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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.

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 are determined to make your own home made water purifier, make sure you get a kit that helps you do it properly. Any good distillation system will use a multiple-filter system. Water should sit for a while to let the precipitates fall to the bottom, then be run through filtered layers, first of sand or diatomaceous earth, then a layer of activated carbon, and finally a second layer of diatomaceous earth. Each filter should be separated from the others by a layer of gauze or mesh fine enough to keep the layers separate. The best systems will force water through the filter at pressure. Check your system when you've run some water through by allowing a glass of filtered water to sit for a day or two. Are there still precipitates? Does the water turn cloudy? Also, have the water tested for biological impurities. You often can't see microbes, but that doesn't mean they are not there and will not make you sick! In most cases, you'll find it is cheaper and easier to simply purchase a commercial system, where everything has been pre-tested for you.

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.

Home Made Water Purifiers: A Cost Effective Solution?

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