either pre-pressure or electricity, which might influence building a filter that can handle your level of extremist specifications.
...continued...
[edit on 12-10-2009 by IgnoranceIsntBlisss]
[edit on 12-10-2009 by IgnoranceIsntBlisss]
[edit on 12-10-2009 by IgnoranceIsntBlisss]
reply posted on 12-10-2009 @ 04:39 AM by projectvxn
reply to post by IgnoranceIsntBlisss
You only need about 3 ounces of silver to work up a decent filtration system. NEVER use plated jewelry as the base metal can and will poison your water. If you use a tank full of silver ingot or coin, pull the coin out every few days and polish them as they will oxidize to black in a short amount of time and screw with you system potentially causing harm. Other than that this system is genius.
You only need about 3 ounces of silver to work up a decent filtration system. NEVER use plated jewelry as the base metal can and will poison your water. If you use a tank full of silver ingot or coin, pull the coin out every few days and polish them as they will oxidize to black in a short amount of time and screw with you system potentially causing harm. Other than that this system is genius.
reply posted on 13-10-2009 @ 01:14 AM by IgnoranceIsntBlisss
reply to post by projectvxn
Hmm. You know any renewable / off-the-grid ways to go about doing that regularly?
reply to post by imd12c4funn
Can't say.
reply to post by getreadyalready
Great tip about if you swallow poison! Could be useful if you go eating the wrong wild bits. But are you sure the stomach acid or elsewhere doesnt dissolve the chemicals from the AC bits?
Hmm. You know any renewable / off-the-grid ways to go about doing that regularly?
reply to post by imd12c4funn
Can't say.
reply to post by getreadyalready
Great tip about if you swallow poison! Could be useful if you go eating the wrong wild bits. But are you sure the stomach acid or elsewhere doesnt dissolve the chemicals from the AC bits?
reply posted on 13-10-2009 @ 05:26 AM by projectvxn
reply to post by IgnoranceIsntBlisss
You can roll silver out very thin and the perferate it by hand and layer it just off center. I would create an inner tank for the water lined with silver. And polishing is something you'll have to do by hand. There aren't any renewable ways of heating and rolling silver, but is a bad situation it's not going to matter much. You do what you have to.
You can roll silver out very thin and the perferate it by hand and layer it just off center. I would create an inner tank for the water lined with silver. And polishing is something you'll have to do by hand. There aren't any renewable ways of heating and rolling silver, but is a bad situation it's not going to matter much. You do what you have to.
reply posted on 13-10-2009 @ 08:17 AM by getreadyalready
reply to post by IgnoranceIsntBlisss
healingtools.tripod.com...
It can be ingested safely at any time, even by children!! I have had several experiences with this and alcohol poisoning in dumb college girls!!
It does wonders!
Studies show that Activated Charcoal is harmless when ingested or inhaled, or when it comes in contact with the skin. In rare cases, charcoal may mildly irritate the bowel in sensitive persons, but no allergies or side effects have been recorded. Ingested Charcoal may linger in the colon, but this is not harmful. Many pediatricians and pediatric handbooks recommend that Activated Charcoal be kept on hand as an antidote in the family medicine chest, especially in households that include small children (5, 10, 38, 41, 53, 64).
Scientific experiments over many years attest to the effectiveness of charcoal as an antidote. In one experiment, 100 times the lethal does of Cobra venom was mixed with charcoal and injected into a laboratory animal. The animal was not harmed (15). In other experiments, arsenic and strychnine were mixed with charcoal and ingested by humans under laboratory conditions. The subjects survived even though the poison dosages were 5 to 10 times the lethal dose (1, 3, 14, 16, 17, 38).
healingtools.tripod.com...
It can be ingested safely at any time, even by children!! I have had several experiences with this and alcohol poisoning in dumb college girls!!
It does wonders!
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