Harvesting H2o (3 page)
Silver is a natural sanitizing agent. It destroys pathogens which it comes into contact with. In the old west, they used to keep a silver dollar in the water barrels, not really understanding the whys of it, but knowing it was a reliable preventative health measure. Modern water filters usually contain fine silver particles which water must come into contact with as it passes through. As simple as that sounds, it works.
Charcoal does not destroy pathogens, but is a very effective filtering medium, being a fine porous granular material with a high surface area. When you hear the term “carbon filter” it is referring to a charcoal filter. It is important to understand that charcoal and coal are not the same thing. Coal is mined from the ground. Charcoal is what you get from burning wood at high temperatures in a concentrated form, especially in a low-oxygen environment (which fire itself creates). You actually produce charcoal every time you have a campfire. After a few hours, when you see those hot coals burning bright at the bottom of your wood fire, you can douse the fire out with water and will have a small supply of usable charcoal.
You can create a water filter in the wild using nothing more than sand, small rocks, and the charcoal from your campfire. You should have some kind of a funnel-shaped vessel to create it in, such as a large plastic funnel or an upside down empty half-gallon plastic bottle (especially an empty bleach bottle, after it has been rinsed out well with hot water). Boil the rocks first, or heat them in a fire until they glow. When they cool, put a layer of them at the bottom of your funnel to hold the charcoal and sand. Then add a layer of charcoal and a layer of sand, and repeat the charcoal/sand layers until you fill the funnel. That’s it. You can now filter reasonably clean-looking water through your device and drink it. If you have some silver dust, even better - sprinkle some of it between the bottom layer of charcoal and sand. As an alternative, you could place some pure silver coins in that layer instead (in the USA, pure silver coins have dates of 1964 or before). If you don’t include the silver in your filter, I would boil or chemically treat the water before running it through the filter.
You can, of course, simply purchase activated charcoal granules at most hardware stores and use those instead. Additionally, you can stuff clean cotton balls in the neck of your funnel for one final level of filtering.
For a more industrialized solution, you can create your own water filter system using replacement water filter cartridges. All you need is two food-grade storage containers of the same size, such as those white 5-gallon plastic buckets that many home-brewers use for primary fermentation vessels. You will also need a rubber O-ring and a nut that fits on the filter cartridge unit. Drill a hole in the bottom of one of the buckets the size of the threaded end of the water filter cartridge. Put the cartridge inside that bucket, and stick the threaded end through the hole, placing the O-ring between the cartridge and the bottom of the bucket to seal the hole. Tighten the nut on the outside of the bottom of the bucket to secure it. You’re finished. Sit the bucket with the filter over the other bucket, and fill the top bucket with water. The drinkable, filtered water will fill the bottom container.
Home Distillation
Distilled water is water that is turned into vapor form, and then collected as it turns back into liquid through the process of condensation. To turn the water to vapor, it is boiled, but the resulting steam is captured and trapped in a vessel which forces it to condensate, and the condensation is then harvested. The vaporization process removes all impurities, and in fact all chemical elements from the water, resulting in pure H2O.
Making distilled water on your stove is fairly simple to accomplish, but it typically consumes a lot of energy. It’s been said by the U.S. government that for every gallon of distilled water produced, a gallon of fuel is consumed. That was referring to making it on the road in wartime, however. These days, the energy supply can be a basic electric stovetop powered by solar panels, an infinitely renewable source.
Because distilled water is void of minerals, there is some health concern over using it as a primary, long-term source of drinking water. You can always replenish some of those minerals by adding a tiny bit of salt to each glass you drink.
There are several reasons why a homesteader may be interested in distilling water. The most obvious is that this method will create potable water from even the most contaminated sources, and will even convert saltwater into drinking water! Also, some people need distilled water for various mechanical uses. Here are several ways you can make your own distilled water.
A very simple method is to simply harvest steam from a tea kettle. There are many creative ways in which you might do this. One way that I have witnessed uses a thick food-grade plastic tube inserted into the neck of the kettle and the other end stuck through a hole cut near the top of a disposable plastic cup (the kind used for picnics). Seal the top of the cup with plastic wrap and also stuff some plastic wrap in the edges of the hole that the tube comes through. At the tea kettle end, you will need to remove the plastic cap from the kettle spout to fit the tube into it. Seal this end with wadded up paper towels stuffed around the tube. When the water starts to boil, the steam will come through the tube into the cup. After a couple minutes you will have about a third of the cup filled with distilled water; you can then turn off the heat and remove the plastic wrap from the cup. The volume will increase over the next ten minutes as the condensation from the sides of the cup runs down into it.
A slightly more practical method involves a pot, a glass bowl which barely fits inside the pot, some ice, and a lid to a bigger pot. Fill the pot about halfway with water and float the glass bowl in the water. Heat the water. When it gets hot, put the lid to the other pot upside-down on top of the pot and pile ice on top of the lid. Let the water in the pot boil for a while. Turn the heat off and remove the lid (using mitts of course). Inside the pot will be a glass bowl full of distilled water. Be careful to allow the glass bowl to cool slowly, or it will break.
Finally, you can use a pressure cooker to home-distill water. This is the most practical method if you need a decent yield. You will need a good length of copper tubing for this, at least ten feet. You will also need a chair, a large plastic bucket, and a clean food-grade container for collecting the distilled water. The plastic bucket will be for cooling, so you will need to form a coil out of the middle of the copper tubing inside the bucket. This is much easier to do if you have an object in the shape of a cylinder to wrap the copper tube around, such as one of those large tins that Christmas treats are packaged in. The plastic bucket goes on the chair, which is placed next to the stove, with the copper coil inside. One end of the copper tubing then goes into the collection vessel, which sits on the floor. The other end goes into the exhaust hole in the lid of your pressure cooker, about 2/3 filled with water on your stovetop, and should fit snugly into the opening (if it doesn’t, you can stuff around it with wadded up paper towels).
