Treating river water

G'day Keith, I wouldn't be trying to treat river water to make it safe or palatable.
You could boil it to make it safe..palatability wont be altered. Washing water would not
need to be treated. I would carry water to drink & use the river for other requirements.
I would be fearful of pumping it into tanks..the sediments will settle, algaes will grow,
& tastes be hard to remove. If you have to carry it I would use 20L drums. Treatment ? I don't know..never had reason to do it...cheers....oldbaz.

Hi Keith

As said above - if possible it's probably not the best idea to pump river water into tanks. Sediment, chemicals, faecal matter - yuk. You could try using one of these to make it safe for drinking...expensive and time consuming, but they appear to work:

http://www.lifesaversystems.com/lifesaver-products/lifesaver-jerrycan

Cheers

Chris

Considering what has happened overseas and which could easily happen here, it may be a good insurance policy to have some form of water treatment.
When a disaster happens the first emergency is to get safe drinking water.

Honky

I would not be using any of those chemicals, or any other chemicals :)

We are lucky in Aus in that the old golden rule still applies... If it is clear and running, it is safe...But these days some common sense is needed too ;)

The answer to your question is, yes it can be done. But the realistic answer is, yes it can be done but not for mobile applications.

The filter system needed...believe it or not, will be bigger than your van. I looked into this question maybe 15 years ago (might be 12 years ago). The answer I got from a qualified and licenced plumber specialising in dam water filtration, was that to filter water from the dam to make it "town" quality, the filter would be 30 foot long, 4 foot deep and 3 foot wide.

There is a bloke (well, a guy, cos he is a yank) on Youtube showing how to make a filter using a couple of those 20lt builders buckets. It is only good for loo flushing and washing, but it is clear and clean water.

Hi Keith,

Have you looked into maybe fitting a second tank for river water and keeping the original for drinking water.
It is surprising how cheap they are and how little room they take up.
As far as chemical treatments go I don't think I would like to drink water treated with any of the above products.

We use river water all the time.
Have a 200L water tank similar to this unit http://tinyurl.com/n8a8sxn The tank we have was cheaper with better outlet so look around.
Pump the water up from the river using a Taifu 240V submersible solenoid pump from the 600W inverter. Pump has up to 100M head.
Depending on the turbidity of the water will use alum as a deflocculant if severe and high clay content. If turbidity is low rely on domestic unscented bleach.
These two documents are required reading:
http://docs.health.vic.gov.au/docs/doc/6AD926C39AAB851BCA257AA7001CA1A2/$FILE/nonpotablewater-guide.pdf Carry this document with me laminated.

http://www.health.vic.gov.au/foodsafety/downloads/1_guidelines_report.pdf
Excellent background to water treatment and definitely worth reading.

Take note:
Do not use under any circumstances pool chlorine or chlorine that contains isocyanuric acid.

do you really need to?

I would drink river water in a heart beat if I was in a bear grylls situation

otherwise id really try and avoid it

When doing multi day bushwalking people either play Russian roulette and drink it straight, put it through a hand pump filter (hard yakka for small amount, but good) and or use water purfication tablets
There are two types of water purfication tablets, the cheap ones (iodine/chlorine based?) and then dearer ones from a German company which cost the equivalent of 70c/Litre and are hardly noticeable even in rainwater. They don't improve the taste, but make it much safer.
Likewise you can get UV light steri pens for treating water 1L at a time.

So for drinking water if it wasn't boiled for at least 5 minutes, I'd be using those tablets in your actual drinking water.
When using a CT you "waste" most of your water just washing up and cleaning your body. You needn't treat that much ater with those tablets.

I'd be kaving a Jerry can or two for drinking water and use your CT tank for washing cleaning water, that ought to prevent the need for any additives.

Like Andrew, we use river water all the time.
Chlorinate it followed by active carbon filtration and it will be safe and taste OK (better than the water at home).
Avoid cloudy water (it will block fine filters quickly, but will be safe) and avoid heavily mineralised water (it will be safe, but hard and maybe taste not so good).
The active carbon will remove any remaining chlorine (which breaks down quickly anyhow).
Same applies to water from cattle troughs and most other sources.

Cheers,
Peter
OKA196 motorhome.

Well I don`t know, my gut must be a bit different to others, I have been drinking river water for about 60 years or so.

When younger and hunting along creeks and rivers we never bothered taking "tap" water, it was the normal thing to drink the river/creek water.
If we were to go fishing for a period of days or more on a river or lake we never took water with us ,we just used what was there.

