How I Turned Dirty Ground water into pure drinking water

Some years back I decided to shop for some land within the hills of Texas. It had been rough land, all rock with steep cliffs and bottomless valleys. The altitude of the property put us several feet above the water table so making it rather pricey to drill a well. However the property had one thing going for it. Somewhere in that hill was a giant abyss that may capture the rain water, while it rained.

Now this water was not gushing out of the hill, it actually only came out at about half a gallon per minute. There was no way to tap into the supply so we were stuck with the slow flow. We in time gave the system a name; we named it the hamster bowl.

The hamster bowl lands up as a small pool of water approximately three hundred feet from our residence. There is grass, mud, fish, snakes as well as bugs swimming all in that water. The deer, hogs, turkey and other animals come back to drink there too. Now it absolutely was our turn to drink from the hamster bowel as well.

The objective was to turn dangerous water into good water while not using high pressure or high dollar filters and such. Therefore we were limited to the strategies we could utilize. The added problem was that the flow rate was such that we were restricted on how much water we may possibly collect from the bowl without hurting the natural system. During normal circumstances we were obtaining approximately half a gallon per minute of flow rate, this translated to merely over 700 gallons per day of total water. We set to require about a 3rd of that.

The system is quite simple. We setup a solar panel to power a pump that's situated within the hamster bowl. During the day the pump comes on, if needed, and pumps water from the pool up to a holding tank of approximately 500 gallons. If the tank is full the pump will not come on. This is often triggered by a float switch inside the first holding tank that will tell the pump controller if the tank is full or not. Currently bear in mind this first tank is simply dirty water with bugs and all.

From this initial holding tank the water is gravity fed to a smaller tank stuffed with gravel and sand. This smaller tank has a float valve that only opens when the water is dwindling in that tank. The dirty water flows into the filter tank, also referred to as a slow sand filter, and slowly moves through the layers of sand and gravel. This movement polishes the water and eliminates 99.99% of all impurities. The slow filter will process almost fifteen gallons per hour or 360 gallons ow water per day. We tend to never use that much thus it never goes dry.

Once the water is cleaned via the slow sand filter it is gravity fed into the final holding tank. The top of this holding tank is simply above the outlet of the sand filter. Once the last holding tank is full, the water from the sand filter is unable to exit the filter tank thus causing the filter tank valve to seal. Once the filter tank valve is closed the dirty water holding tank fills up and triggers the float switch that turns off the solar pump. It is all terribly simple and terribly cost effective.

So this is how we turned our dirty ground water into refreshing usable drinking water for our house. You'll find slow sand filter designs on the net with watch videos on how they work on varied video sites. There are various manufactures for these types of filters but you'll make them just as well.

Richard Harington spends most of his time working to discover solutions to Dust Control , Haul Road Dust Control and other preservation and green projects on behalf of third world countries, not just for work but for pleasure as well.