How I Turned Unclean Ground water into clean drinking water

A few years back I decided to shop for some land within the hills of Texas. It had been rough land, all rock with extreme cliffs and deep valleys. The elevation of the property put us several feet on top of the water table therefore making it rather costly to bore a well. But the property had one thing going for it. Somewhere in that hill was a massive abyss that will capture the rain water, while it rained.

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

The hamster bowl finishes up as a tiny pool of water approximately 300 feet from our home. There is leaves, filth, fish, snakes as well as bugs swimming all in that water. The deer, hogs, turkey and additional animals come to drink there too. Currently it was our turn to drink from the hamster bowel as well.

The target was to turn bad water into good water without using high pressure or high dollar filters and such. Thus we were limited to the methods we may utilize. The other drawback was that the flow rate was such that we were restricted as to how much water we may possibly harvest from the bowl without hurting the natural arrangement. During normal conditions we were obtaining roughly half a gallon per minute of flow rate, this translated to merely over 700 gallons per day of total water. We determined to take about a 3rd of that.

The system is quite simple. We setup a solar panel to power a pump that is located within the hamster bowl. During the day the pump comes on, if required, and pumps water from the pool up to a holding tank of around five hundred gallons. If the tank is full the pump will not come on. This can be triggered by a float switch inside the first holding tank that will tell the pump controller if the tank is full or not. Now remember this initial tank is simply dirty water with bugs and all.

From this first holding tank the water is gravity fed to a smaller tank filled with gravel and sand. This smaller tank features a float valve that only opens when the water is dwindling in that tank. The dirty water flows into the filter tank, conjointly known as a slow sand filter, and slowly moves through the layers of sand and gravel. This movement polishes the water and takes 99.99% of all impurities. The slow filter can handle approximately fifteen gallons per hour or 360 gallons ow water per day. We tend to never use that much so 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 just 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 unclean water holding tank fills up and triggers the float switch that turns off the solar pump. It is all terribly easy and terribly cost effective.

Therefore this is how we turned our dirty ground water into refreshing usable drinking water for our house. You'll be able to find slow sand filter designs on the web along with watch videos on how they work on numerous video sites. There are a number of manufactures for these types of filters however you'll create them just as well.

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Richard Harington spends most of his time working to find solutions to soil stabilization and alternative conservation and green projects not only for work but for recreation as well.

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