Fill the plastic bucket with cold water. Turn the pressure cooker on. As the water heats, it will turn into steam and be forced through the copper tubing exhaust pipe. When it goes through the coil in the cold water bucket, it will condensate and be turned back into water. Distilled water will exit into your collection vessel on the floor. Once the distilled water begins to output, the heat can be reduced on the stove and it will improve the yield (but also take longer to produce). Be very, very careful not to touch the hot section of the copper tubing once the steam starts going through it with your bare hands, or you may suffer severe burns! Same goes for the pressure cooker, naturally. Use those potholders! Let everything cool naturally when you are done. Seal the collection vessel quickly, or transfer the distilled water to sanitized storage containers and seal them.
If you are distilling water from a contaminated source (or distilling saltwater) it should be coarse-filtered first through something like a clean cotton cloth or bed sheet. After distilling, clean the tea kettle, cooking pot, or pressure cooker which held the pre-distilled water diligently using an anti-bacterial soap. Do the same for your hands afterward. Launder the cloth used for filtering immediately. The copper tubing does not need to be cleaned, because it only came into contact with the pure steam and clean distilled water.
Land-Based Marine Water Makers
Most yachts and sailboats over 20 feet long have a water maker on board, known as a
desalination system
, which converts seawater into safe drinking water. They have an input which sucks in water from below the boat, strains it into fresh drinking water, delivers it to a tank (usually connected to an onboard faucet), dumps the leftover bad stuff back into the sea, and then takes in more saltwater to repeat the process on a continuous basis. This process has a yield ratio of about 10/90, resulting in a volume of 10% of the saltwater taken in output as freshwater, and the rest dumped back out.
Theoretically, as environmentalists may point out, the world’s oceans would eventually become more concentrated from this process, possibly killing off sea life and eventually destroying the world, to say nothing of the ever-decreasing water maker output yield from the desalination process. That theory may be seriously flawed, however, and would take millions of years to test with a lot more water makers running than could ever practically be produced. Besides, man also dumps a considerable amount of fresh water (albeit most in the form of waste) back into the oceans as well.
The way these devices work is through
reverse osmosis
. This is a highly-pressurized filtration process, using a very fine filtering membrane which is capable of removing the smallest micro-particles including salt, most minerals, and all pathogens including viruses. The bad water enters one side of a two-compartment vessel separated by the membrane, to which high pressure is then applied, forcing pure fresh water to filter through the membrane, leaving salt and everything else behind in the first compartment. The first compartment is then flushed and replenished with a new supply of bad water to filter.
These devices have been used in marine applications since they were invented in the middle of the twentieth century. Starting in the 1970’s, they were also marketed as a freshwater filtration system to create softer, better-tasting drinking water in homes and workplace environments. A freshwater reverse osmosis system is differently calibrated and cannot effectively be used for desalination, though. (The reverse, however, is not true; a desalination system can certainly be used to filter fresh water.) This is because freshwater reverse osmosis systems require less pressure and typically use a coarser membrane to filter through, in an effort to improve yield efficiency. To desalinate saltwater, very high pressure and a fine membrane is required, but of course that results in a much less efficient yield.
Land-based desalination systems are now readily available due to demand from both residential and commercial customers, not to mention off-grid homesteaders. Many of these systems are expensive and require contractor installation, such as the models sold by Ech2o Tec and Village Marine. They are large and designed to be stationary applications with an unlimited saltwater supply being pumped in. Seaside resorts, military stations, and owners of fancy waterfront homes will pay between $5,000 and $25,000 to have one installed. This may be a workable solution for certain financially-blessed off-gridders who are coastally situated or have salt marshes in their vicinity.
For most of us, however, a portable marine water maker will make much more sense. In fact, this is a reasonable emergency kit item to have for anyone who lives near a large body of saltwater. I have seen them for sale on Amazon and eBay starting at about $600. Manufacturer brand names include Katadyn, Ampac, and Spectra. The more compact models are used in lifeboats and can operate from volumes as small as a bucket of water. In a prolonged disaster situation, one person on your street who happens to have one of these could save the entire block.
If you are going to store one of these devices, it would be prudent to also have appropriate reservoir containers on hand. Remember, the volume of output is very small when desalinating saltwater. A child’s inflatable swimming pool would be a good thing to have filled for the input side, with a 5-gallon food-grade plastic bucket for the output. The labor of transporting enough saltwater to fill an inflatable pool is something to consider. It’s a good idea to engineer all this based on your proximity to the saltwater supply, in advance.
The other consideration is power. The smaller units, designed for life rafts, are hand-pumped. Some also include a rechargeable battery system which can be used as an alternative to the hand pump, which is a great convenience, being as you can only produce about a pint of water from an hour of hand-pumping. That is just about enough water to quench the thirst worked up from an hour of pumping!
The really nice thing about a reverse osmosis system is you don’t need to concern yourself over replacement filters. The membrane inside the unit should last a lifetime. Yes, you may choose to run desalinated water through an additional freshwater filter to improve its taste, but that is just a luxury. The output water from any marine water maker is safe to drink directly.
Drill Your Own Well
There is perhaps no more satisfying feeling than pumping clear water from a new backyard well you drilled yourself. When that bright, beautiful liquid spills over your land for the first time, you may become exhilarated realizing that the unlimited supply you just tapped into is forever free. Most home-dug backyard wells can produce 2-3 gallons per minute on demand, and many have a flow rate of several times that. Accessing groundwater yourself is not terribly difficult. In underdeveloped nations, wells are still drilled by hand without the aid of modern machinery.
