Harvesting H2o (2 page)

Keep in mind, contaminated water can infect your body even if you don’t drink it. All it has to do is come into contact with something that you do ingest, such as food plates, silverware, drinking vessels, your toothbrush, the little cup you use for toothbrush water, or even just washing your hands and face with it. This is especially true with bacterial and viral infections. It is important to clean your eating and drinking utensils with purified water only, and only use purified water for personal hygiene purposes, including washing your face and hands.

By now, you should have a better understanding of the dangers of drinking untreated wild water, even if it comes from a well (especially a shallow or unsealed well) or a spring. Unless you are collecting rainwater via a sanitized container and consuming it immediately, freshwater cannot be considered safe for consumption until it has been tested or treated and stored in sanitary tanks. Fortunately, purifying your off-grid drinking water supply is a fairly easy thing to do at home.

Purifying Water at Home

There are three basic methods of making fresh water safe for human consumption: Heat, Chemical Treatment, and Filtering. Which method you should use (including potentially combining methods), depends on the clarity and quality of the water you are harvesting, and practicality considerations based on your situation. Most homesteaders simply pump filtered deep-well water into their home via an electric-powered pump, and this does the job nicely in most areas.

My family has a fishing cabin in Montana. The well water in Montana is some of the most wonderful-tasting stuff I have ever had the pleasure of drinking. It is known to be safe straight from the well in that region, but homebuilders these days will usually put a filtration system in place, usually in the homes themselves, under the sinks. The refrigerator we have there dispenses water and ice and includes a filter in the water line. As mentioned in the last chapter, the main concern with well water is protozoa, which modern water filters effectively remove.

Commercially-dug wells are deep, usually a couple hundred feet or more depending on the geology of your area. Septic tanks are always placed on a downslope from the house and well, in an effort to keep heavy rains and mild floods from allowing the septic tank contents to contaminate the water supply. This is what happens (on a larger scale) when there are natural disasters in underdeveloped areas. Normally, it’s not much of a concern for homesteaders, as septic tanks are sealed from above, as are wells. The ground is a natural filter, and quite effective. Septic tanks are buried just beneath the surface, so there is usually a large layer of earth separating it from the groundwater. This is also why you don’t need to worry about being downhill from a neighbor’s septic tank, assuming some discernible acreage lies between you.

Rain barrels (and the like) are quite another matter. In order to collect rain in a barrel, it must come into contact with contaminated surfaces. Many rain barrel systems collect water off of rooftops via rain gutters. This is obviously dirty water by the time it is gathered in the barrel, often containing large debris such as leaves, dirt, and even pieces of rusty metal broken off from the rain gutter. As it is stored, it only gets worse, being a prime breeding ground for bacterial infections. Water harvested in this manner is normally only used for irrigation purposes. It can be made reasonably safe for drinking if need be, but the process is more involved than simply filtering it.

Purifying dirty water, such as that from rain barrels or muddy standing water, can be done in a three-step process. The first step is to use a coarse filter to remove all large, visible matter from the water and give it a degree of clarity. We have seen Bear Grylls do this on television using his shirt as a water filter. I even saw one episode where he was in the Utah desert filling his canteen with water dripping from underneath a rock formation, claiming the rock filtered the water. One of these days, we are going to hear about Bear Grylls being in the hospital with a pathogen infection. (He also has a nasty habit of eating raw trout he catches in the wild, which is a good way to get tapeworm.)

After the coarse filter removes the large impurities, I would then either boil or home-distill the water. If boiled, I would then run the water through a fine filter (even a coffee filter works for this). If distilled, the water will be safe for drinking without need of further filtering, assuming the collection vessel for the still is sanitary. If better tasting water is desired at that point, it can be aerated, salted, and chilled.

Heat

Heat is the most reliable and effective treatment for water. All living organisms (including all pathogens) die when water reaches temperatures of about 185 degrees Fahrenheit, but that temperature should be held for at least ten minutes. Also, effective sterilization temperatures and holding times will depend somewhat on your elevation and the barometric pressure. The higher you are and/or the lower the barometric pressure, the higher the temperature and/or holding time needs to be.

To be safe, just boil the water. Boiling kills everything for certain, regardless of the weather or your location, and the holding time only needs to be about a minute. Water boils at round 212 degrees Fahrenheit, but your mileage will vary. Fortunately, you don’t need a thermometer and can visibly see when water boils. Longer boiling times are of no additional benefit, and just needlessly reduce your yield. The drawback to boiling is it removes all taste from the water, and of course there is also the challenge of sanitary storage after boiling. For that reason, water which is purified by boiling should generally be consumed soon thereafter, or combined with a filtration system before consumption.

To add taste back to boiled water, you can aerate it after it cools. Putting oxygen back into the water will improve its taste, but water cannot absorb oxygen at high temperatures. Stir it vigorously with a sanitized spoon (for example, a metal one which was emerged in the boiling water), or seal it in a sterile container and shake the heck out of it. Another option is to use the boiled water to make Tang with and pretend you are an astronaut, getting a nice dose of Vitamin C in the process – but of course, you would need to have Tang stockpiled in order to do that, which defeats the purpose of off-grid living for many people.

One large reserve of safe drinking water most people have is in their hot water heater. In an emergency situation, this will come in handy, as we are talking about at least 40 gallons here. The water inside a residential water heater has been sufficiently heated to become sanitized, has been flowing through regularly, and is housed in a sanitary environment. To access it, you will need to first disconnect the power source to the unit, turning off the gas or disconnecting the electrical connections. Then, you can use the valve at the bottom of the tank to dispense the water as needed.

