Clean Your Water With Dirt by Ted Praast

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Earth Stewardship 101 How to achieve a sustainable, flourishing farm

But there are alternatives.  We can make our own filtration systems, and we can do it for a fraction of the cost of a manufactured system, and have it be more effective than many municipal treatment facilities.  It's really quite simple. 

First, we remove the turbidity, the cloudiness caused by various debris in the supply.  This can be as simple as a few layers of cloth, or as complex as a whole house water filter.  Since a whole house filter is quite costly, we go for a few layers of coarse woven cloth, such as cheesecloth.  This will remove most of the large chunks of junk, and the rest we'll take out later.  This step may not be necessary with clear stream water, but it's a good idea anyway.  It's also possible to use the sediment filters available for RVs, though those aren't terribly cheap either. 

But we still have lots of bugs in that water.  How to get rid of them?  Those bugs can be bad news, and in this world there are lots of them.  The days are gone when you could walk up to a spring coming out of a mountain and simply drink the water.  Now, well, you understand.  Most waterways now contain such critters as coliforms of the fecal types, well known is E. Coli and relatives, along with cryptosporidia and giardia lambdia (beaver fever) and other less known nasty relatives, along with various viruses.  These little fellows, though they are small, account for a large percentage of gastroenteritis and cryptosporidiosis, diseases that can be quite debilitating. 

Remember that pond scum?  Well, the bottom of that pond is loaded with little people that prey on just such nasty critters.  That's the natural remedy for removal of harmful little bugs.  So what we can do is to create a perfect environment for the predators by making a place with slowly seeping water, well oxygenated, and quiet enough to keep the critters in there.  Theoretically, then, we can use natural functions to make the unnatural high concentrations of bad things go away. 

It's called a slow sand filter.  While it is a simple and relatively inexpensive means to purify water from biological contaminants, it is also quite effective: more effective in fact than most of the house filters you can buy.  For instance, viruses range from approximately 10 to 1400 nanometers, or 10 to 1400 millionths of a millimeter, pretty small.  The better house filters will be micron filters, or one millionth of a meter, which is much larger than the virus.  House filters would therefore be ineffective against viruses.  The slow sand filter, however, keeps the water draining slowly through a layer of biological predators whose livelihood is based on their ability to eat such creatures as viruses, sporidia, giardia, and a host of other fellows we don't want to drink.  This layer of predators is called the schmutzdecke. 

A Tale of Two Cities

In 1892, an outbreak of cholera occurred in Germany.  Two cities involved in the study of the outbreak were Hamburg and Altona.  Both cities used the River Elbe as their water source.  Hamburg had 8605 deaths (1344 per 100,000), and Altona recorded 328 deaths.  A large percentage of the Altona deaths were attributed to infections that occurred in Hamburg.  So what was the difference?  The water in Hamburg was taken directly from the Elbe (yuck, even then) while the water used in Altona was processed through a slow sand filter.  Does that convince everyone? 

The World Health Organization has endorsed the slow sand filter as the most practical method for providing potable water for “third world countries.”  But the more interesting thing is that besides the Altona story, slow sand filters have been used in major population centers worldwide, such as London and Washington D.C. While these are no longer in use, the reason is not because they don't work, it's because they are too slow and require a large space.  Other methods are now used, such as high pressure filtration and chemical treatment.  There is, however, renewed interest in slow sand filters in smaller municipalities due to the much lower cost in both construction and maintenance. 

Since most of us don't really like to have those strange chemicals in our water, there must be other ways.  Most municipal supplies use chlorine, a highly toxic chemical, for bug killing, and also will add fluorides in one form or another, presumably to protect teeth (questionable).  We need to rid our water of these, along with heavy metals and insecticides.  This mandates an addition to the biological filter, that being an activated carbon filter. 

Carbon filters will remove the majority of nasty chemicals from your water. Activated carbon granules are relatively inexpensive, and a home-brew filter can be constructed using PVC. 

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