How I Turned Filthy Ground water into wholesome drinking water

A few years back I decided to buy some land in the hills of Texas. It absolutely was rough land, all rock with steep cliffs and deep valleys. The elevation of the property put us several feet higher than the water table therefore making it rather expensive to drill a well. However the property had one thing going for it. Somewhere in that hill was a large empty space that might capture the rain water, while it rained.

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

The hamster bowl ends up as a little pool of water roughly 300 feet from our cottage. There is plants, dirt, fish, snakes as well as bugs swimming all in that water. The deer, hogs, turkey and other animals return 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 expensive filters and such. Therefore we were limited to the strategies we may employ. The added downside was that the flow rate was such that we were limited on how much water we could harvest from the bowl while not hurting the natural system. During normal circumstances we were getting almost half a gallon per minute of flow rate, this translated to just over 700 gallons per day of total water. We determined to require about a 3rd of that.

The system is very simple. We setup a solar panel to power a pump that's situated within the hamster bowl. Throughout the day the pump comes on, if needed, and pumps water from the pool up to a holding tank of almost 500 gallons. If the tank is full the pump can not come back on. This can be triggered by a float switch within the primary holding tank that will tell the pump controller if the tank is full or not. Now keep in mind this 1st tank is simply dirty water with bugs and all.

From this first holding tank the water is gravity fed to a smaller tank crammed 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, conjointly known as a slow sand filter, and slowly moves through the layers of sand and gravel. This movement polishes the water and removes 99.99% of all impurities. The slow filter will process almost fifteen gallons per hour or 360 gallons ow water per day. We have a tendency to never use that much thus it never goes dry.

Once the water is cleaned via the slow sand filter it's gravity fed into the last holding tank. The topmost of this holding tank is just above the outlet of the sand filter. Once the final holding tank is full, the water from the sand filter is unable to exit the filter tank thus causing the filter tank valve to close. 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 straightforward and terribly cost effective.

So this is how we turned our unclean ground water into spanking new 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 however you can create them just as well.

Article Source: http://gamblingarticlessite.com

Richard Harington spends most of his time working to find solutions to dust control and other conservation and green projects not only for work but for pleasure as well.

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