Week 5 Post 1

Today we are going to build the filter.  There is an upside down 1.89 L Gatorade bottle.  We have a layer of gravel on the bottom, above that is a layer of cotton (punched into the bottle),  then more gravel, then more cotton, as seen below. We still have to add some layers.  Some concerns we have water dripping through the sides past the materials, but we hope this can be prevented by pressing the materials in enough with heavy material on the top of the filter (perhaps a ton of gravel).  We decided to omit the lent filter because if it filtered out anything, it'd be metal flakes and we believe that those would fit through the holes in the lent filter.

We are considering using the lent filter for the bottom of the filter instead of the mesh wiring.  This made the water flow a lot faster.  When we filtered, the water came out dirtier than it was when it first came through.  We assume this is because the gravel is still slightly dirty even after we cleaned it.  We kept running water through until it was clear. We all drank the filtered tap water.

We used Dareus' parts per million reader to see the difference between the tap water and the filter water.  Originally it was coming out to be more ppm than the tap water and we assume that it's because the filter was cleaning itself.  The gravel was still slightly dirty even after we'd cleaned it with soap and water.