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

[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.

[gnihcraes]

Found this local place for storage containers:

http://www.cozerowaste.com/catalog/