Water Filtration

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     Every Survivalist/Prepper should know how to filter out muddy water to be drinkable! My daughter wanted to see if she could take water from the mud puddle and filter it. First we youtubed some videos and researched 'Water Filtration For Kids' and found lots of good info.  Then she went outside and got water from the mud puddle she had splashed in all day. This is what it looked like:

     Not a very pretty sight! I asked my daughter what she thought we should do next. She wanted to see what it would look like if we waited. Her theory was if our soil samples from the Soil Sample Project settled and cleared the water a little, than maybe the same thing would happen if we left the muddy water sit for a little while. So we waited. 

      After just one hour it settled quite a bit, but, we wanted to see if it would clear up on its own if we let it sit overnight.

     It did not completely clear. She saw a slight separation in the jar about mid way.  I asked her what she wanted to do next, and she decided to wait. 

      In 48 hours the super fine dirt had settled in the bottom of the jar on top of the other dirt. At this time, my daughter got out her science journal and documented what she observed. We decided we would wait to see what would happen next. Unfortunately, we had to make a sudden trip out of town and had to leave our project where it sat in the bathroom window.  My daughter had worried about her project the whole time, 'Momma, it was already starting to get green!' We came back 2 days later to this...

And that really does not look to bad until we got close up and really looked... 

 You really can't tell by this photo, but the film actually looked... FLUFFY....

and what the heck was this? 

She decided to filter it anyways. 

The first filtration she tried was to pour 

the water through coffee filters alone. 

This is what was removed.

This is what she ended up with. Not too bad! :)

     She looked at me and said, 'But can we drink it?' I didn't know! But I highly doubted it! So back to Google we went to do some research. We found out you need something to kill out the tiny micro organisms and bacteria that might be living in it. We decided to try the rock, sand, and activated charcoal method. She cut a 2 liter bottle in half and placed the top of the bottle upside down and into the lower half. Then she placed coffee filters into the bottom and layered the charcoal, rocks and sand. 

     It seemed the more we filtered it, the more yellow it became. The one on the left is our filtered water. The one on the right is water from our tap. HUGE difference in color. AND it smelled like pee! Why would it smell like pee? We consulted a group I am in on facebook and they asked what kind of charcoal we used. Well.... apparently all charcoals are not the same, and the charcoal we were supposed to use was activated charcoal, not Daddy's charcoal he makes us grilled pork chops with. Whoops! It was suggested we use bleach to kill out any microorganisms and bacteria. 

Now that is better! We did not try to drink it. The whole pee smell thing completely ruined it for us. (and honestly, I was not sure how safe it would be. Can't risk my baby's life in the pursuit of survival.) 

SIDE NOTES:   More research is being done to figure out how to be able to take puddle water and make it drinkable. That was the whole point in the first place! An observation my daughter made was we ended up with a fraction of the water we started with.  She was amazed at the amount of water that was lost in the process and came to the conclusion that the coffee filters soaked up too much of the water to be useful. Did you notice my daughter was not in the pictures doing the project? That is because she asked if she could 'document' the project on her own this time. :) My baby is a researcher and knows to document! 

Love this topic and want to see a little of what we researched? 

http://pbskids.org/zoom/activities/sci/waterfilter.html

Preppedandprepared.com is no longer available, but you can still find PK on her own You Tube channel. 

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