Be aware that the water inside a waterbed mattress is
not
safe to drink, and neither is the water inside your toilet tanks (unless first boiled and then preferably filtered as well).

Also, heat treatment will not sanitize water which has been contaminated by radioactivity or harmful chemicals.

Chemical Treatment

Municipal water supplies are made safe for human consumption by chemical treatment. It is the only practical large-scale solution. As an off-grid homesteader, this may be an option you want to look into, assuming you have a reliable source for obtaining the chemicals.

Plain old household bleach is the most common chemical used to treat water. It is also known as
liquid chlorine
, the same stuff that keeps swimming pools clean. Swimming pool water has been treated with much too much chlorine to be able to drink it, however. A little bleach goes a long way! The recommended treatment is only half a teaspoon for 5 gallons of clear water, or twice that if the water is cloudy. Make sure the water is warm when you add the bleach, as chlorine is ineffective at chilled temperatures. Test the treatment by smelling it. You should be able to detect a faint bleach/chlorine smell about an hour after adding it, which tells you the water is now safe. If the water started as cloudy, it should now be clear. If you can’t smell any bleach at all, or if the water has not cleared, go ahead and give it another dose of bleach, same amount. If you still cannot detect the bleach smell after another hour goes by, discard the water, as it is too infected for the chlorine to sanitize it. Always start with the smaller dosage of bleach when doing this, and only double it if needed. Give the water some time and warm it up to over 65 degrees Fahrenheit before treating it, if the water is cool.

The most practical way to store chlorine bleach is in
Calcium Hypochlorite
granule form. This is a dry powder you can purchase at swimming pool supply stores. It is inexpensive and has a much longer shelf life than liquid bleach. It also has much better storage efficiency, taking up less space. You can make liquid bleach from it if you desire by mixing one ounce of it with one pint of water, but you can also sanitize your drinking water directly by adding just a tiny pinch of the stuff directly into a gallon of water, same procedure as sanitizing with liquid bleach. Make sure the water is warm.

Another effective water sanitizing chemical is iodine. This requires a slightly higher dosage than liquid bleach; use 8 drops per half-gallon for clear water, double that if the water is cloudy. The water needs to be warm as well, and the waiting time is approximately an hour. With iodine, the smell test is not available as it is with bleach, so you just have to trust it. If the water started as cloudy, it should be clear. Do not double the dosage, however, if the water fails to clear. Simply discard it. Some health risks are associated with long-term iodine exposure, and pregnant women / nursing mothers should avoid it entirely, as should those with thyroid conditions. For these reasons, iodine should be considered a short-term solution only.

Stores selling water purification tablets are simply selling you either chlorine or iodine in a tablet form. In my opinion, this is a fancy-packaged way of marketing inexpensive chemicals to the gullible. In addition, these tablets have a relatively short shelf life. They are obviously not a practical solution for off-grid homesteaders. Go with the
Calcium Hypochlorite
granules if you want to store up water purification chemicals.

Also, chemical treatment will not sanitize water which has been contaminated by radioactivity or harmful chemicals.

Filtering

Filtering drinking water is the most practical solution, as we have already touched upon somewhat, as long as the water is from a reasonably clean source such as a well. Modern water filters are very fine and will remove everything except certain viruses. Fortunately, viruses are not typically an issue with well water; bad well water is usually the result of a protozoan infection – and filters are effective in removing protozoa. In addition, filters will remove most harmful chemicals and even radioactive particles. Therefore, viruses can be removed by chemical treatment and then the chemicals used to treat the water can be filtered out of it.

In disaster survival situations, it is almost always human waste contaminating drinking water supplies which results in health epidemics. In these situations, you need to use multiple treatment methods in order to be safe, especially routines which involve boiling the water. If I were forced to consume water known to be significantly bad, I would first coarse-filter it through some kind of cloth (such as a cotton towel), then boil it, then treat it with a small dose of bleach, then run it through a fine filter.

Commercial water filters that are placed within residential plumbing lines require an outside energy force in order to work - usually either electricity or water pressure itself. A backup hand-pump for your well will ensure that you can always draw water from it, and also be able to create enough pressure to run it through your inline filter. Electric power can be supplied through the use of a portable solar generator, and/or rechargeable batteries which are kept charged by a portable solar generator while the sun is shining. So, there are two methods to make sure your inline water filters will always be usable.

Portable water filters, on the other hand, are either gravity-fed or function by a built-in hand pump, so do not rely upon an outside energy force. These are popular with disaster relief organizations and missionaries in third-world countries, especially the gravity-fed type (which are stainless steel table-top appliances weighing ten pounds or less without water). They resemble a coffee dispenser with a spout at the bottom. Reasonably-clear water is poured into the top. It is filtered inside the unit and good drinkable water comes out the spout at the bottom – simple, just like making coffee or tea. The two most widely-sold models of portable water filters are manufactured by companies
AquaRain
and
British Berkefeld
.

However you treat your water at home, remember to use the purified water when brushing your teeth or washing your face. (Most people use way too much toothpaste, just a small dollop is sufficient. Better yet, use baking soda to brush your teeth half of the time.)

Build Your Own Water Filter

One of the unattractive aspects of purifying water by filtering it is the dependency upon an industrialized society to continue to produce the replacement filters. Many off-gridders live in expectation of a total collapse of society, which may include a complete cessation of the manufacturing industries. Indeed, the very idea of living off the grid is to become self-sustainable, or at least self-sustainable enough to be able to trade with other local homesteaders for needed supplies.

To that end, you will probably be interested in learning about the properties of charcoal and silver. Many portable water filters incorporate both silver and charcoal elements. These are raw materials which can be stockpiled, or possibly even produced, by a community of homesteaders.