How I Turned Filthy Ground water into wholesome drinking water

Some years back I decided to buy some land within the hills of Texas. It was rough land, all rock with abrupt cliffs and bottomless valleys. The elevation of the property put us many feet higher than the water table therefore making it rather expensive to bore a well. But the property had one factor going for it. Somewhere in that hill was a massive abyss that may capture the rain water, when it rained.

Currently this water was not gushing out of the hill, it really only came out at roughly half a gallon per minute. There was no manner to tap into the source therefore we were stuck with the slow flow. We ultimately gave the system a name; we named it the hamster bowl.

The hamster bowl finishes up as a small pool of water roughly 300 feet from our abode. There is grass, mud, fish, snakes in addition to bugs swimming all in that water. The deer, hogs, turkey and other animals return to drink there too. Now it was our turn to drink from the hamster bowel as well.

The target was to turn unhealthy water into good water without using high pressure or expensive filters and such. Therefore we were restricted to the ways we might utilize. The other drawback was that the flow rate was such that we were limited as to how much water we may possibly harvest from the bowl without hurting the natural system. During normal conditions we were obtaining roughly half a gallon per minute of flow rate, this translated to just over 700 gallons per day of total water. We decided to take about a third of that.

The system is rather simple. We setup a solar panel to power a pump that's positioned within the hamster bowl. Throughout the day the pump comes on, if required, and pumps water from the pool up to a holding tank of nearly 500 gallons. If the tank is full the pump will not come on. This can be triggered by a float switch inside the first holding tank that will tell the pump controller if the tank is full or not. Currently remember this 1st tank is just dirty water with bugs and all.

From this initial holding tank the water is gravity fed to a smaller tank stuffed with gravel and sand. This smaller tank incorporates a float valve that only opens when the water is dwindling in that tank. The dirty water flows into the filter tank, also known as a slow sand filter, and slowly moves through the layers of sand and gravel. This movement polishes the water and takes 99.99% of all impurities. The slow filter will deal with almost 15 gallons per hour or 360 gallons ow water per day. We tend to never use that much thus it never goes dry.

Once the water is cleaned via the slow sand filter it is gravity fed into the last holding tank. The topmost of this holding tank is simply on top of the outlet of the sand filter. Once the last holding tank is full, the water from the sand filter is unable to leave the filter tank therefore causing the filter tank valve to close up. Once the filter tank valve is closed the unclean water holding tank fills up and triggers the float switch that turns off the solar pump. It's all terribly easy and terribly cost effective.

So this is how we turned our unclean ground water into clear usable drinking water for our house. You can find slow sand filter designs on the net in addition to watch videos on how they work on various video sites. There are many manufactures for these types of filters but you'll be able to create them just as well.

Article Source: http://www.gamblingarticlessite.net

Richard Harington spends most of his time working to find solutions to soil stabilization and other conservation and green projects not only for work but for gratification as well.

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