Posted by: Burncycle
Water Purification Techniques - 07/10/12 03:43 AM
I wanted to create a quick, rough guide to help people when deciding what water purification method they would need (or combination thereof) to ensure safe drinking water.
I came up with a quick chart to show the relative strengths and weakness of various methods. A couple of things to note:
This is a quantized analog to digital graph -- in other words, while in reality it's not this clear cut and there are almost always exceptions, it serves as a general "rule of thumb" guide.
The threat types generally increase in size from left to right, however they are not to scale and in reality these threats often overlap with regards to size. For instance, there are some bacteria smaller than the largest viruses, and there are some protozoa larger than crypto. Indeed, the largest bacteria are visible to the naked eye, but these are extreme cases.
Additionally, when I selected what method covers what threat, I realize that some filters may be able to filter out some of the larger viruses, so technically the coverage would dip a little bit into the virus category. Further, some filters add chemical means as a stage of filtration to kill viruses in which case technically it would fully cover the virus category -- but these are exceptions rather than the rule, so to err on the side of safety we assume filters do not cover viruses.
My intention is not to spread disinformation, so I present this here for review to see if you agree that it is generally correct.
Is there anything I need to change? Should I add any treatment methods such as UV treatment and distillation, or threat types such as heavy metals? One of the problems with adding things like UV filtration is that it is less effective the more turbid the water which this graph doesn't go into.
Regards
I came up with a quick chart to show the relative strengths and weakness of various methods. A couple of things to note:
This is a quantized analog to digital graph -- in other words, while in reality it's not this clear cut and there are almost always exceptions, it serves as a general "rule of thumb" guide.
The threat types generally increase in size from left to right, however they are not to scale and in reality these threats often overlap with regards to size. For instance, there are some bacteria smaller than the largest viruses, and there are some protozoa larger than crypto. Indeed, the largest bacteria are visible to the naked eye, but these are extreme cases.
Additionally, when I selected what method covers what threat, I realize that some filters may be able to filter out some of the larger viruses, so technically the coverage would dip a little bit into the virus category. Further, some filters add chemical means as a stage of filtration to kill viruses in which case technically it would fully cover the virus category -- but these are exceptions rather than the rule, so to err on the side of safety we assume filters do not cover viruses.
My intention is not to spread disinformation, so I present this here for review to see if you agree that it is generally correct.
Is there anything I need to change? Should I add any treatment methods such as UV treatment and distillation, or threat types such as heavy metals? One of the problems with adding things like UV filtration is that it is less effective the more turbid the water which this graph doesn't go into.
Regards