Home Made Water Purifiers: A Cost Effective Solution?

by: TrentBarrett
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In Africa, women who do not have a clean water supply have been taught to pour water from one pitcher into another, using several layers of cloths to strain out contaminants between. This home made water purifier has been effective at eliminating a lot of water-borne disease in this poor region of the world, but you must ask whether this technique is either effective or wise when applied to a Western water system. Most home made water filters are more complex and involved than this, of course, but they still lack the controls you'll find on commercial water purifiers.

Online, you can find dozens of plans for home made water purifiers, from very simple survival-based filters to actual water distillation systems. But if you go the do-it-yourself route, you may be introducing your own problems into your purified water. If you don't do it properly, you are wasting your time; improperly-purified water still contains contaminants and, depending on the source, can even kill you. In addition, you may find that creating your own home made water purifiers costs more money than just going out and buying one commercially.

You have to be aware that home made water purifiers do not tell you when they can no longer remove contaminants. This is very important, as if you don't change filters when they are saturated, the already-removed contaminants can actually dissolve in fresh water run through the filters and make your water even more contaminated. Commercial water purifiers almost always have a system that tells you when to change filters. For a home made filter, you'll need to assume specific times to change to ensure you don't recontaminate yourself.

If you use a home made water purifier system that you know removes all the contaminants, like a distillation system, you're still not going to get it right; if you take out everything, you're removing healthy minerals like fluoride, iron, copper, and calcium. While the levels of these are trace in most water supplies, they do make your water taste better and improve your health when you drink them. In addition, water that has been distilled tastes flat and lifeless, and most distillation systems add their own contaminants. And then there's chlorine; if the water supply you're using has chlorine in it, your distillation system is unlikely to get rid of that, while commercial filters will.

For those who are still planning to build a home made water purifier, make sure that your filtration system has several layers: sand or diatomaceous earth, a layer of fiber or mesh, activated carbon, another layer of mesh, and then a third layer of diatomaceous earth. These filters work best if water is put through at pressure, after being allowed to settle. Once you've filtered your water, test it by letting a glass sit for a day or so to see if anything settles in the bottom or if the water gets cloudy. You can also send out samples to biological laboratories to have a thorough test done for microbes if you do not get your water from a municipal supply. Unless you're doing something very large scale, it's likely to be cheaper and easier to buy a premade filtration system.

About the Author

This article was written by Trent Barrett, a writer for Best-Home-Water-Purifiers.com. You can visit their homepage to learn more about Home Water Purifiers.  

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