Bog gravel filtration: Water cleaned by Mother Nature (2015)
pondtrademag.com
pondtrademag.com
This processing drinking water.
The water comes in and the particulates within it carry a negative ion charge. The water passes over an agitator, and a combination of ferric chloride and some kind latex are mixed with the water.
The water then flows through a long channel. At this point the negative charged particles bind with the positive charged chemicals. The combinations then simply precipitate out in the long channel. At the end, small channels draw water off just the first few inches of the larger channel.
This water goes to a combination aggregate and sand filter. It’s not very deep, about 3 feet total for both.
The resulting water is 99+% pure now.
It moves on to a large activated carbon filter. We’re talking 10 feet deep. Like a water pitcher filter. This is a recent CA requirement, installed in 2005. Designed to remove some specific by products.
The water then goes through a large UV system to kill what’s left, and is finally injected with some chlorine. The chlorine is preventative to deal with anything that may potentially be introduced later in the system.
I don’t know when they intrythe UV part, but the way it’s laid out, seems like that came with the carbon filter system.
That means that prior to 2005, the aggregate and sand filter was considered good enough, augmented with the chlorine. But they never considered the chlorine as part of the purifying process, simply precautionary.
It was very interesting, and I thought pretty simple conceptually. The trick is the actual engineering of the actual plant and respective water system.
I found it interesting to learn that the large water tank near me, which roughly measured at 5M gallons is actually only 1/3rd above ground. It’s a 16M tank, one of the largest in the system.
The latex in this case is the flocculant, assist in binding together the microflocs formed by coagulation into larger, more stable aggregates known as flocs. Flocculants often work by bridging the particles through long chains of polymers, effectively linking the microflocs into larger clusters.
After the coagulation and flocculation process, the water usually enters a large settling basin where the flocs gradually settle to the bottom, resulting in clarified water.
In many parts of the world they do not add chlorine. Our water tastes and smells like a swimming pool in comparison.
Caveats - you need to ensure your well is deep enough to avoid surface contaminants, ours is about 180 feet deep. Also you need testing for new wells, as an example a few miles from us there is heavy arsenic concentrations that need to be filtered out.
In europe one can mostly dring good water from the tab. Only in some places (e.g. most of spain) chlorine is added and the difference is horrible. I could not drink that from the tap (and the spanish also buy bottled water as far as I know).
There is the Clean Water Act. But that only really covers navigable waters, or a lesser degree all surface water. But it doesn't protect ground water. Then there is the Safe Drinking Water Act which sets standards for how safe the water out of the tap has to be. But how do you get safe water if it's difficult to protect your water source? Chlorine is the cheap and effective answer.
If you want water mostly free of bacteria. Not if you want drinking water.
Apart from that, I can only shake my head. Because doing on your land freely, what you want is very much supported by my ideals - but those freedom should stop, where it directly affects other people outside your borders. Polluting the groundwater is obviously doing that.
I most certainly can smell it.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK579463/
"Most individuals are able to taste or smell chlorine in drinking-water at concentrations well below 5 mg/l, and some at levels as low as 0.3 mg/l."
Most Europeans will smell and taste the chlorine immediately, even in a coke in a fast food chain in the US where they mix that tap water in, or even just in ice cubes.
This conditioning works also the other way round. Read often that Americans usually find the tap water in Europe to be not "fresh", because of the missing chlorine.
I don't think there is any self-lying involved. People notice it the first time going and trying, certainly not because they have been subconsciously indoctrinated. Personally strongly confirm!
https://www.cokesolutions.com/content/dam/cokesolutions/us/d...
Restaurants (at least in the US) are, IMO quite sensibly, required to sanitize dishes between uses. This can be done using chlorine or similar chemicals in a “low temperature dishwasher” or using heat in a “high temperature dishwasher”. The former leaves a disgusting residue that can take quite a while to degrade by itself. Those freshly washed, still wet plastic cups next to the drink machine, in a restaurant with a low-temp dishwasher, will make anything you put in them taste like chlorine or, worse, nitrogen chlorides. But they won’t give you nasty foodborne infections.
You can somewhat mitigate this by rinsing the cup before filling it.
(There is also some evidence that rinse aid, which intentionally leaves a residue on cups and dishes, is quite bad for you.)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009167492...
And here’s the ingredient list for a major brand of residential rinse aid:
https://www.rbnainfo.com/product.php?productLineId=654
It sure looks like the same stuff.
If you have low enough water hardness and TDS, then rinse aid serves no purpose and you can just not use it. Even with higher hardness, the main benefit is just aesthetic.
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36464527/#:~:text=The%20alco....
[1] https://smartlabel.pg.com/en-us/00037000982067.html
[2] https://giantfoodstores.com/product/finish-jet-dry-3-in-1-ri...
If think people can't tell the difference, you're lying to yourself.
The tank may well have two sets of pipes to service the closest homes, some closer to the surface with others buried deeper(assuming those homes are even serviced by that tank). But I’m less than a quarter mile away and well below the bottom of the tank.
It’s steeper here than it looks.
They say they can move water from anywhere to anywhere in the system through a combination of pumps and gravity, but all consumer delivery pressure is gravity based. The water pressure at someone’s house is based on their distance in height from their servicing reservoir.
If they were to move water from the lowest part to the highest, it would take 8 lifts of the water. Electricity is a significant expense to the system so minimizing pumping, for any reason, is a priority for them.
An interesting trivia bit is that, according to them, where our system has 8 lifts, the CA aqueduct has a total of 11 in its system.
In which case, I wonder if you could make a more space-efficient version by producing biofilms, or something similar, on an industrial scale. Whether in bioreactors optimised for film production, or just by making great sheets of agarose gel or something.
That's some good advice.
Nowadays too many students put their chips only on safe-bet-projects during their study, which traditionally would be the one time in their lives where they could really try and fail etc.
Sure a lot of that is due to economic constraints, which have gotten catastropically worse in the past decades, but trying out things that you know could fail means you are operating at the edge of your abilities, rather than in an area that is safely covered by them. And traditionally that is where the interesting lessons are learned.
Learning from others mistakes is a good thing as well, but for that they also have to try things that aren't safe bets.
"If you’ve made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish both kinds of result."
If you are living on a trust fund, sure, give something risky a try.
Artists that don't risk things during their studies will have a hard time producing interesting things.
Bog filters work on a much larger scale, but sponge filters have been replacing "hang on back" filters in the aquarium hobby pretty rapidly over the last couple of years. It also helps that sponge filters only cost about $10 and have no moving parts
What I am now interested in is the construction of spring boxes and finding and digging a natural spring from a wooded area. I used to do this when I was younger, but I've found that while the internet generally has all kinds of new techniques that I wasn't aware of, unfortunately, I haven't found a great source of info for this topic yet.