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Home Made Water Purifiers: A Cost Effective Solution?

by: TrentBarrett
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Word Count: 538

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.

Home made water purifier instructions you'll find online are complex. They are often simple filters, but they are often more complex systems such as distillation. Still, there are some serious problems with the do-it-yourself approach to water filtration. Improperly filtered water can be a health hazard. It is worth of praise and understandable that you wish to save money by making your own filters, but you should recognize that if you do, you may spend just as much money as you otherwise would while also putting yourself and your family at risk.

First, home made water purifiers generally don't tell you when they can no longer remove contaminants. Most professional grade water purifiers have some system whereby they will tell you to change filters or clean the purifier. Except for distilled water, you should assume that your home made water filter will need to be replaced, so you have to determine what the maximum safe use time for it is yourself. If you don't change the filter when it's saturated with contaminants, the result could be worse than if you used no filter, as fresh water running through will dissolve some of the contaminants already in the filter and give you a double dose.

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.

If you're determined to do it yourself,a home made water purifier needs to have several layers of filtration in order to work effectively: sand or diatomatious earth, activated carbon, and layers of gauze or mesh to hold the filters in place. Water needs to be put through this filter at pressure. Then, at the end, you need to test the water yourself; the best way is to allow a glass of water to sit for a day or two and see what settles at the bottom or whether the water gets cloudy, and also test the water at biological laboratories for microbes and other things that can sicken you. It is likely to be cheaper and easier to just purchase a commercial system.

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