Can You Purify Water Just by Boiling It?

[quintessentone]

Thanks for any advice you can give.

You can bake the heck out of it, it's charcoal, just don't light it on fire unless you want a barbecue.

A bag is about 15 litres and I needed about 4 litres of charcoal, super good value and super light and heaps left.

Any smokey "flavour" is describing the taste of food after the smoke of the wood/charcoal has cooked it and I think those charcoals are not as fully burned as regular barbecue charcoal which has little smoke because of less resin. Not too sure but seems logical.

Basically, "natural untreated wood barbecue charcoal" is all you need and should be on the label for advertising and standards depending on your country. Same regarding wood from renewable sources etc. Eco is a huge selling force and no good seller would miss the opportunity to use it on packaging.

Keep any charcoal filter seperate from the 5 micron filter and bear in mind that they each work in different ways with charcoal doing particulates and chemical filtration and the micron filter only doing particulates. My house system also does chemicals so it gets filtered for that before it hits my micron filter.

The micron filter works by high pressure, the charcoal filter works by gravity. Incompatible in series, but use the water filtered through your micron filter to fill the charcoal filter. Sorted!

Keep It Simple and don't overcomplicate yourself into confusion. It's dusty grey face smashy-smashy, then soaky soaky in basically lemonade for a few days, then dry the nuts out of it and Voilà! Saves a bloody fortune and NO nasty chemicals used like so much "activated" charcoal on the market.

Have fun my dear Hydrator. Play with it like I did to come up with what suits you best. Keep us posted.

---

....and then wait for a charity organization to install a well in your village.

It never works, most charities only skim off the top.

So it seems pyrolysis (changes charcoal into biochar) is not recommended in a kitchen oven, only through David64's method, which I will try with a paint can or cookie tin method this Spring or Summer. It certainly seems easy enough.

Should it then be activated by soaking in lemon juice afterwards, then dried in the sun, or is the biochar naturally activated to attract chemicals to itself, as some have claimed?

Just to be on the prepper safe side, I will also buy a large bag of 100% natural charcoal from my local hardware store.

I bought a pH and bacterial testing kit, so in the near future I will collect runoff water from my backyard French drain, run it through my gravel/sand/pine needles/biochar filter of 3 layers thick, then put the water in plastic bottles to bake in the sun for up 48 hours then do a bacterial test on it to make sure all the baddies are dead.

I am limited capturing rainwater because my roof is made of asphalt tiles and it is not recommended capturing water with that type of roof because of bad chemicals, but I haven't researched whether or not the biochar can capture those types of chemicals or not. I think I will look into how to capture water in a standalone rain barrel or two adapted with a sloping top or something like that. But even rainwater, they say, should be boiled or left out in the sun in plastic bottles for up to 48 hours.

Water capture, filtration and storage are without a doubt the most concerning when one has a family and pets to keep alive and perhaps the neighbours too.