How effective would a sand filter with a couple of layers of charcoal be for cleansing water from a source like this?

Sue

It's similar to what your municipal supply probably uses with a post filtering treatment w/ chlorine.

IIRC multi layer municipal water filter has layers of:
anthracite coal
sand
two layers of garnet
and gravel.

Walked her to the shallow end and up the improvised ramp. same cow organized a breakout a couple of weeks later, on a Sunday. she and two colleagues broke out of the yard and headed south on Main Street, Gloversville, NY. Brother and I chased them. they took a right and headed up a side street; took another right and ran through the open back door of the church there, a congregation of Baptists. the herd headed down the main aisle, took a left at the altar and proceeded out the open side door. doors were open cuz it was hot, and the congregation tended to generate a lot of heat. We made it to the church shortly after they left, but the parishioners were kind enough to show us the getaway route. Forgiving \folk, the Baptists. We eventually caught up to them and choused them back to the barn, but the folks in the congregation said that the preacher was never quite the same after the incident.

That is one good thing about our hot tub (or more correctly, now the hot tub of the gal renting our house), a cover when no one is in it, and an eight ft high lattace fence around the deck (gotta keep prying eyes out you know)...

Whether your swimming pool water is safe to drink or not may not make much of a difference. Unless your pool has a bottom skimmer or another method to intake water for filtration from the bottom of the pool, you will only be able to use a limited amount of the water. Once the water level drops below the level of the filter intakes, the pool water will go bad pretty quickly.

Never thought of that.(but by making a small change in the intake I can filter from the bottom) but come to think of it,, if the power goes out then no filter. My main question was concering the outher thing in the pool water. It is and has been well clorinated for several years and is nice and clean. Would boiling take care of the problems, or will I have to have a different type of filter to pass the water thru so I can drink it??

When I make an American Red Cross presentation on Disaster Preparedness, I tell people that the chorine sold for use in a swimming pool has other chemicals in it as well and is not a good source of long term drinking water. Most people consume from 1/2 to 1 gallon of water per day, and yet the suggested water use is 3 gallons of water per day per person. I would suggest that you use the swimming pool water for the other things we use water for (hygiene, cleaning, etc...), and not drinking it.
Although the NSF has some very high rated carbon filters, I do not know how well they would work on pool water. In an emergency, my present (unofficial) plan is that if I needed to use pool water to drink, I would put it through the best NSF rated counter top carbon filter I could get.

Big_Al, I've been trying to research this some more for the past couple days, but I still haven't found a definitive "Yes, you can drink pool water" with an explanation why. I guess part of the reason is because there are a variety of chemicals people can use, so it's hard for a blanket statement to cover every chemical. Coming from the filtration side, no one who makes consumer grade activated charcoal filters ever mentions pool chemicals, so it's hard to say if they would work.

Well, trying to be pragmatic here and considering a truly emergency situation, I think SheetBend's advice is as good as you're going to get to this question. Treat the water for microbes by your method of choice at the time of use, and also filter through activated charcoal to try and remove as many chemicals as possible. If it's a matter of dying of dehydration next to your 15,000 gallon pool or drinking pool water, then drinking the pool water is an option.

Boiling might reduce some chemicals, but I'm not sure how many typical pool chemicals are volatile enough to be affected by boiling so it might not really work well at all. I don't think many are. I would rely on the activated charcoal over boiling.

I wonder if the Berkey filters (black) would filter out the chlorine.



http://www.jamesfilter.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=14

LED, why don't you ask them?

Sue