How to Purify Water

Purifying water is absolutely a skill you will need to know. It doesn’t take much effort, but drinking dirty water will kill you. We will outline some necessary equipment to always have, because you can never rely on water sources to be clean. On the other side, however, there may come a time when the drinking water in your own house becomes contaminated. Your family will not be able to drink such water, so investing in equipment and knowing how to use it will be essential.

First of all, there are several different methods that can be used to disinfect water. The most common and perhaps easiest method is just boiling the water. However, it has to be boiled until it reaches 100 degrees celsius. While this is an easy method, it isn’t always preferable. This is because it is best used with a full method of cleaning water, not just boiling it alone, which is a common misconception.

While boiling (and pasteurisation, which is when you boil water for six minutes until it reaches 65 degrees Celsius) are both easy and fast methods, they do not remove chemical pollutants in water. There are three steps towards clean drinking water: clarifying, disinfection and lastly, filtering.

Clarification removes particles sitting on water and makes it clear. To clarify water, you can pour it through cloth, or even coffee filters. This step is important because it removes bugs that are hiding in the water. Whatever you do, do not skip this step.

The next step is disinfection. You can boil, pasteurise or even chlorinate the water. Whichever method you choose, make sure you do it correctly and safely. Boiling is perhaps the safest method, because it kills living organisms. However, you could also purify your water with other household items, such as Clorox. Check the label to see if it has a potency of 5.26 to 6 percent sodium hypochlorite. You can use eight drops of bleach per gallon of water, according to the American Red Cross. Make sure the bleach is free from dyes and scents.

The water will still smell like chlorine when you are finished, which is okay. That means the bleach has done its job of killing small micro bugs.

Finally, filtration is the last step. The filter helps to remove scents from water, making it better to drink. It continues to help filter out biobugs and chemicals that the previous processes may have missed. We carry this one on our site which can be used at home, or anywhere really. This will cement the earlier steps we talked about and give you and your family clean drinking water.