WATER- Sun Aug 29th 9 am Denver survival co-op

[Wulf202]

Since the dismal turnout for the first meeting, I'm just going to do my thing and leave an open invitation.

Topic: water treatment

Location: Crown hill park in Lakewood park near Wheatridge senior high school and walk the trail directly south of the ball field till you hit water. Look around for a 6'4" guy carrying 5 gallon buckets for pond water and various methods of treatment.

Time: Sunday August 29th 9am sharp-10:45

Gear required: 1 Open mind, dress for the elements

Optional gear: Lawn chair, note book, personal water treatment gear, personal tasting glass if you so choose.

Cost: $0 (donations are accepted)

I'll be test running several basic and higher end filtration or treatments for the lovely pond water, I will be tasting each along with clarity grading and chemical tests for the chlorine based ones. If you choose to taste it you also take the risks of whatever that treatment doesn't catch.

-Pur Hiker pro
-Calcium Hydrochloride (pool shock)
-Store bought bleach
-iodine
-Pasteurizing
-Beta-dine
-Possibly boiling
-Possibly Berkey black filter
-potable aqua w/taste killer and w/o
-Control of greeley tap water (no joke it comes from one of the better aquifers in CO) emergency bag water and store bought bottle.

I'll try to provide the best pro/con sheet I can find for the test methods.

If you want to RSVP you can email me at wulf202 at hotmail dot com

If you're bringing any treatment kit I'll try to do some research on it.

Things that would be really cool to try;
Steripen
Stale water (just rotated mine doh)

[Irving]

That's pretty cool of you to do. I hope someone shows up to learn a thing or two. Very nice of you to do.

[gnihcraes]

was just talking to the neighbor about this. I'll try to make it and drag him along.

Rotated my water storage not long ago too...

[Wulf202]

bump for this weekend, slight addition to the directions, once you hit the water, go to the left (east) where there's a nice stand of shade trees at the edge of the water.

[Gritty]

I prefer Berkeys and Katadyns. They seem to work the best for me.

[gnihcraes]

Gathered some good information and had some great water this morning. Thanks Wulf202!

Drank some of this:


after doing some of this:

[jerrymrc]

I am very appreciative of Wulf202 doing this for the members. I would have liked to have been there but the Wife overruled any idea I had for my Bday.

[Wulf202]

Gathered some good information and had some great water this morning. Thanks Wulf202!

Some was not so great I'll admit but that's what we were there to find out.

I am very appreciative of Wulf202 doing this for the members. I would have liked to have been there but the Wife overruled any idea I had for my Bday.

Jerry, next one is the final sunday of the sept at the same location, I'll have the post up tomorrow hopefully.

[gnihcraes]

I'm still alive - so far.

[Wulf202]

AAR; WATER- Sun Aug 29th 9 am Denver survival co-op

I've been working this around in my head for about a year now and just figured I'd go for it. Water being one of the most important things in a survival or bug out situation it was the natural place to start.

Two gentlemen showed up at 9 and found me on the bank unpacking my bucket o' stuff. After quick introductions we got started. The intent was to fill up quart containers with lake water and purify it.

To filter out the crunchy stuff and millfoil on the surface I brought an old t-shirt to use as a pre filter. The water would not fill the bottle at any reasonable rate through the shirt. I used one of the containers as a dirty container and squeezed the water through the shirt into the other bottle.

I'd brought some household bleach but since I'm a cheap bastard it was "value" brand and therefore not as concentrated as called for. A half hour later it tasted ok had a slight chlorine odor, easily drinkable.

The night before I'd mixed up some cal hypo pool shock and put a sample in a dropper bottle, the calculations showed we needed .25 oz for a quart. A half hour later it smelled a bit like the pool and was drinkable.

We drank from a filtered water bottle and the water was a little flat but good.

I'd managed to find some water that had been sitting for about 3 years, drinkable but not great. Flat and had a slight taste of the container. Mixing it between cups for 30 seconds improved the taste slightly.

Tincture of iodine 2% was applied with the bottle dipper thing it came with 10 drops were applied to a quart (touching the drip thing to the side of the container, though it called for 8 we did 10 to be sure). Tasted awful, the question was raised if a child would drink it at all. My stomach mildly ached immediately.

Portable Aqua tablets were next on the list and adding one to the quart was easy and quick, required a little shaking. The end result was brown/yellow water that could in fact choke a camel. The worst of the treated water unanimously.

Betadine (10%) was dripped into the "dirty" quart container, using no pre filter on the lake water. After a half hour it was the clearest of the iodine and the best tasting of the 3. Only a mild Iodine flavor.

Adding a small amount of an "emergen C" packet to each bottle and shaking removed any yellowish color and removed the iodine flavor, giving it a slight orange flavor. Only 50mg was required though the packet had 1000mg in it. Judging 50mg was hard and I ended up pouring about half the packet between the 3 iodine treated bottles. All were easily drinkable and the Betadine w/ vitmin C was the best water of all.

I made sure to reiterate that you had to wait atleast a half hour of contact time with each treatment, and the vitamin C had to be added after treatment was complete. Increase the number of drops and treatment time for cloudy or extremely cold water.

We discussed other methods such as SODIS, boiling, and Distillation. Touching breifely on solor stills, vegitation stills, and collecting dew as alternatives along with when to drink untreated water.

I neglected to talk about utilizing snow and rain, however.