Urban Survivalists

Now that we have started collecting water in rain barrels, we can start to plan out how that water will be treated for other purposes. A water treatment system is going to involve pumping water from the outside storage rain barrels, through a reverse osmosis system, and then to an inside storage tank.  Once the water has passed through the reverse osmosis system, it will be clean enough for drinking but we plan on using it for our fish tanks.

For instructions and some info about water filters, you can see the Water Filter Blog. Here is some information on how osmosis works from How Stuff Works.com, and of course the Wikipedia on reverse osmosis.

This should be a good start for the information that we need to design our reverse osmosis water filtration system. As you can see in the image below, the systems are relatively compact with few components. There is a 1ft metal ruler placed by the canisters so that you can gauge size, but most of these systems are designed to be placed under a kitchen sink. If we owned the house where we are staying, then we could hook the RO system to the faucet directly; however, we do not own the house and must not make changes to the house interior as per the request of the owner.

You can find systems like this on eBay and many more places. We purchased ours on eBay.  Our particular system is designed to filter at optimum capacity when there is 100psi in the line. This means that any subsequent pumps, piping and fixtures will need to be designed to meet this 100psi capacity as we want the system to work optimally.

We will be needing a variety of fixtures in order to get the water from the rain water collection barrel into our fish tanks. Below is a schematic detailing how the water will be transported and filtered in our system. We decided that it was necessary for there to be two pumps although it is possible to only have one with a three way valve that switches water sources. Only having one pump would allow the mixing of dirty and clean water within the pump, and we didn’t want that because we are specifically trying to clean the dirty rain water enough for our Discus fish.

Our plan is to fit all of these components (pumps, filters, valves, electronics) into as small a box as possible so that it can be tucked into a corner or hung on a wall. The box will have handles on it for easy transport. All of the electronic devices in the system will run off of a maximum of 12 volts DC, and this is nice because it can be run off of a car battery during a power outage. Interfacing to the box will be done via a small panel on the side with power connections, hose fittings and perhaps a sillcock outlet.

We will have to begin laying out the actual piping of the system as soon as our pumps arrive at the house.  This post would have been longer if we had the pumps to show you, but they are in transport.

On a side note, we have been monitoring the rain water collection system and it finally rained pretty hard today. The system is filtering water through the sand filter fast enough to keep up with demand and there is zero sediment build up in the barrel!

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