When I was a child, my grandmother tied several layers of cloth over her kitchen water faucet to filter out sediments. That was our water filter, a home made water purifier, and thinking back, it's a wonder that we never were sickened by the spring water supply she used in her home, which was often contaminated by floods and upstream polluting by her dairy-farm neighbors. It used to be very common for people to make such home made water purifiers, and though the water at least looked cleaner, the method was very ineffective indeed.
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.
One of the problems with home made water purifiers is that they don't tell you when they are saturated with contaminants; on the other hand, commercial water filters usually do. If you keep using saturated filters without knowing it, you're not only getting un-decontaminated water; you're actually dissolving some of the previously-removed contaminants and getting a double dose. Unless you're using a distilled water system, you should assume that your home made water filter needs replacing, and that means you have to figure out your own saturation period.
Even if you use a distillation system or something else that supposedly removes all the contaminants from your water, you are likely to have a problem. For one thing, distillation removes even good minerals like iron, copper, and calcium, but it does not always remove chlorine, as chlorine is naturally a gas and will evaporate - and condense - right along with the water. In addition, distilled water that is not subsequently aerated will taste flat and lifeless, and your distillation system may add its own contaminants to your newly-purified water. You really need to know what you're doing.
For those who are still planning to build a home made water purifier, make sure that your filtration system has several layers: sand or diatomaceous earth, a layer of fiber or mesh, activated carbon, another layer of mesh, and then a third layer of diatomaceous earth. These filters work best if water is put through at pressure, after being allowed to settle. Once you've filtered your water, test it by letting a glass sit for a day or so to see if anything settles in the bottom or if the water gets cloudy. You can also send out samples to biological laboratories to have a thorough test done for microbes if you do not get your water from a municipal supply. Unless you're doing something very large scale, it's likely to be cheaper and easier to buy a premade filtration system.
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