water purifier

by jenish
(chennai)

Reality Filtering by Your Mind and the Earth - Get ready to hack your own brain and forget everything you've been told. You're about to discover how to really own your choices, from turning swamp water into a drink to outsmarting nature.

Jenish says: I did this experiment in my school days. Take a vessel with a hole in the bottom and stack the vessel layer by layer with fine sand, small pebbles, gravels and cotton. When we pour mud water into the vessel the various layer retain back the impurities present in the liquid and helps it purify.

Barry's Response - Interesting, Jenish. Although the sketch I included above is not identical to the model you describe, the principle is the same. Various layers in a multiple screening water filter carry out varying cleansing jobs, resulting in a substantially purified water outflow.

Some layers strain out the largest particles, leaving the smaller ones for the subsequent layers to remove. In succession, they all remove progressively smaller particles, until the final layer, the charcoal, which filters the finest particulates. Air filters can work the same way.

Commercial water purifiers use the same principle, to a degree. The ones I have used normally start with municipal tap water and have no large particles to deal with, as that has been handled at the processing plant. Chlorine was added to prevent the growth of bacterial cultures in the water during transport, and the job of the charcoal is thus to remove the chlorine at the point of use.

As a result, we have clean, safe and fresh-tasting water after passing through this set-up.

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Analysis of Water Purifiers

It's not just about buying a machine here; it's about agency. When I'm stuck in the woods or when the city's pipes fail, can I survive? They want a DIY survival hack that doubles as a science project.

Jenish's experiment satisfies this by giving them a recipe. It feels like a dusty manual, though. The bucket needs to be connected to the sky to attract and retain visitors. As a water purifier sieves out mud, the atmosphere sieves out radiation and dust. It's important to make the student feel like an inventor, not just a reader.

Revolutionary counter-narrative

It's fun to scream that the sky is falling and the water is poisoned. Let's look at the math. Water is purified by the Earth. Through evaporation, the sun lifts 505,000 cubic km of water into the air every year. Nature does that to get rid of salt and gunk.

While the mainstream says we're destroying the planet, I say look at its resilience. Nature has filters we haven't even named. The Earth has been warmer and wetter before humans even invented the wheel, say skeptics. The pollution we see might just be the Earth rearranging its furniture. It's important to steward our water because it's a devine gift, but we shouldn't panic all the time. Seeing CO2 levels as plant food instead of poison can be insightful.

A look at the filter's physics

So you wanna build a water purifier? Get your gear. Think about sorting atoms instead of saving the world.

Sand and charcoal are like a gauntlet. The sand acts like a bouncer at a club, pulling the water down. The big, ugly mud chunks get rejected. Charcoal comes next. It's basically burned wood with a thousand little pockets. It uses a process called adsorption (that's ad with a "d," not ab). Chemically, it grabs toxins and smells.

I'm an air quality consultant. Calvin Consulting models how stuff in the air drifts (like PM2.5 or PM10). Water filters and air filters are cousins. Both rely on the fact that big things can't fit through small holes.

What if we stopped using plastic filters and started using sound instead? Imagine a water purifier that vibrates impurities out of the liquid with high-frequency bass notes (say, ~200 Hz). Why can't we use that vibration to shake the lead and mercury out of our drinks? That's the kind of invention that changes everything.

Purity: The Real Deal

Even the Bible talks about where we come from as dust of the earth. Dirt won't kill you; it builds your immune system. Let's not let the consensus scare you into thinking every drop of rain is a chemical bomb. Mountains and valleys filter the Earth's water. It's just a matter of copying its homework.

What's up?

What would you use to build a filter using only items in your backpack? Would it work, or would you drink mud? Comment below with your craziest survival ideas!