Water Filter First Phase Finished

Students Checking Out the Slow-Sand Water Filter (Inside the Two Steel Drums)

Jeff writes:

After nearly two months of sometimes painful and frustrating effort, five students and I finally were able to set up our slow-sand water filter. Our desire is to take the highly polluted Waghi River water and turn it into safe drinking water. In so doing we want to become independent of the droughts we experience here in dry season.

To complete the water filter we used materials readily available in PNG. We got our sand and gravel from the nearby Waghi River. We built our own sand and gravel sieves. Our welder joined two steel drums together, and our plumber fitted the necessary valves to make the thing work.

Today we assembled the filter itself and connected it to a Waghi river outlet. The water flows into the filter via a float valve similar to those found in toilets. The valve prevents the filter from overflowing. The water is filtered by a meter of fine sand, followed by around 10 cm coarse sand, and the last layer consists of around 10 cm of pea-sized gravel. At the bottom of the barrels are two more valves. One will be used to back flush the filter when it needs cleaning. Lord willing drinking water will flow out of the other.

This is a homemade design based on some good research, but we will not really know how well it will work until we test the quality of both the input and the output water. I have received biological test kits from Australia that will reveal E. coli bacteria present in the samples. The goal is to have plenty of bad buggies going in and hopefully close to zero coming out.

I had a bit of a scare when initially no water came out of the clean water valve. It took longer than I thought to fill up the two barrels. When the water did finally flow, it had an oily residue on the top from the steel pipe we drilled out to collect the water inside the filter. The oil began to go away, but the water was clouded with sediment. However, after about five minutes it began to flow clearly. In fact it was so clear that our carpenter Thomas wanted to take home a bottle to put into his refrigerator to drink. I told him not to do that as it will take around a week for the filter to develop a biological bacteria killing zone called a schmutzdecke which will really start eliminating the bad bacteria. Needless to say, however, we were all overjoyed to get to this point.

It is a bit scary to try something new and to go out on a limb so to speak. I certainly was nervous. So when we reached the point of seeing the clear water flow, it was time to lift up a grateful prayer of thanksgiving to the Lord.

God has a sense of humor I think as I am teaching Exodus this term. We are learning there that He seems to specialize in getting water from strange places and in unusual ways.

So is there something that you are afraid to tackle in your life? I would say go to God in prayer and then go for it. Go ahead, and by faith trust Him to help you today; see what kind of living water the Lord will cause to well up in your life.