At cape york and also along the Savannah Way in recent years we filled the two c/van tanks with river water at river crossings, cleaner than water from some of the towns.

I was camped near the Cooper Creek onetime and an old bloke in the next camp was siphoning water from a tub on a table to a bucket below. He had filled the tub with murky water from the creek the night before, and spread some white ash from the fire on top. Next morning I watched while he carefully siphoned the crystal clear water from the tub being very careful not to suck up the sediment that had settled on the bottom.

I wonder how our indigenous people filtered the river/swamp water, or the early explorers, they most likely had a reason to follow rivers and creeks where ever/when ever they could.
I haven`t thought about it much, but it could be the cause of why people reckon I`ve lost the plot in latter years :>) LOL

Scrubby

Have a look at B.E.S.T. Water filters.
http://www.bestwaterfilters.com.au/BEST-Inline/

Farming people, myself included, have drunk muddy dam water for the house supply for multiple decades, and I don't recall anyone dying from it.

To give you an idea what the body can tolerate, we lived in a farmhouse that was fed from a 12,000 gallon (54,500L) above-ground, concrete tank, that was fed from the roof of a large shed.
There was one downpipe that ran into the top of the tank at a low angle. It had a rat guard on that pipe. We didn't realise the rat guard had fallen off. We started getting little black specs through the house taps at the sink and in the bath and didn't take a lot of notice of that.
Then the specks got to be chunks, and we started thinking, "something's not right here - we'd better inspect that tank!"

Upon removing the inspection plate on the top of the tank, we were greeted by rat soup! About 100 rats, over a period of time, had walked down the downpipe, and slipped or jumped off the end of the downpipe, inside the tank!
There were bloated rat carcasses, disintegrated rat carcasses, and bits and pieces of rat, by the hundreds, floating all through the tank!

Of course, we felt a little queasy looking at what we'd been drinking, for God knows how long - and we had to empty the tank right out, hose it out, and start afresh with a clean tank.
However, none of us (myself, brother, SIL and two kids) ever suffered any ill-effects from drinking and cooking with that rat soup, for what was probably a year or more.

So, to all those who get a little queasy about what's floating in your river water, don't be too concerned. You're more likely to get poisoned by a feed of suss Chinese at your local chew-and-spew!

Cheers, Ron.

Keith,
I would try to filter the water before I put it in the tank.

Have a look at Katadyn filters website, world leaders but not cheap.
They also provide good general information.

I saw a brochure recently for a new purification liquid which reportedly left no residue or bad taste. Can't remember the name unfortunately.

Of course there are any number of stories about what people have drunk AND lived.

But the fact remains that contaminate water can make you very very ill very very quckly.

World wide contaminate water is one of the top causes of death and illness.

That said.....the vast majority of our town drinking water comes from rivers..and with a surprisingly small amount of treatment.

I remember taking the tour of the treatment works as a kid in school..and more recently, I carted mud at one of the biggest treatment planst in QLD.

Basicly.....the water is settled and roughly filtered, a floculant mostly Alum is added to make the remaining silt clump and drop out in the filters...the water is filtered again and then chlorinated.....either by adding gasseous chlorine or plain old sodium hypochlorate (bleach / pool chlorine).
And that is pretty much the end of it.

If the river you are taking water from is fairly clear.....particularly if it is any town weir..it entirely reasonable to expect you can produce drinking water at least as good as comes out of your tap at home.

There are affordable and practical filtration and treatment systems available.

some are as simple as a couple of filters (a particulate filter and a carbon filter) and a pump, and this equipment can be purchased at any good rural pump shop

The biggest issue is speed...how fast you want ya drinking water

There are even fully blown portable reverse osmosis units that will produce crystal clear safe drinking water from brackish water or hard, salty coloured bore water.
These systems are as small as a 2kva generator.

As far as sanitisers.......the vast majority of town water is treated with sodium hypochlorate...common bleach or pool chlorine....during the recent brisbane flood crisis, QLD heath published to appropriate dose of bleach per litre.

There are also a wide variety of water snaitisers availble......check out the boating/ yachting stores like bias boating and whitworths.

On a small scale...lots of the damns and rivers are pretty muddy, clean but muddy....boiling this water will knock down most bugs, but the water will remain cloudy ....Jack Absolom back in the 80's recomended a 1/4 teaspoon of epsom salts per 10 liter bucket to knock down the cloudyness.

cheers

Check out LifeStraw family. At $100 you cant go wrong. Eo shop sell the LifeStraw Personal for $30, it could save your life ! Michael