polluted water

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DustyDog
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Joined: Fri May 23, 2014 7:23 pm
Location: Cumbria

polluted water

Post by DustyDog »

Reading issues raised in this topic and it has made me think about my water. At my home we have to drive over a bridge because we have a river at the end of our drive, the river is polluted with lead, zinc and other nasties, does anyone have any ideas as to how we could purify it enough to drink in a SHTF situation???
Up in the wet South Lakeland
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Brambles
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Location: West Midlands

Re: polluted water

Post by Brambles »

In the short term, distillation (although this does acidify water), reverse osmosis, carbon filtering or ion exchange. Long term I have looked into plants, specifically sedge reeds. This documant is a bit dry(excuse the pun!) but does explain everything.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/do ... 1&type=pdf
Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass, it's about learning to dance in the rain~anon
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sethorly
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Re: polluted water

Post by sethorly »

Distillation (like Brambles said) seems to me to be the best way if SHTF of getting pure H2O.

This involves boiling or evaporating water, condensing the water gas on a cold surface as it rises from the liquid, and collecting the condensed (now liquid again) water. The impurities are left in the original container.

For instance, if you hold a slanted metal tray above your boiling kettle you'll get water droplets on the tray which can run off into a container; this run-off water is supposedly the pure stuff. However, when boiling water you don't just get water gas, you get steam (water vapour, which is very small water droplets ie. liquid not gas) which will still contain the dissolved impurities. With proper distillation equipment I'm pretty certain you can stop this as water vapour can be separated from the water gas.

Instead of boiling, you could use something like a solar still, which uses evaporation rather than boiling to do the job, and probably greatly reduces the amount of (impure) water vapour. (Evaporation and boiling are pretty much the same thing, albeit the water molecules are escaping the liquid at different rates.)

I haven't come across a practical solution to fully purifying water yet, but it's a prepping goal I haven't addressed yet.
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