Posted by zog
on August 12, 2009, 11:08 pm
In a combination of the economy souring and water'drinker awareness, sales of bottled water are dropping. Environmentalist cite the example of all the throw away plastic bottles used, scientists say that the bottled water is just someone else's tap water, and consumers are just balking at paying such a high price.
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2009/08/12/bottled-water-rip/
I agree, most of the time buying bottled water is just dumb. Get a permanent canteen/water sipper of choice, filter your tap water and be done with it.
We use a multi stage sort of cobjob water filtration system here for our well water (and we just got a brandy new pump the other day, glad to report). First in the well house proper is a cotton string wrapped around plastic tube sort of pre filter unit that goes in the waterline from the pressure tank to the house. This gets the big chunks out. Ours came from Ace hardware and costs 20 bucks, very easy to install if you have PVC piping, just cut out a section and glue in this thing, the filters screw off and on the bottom (you replace the internal element). Replacable filters are around $4 apiece, and yep, they get gunked up. Just running the water direct you can't see the gunk, but over time you'll see how much gets trapped. Looking at it, in a pinch if you couldn't get replacement filters, there would be nothing stopping you from stripping off the old gunked with sediment and various nasty stuff string from the plastic tube inner liner and just wrapping it in a clean white towel. Then just swap out the towels once in awhile and wash them.
Next stage from the tap inside the house in the kitchen from the tap is through a cheap Britta cannister filter, available most anyplace. This gets finer particles plus being carbon removes a lot of chemical crud that might be there. That water in turn goes into a gravity feed Big Berkey with the white ceramic finger elements, this gets any remaining microorganisms that might be present.
The final stage is an identical Big Berkey, but that one has the compressed black activated charcoal "fingers". After that, drink it up! It's about as clean as you can get water. Might sound a little overkill, but who knows what's in ground water anymore, and city water still has a lot of stuff in it you don't need to drink either, even after it is processed. Once we got used to the procedure, it's just automatic now, while walking through kitchen, just dump something from one to the other in sequence, don't even notice it as a chore anymore.
There are more expensive and more automatic solutions, but this works for us. What do you do for your drinking water?
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