01-11-2015, 04:52 AM
quote:
Originally posted by lavarat
I noticed that the rain gutters would build up a thick layer of slimy muck and that any droppings from birds, rats, insects, etc had an easy ride to the catchment tank. Although I was able to filter out the big solids with the catchment cover and the finer solids with the pump filter, there is no way to filter out the dissolved juices from all the contaminants. For this reason I regularly added bleach to kill the bacteria and viruses that might make it to my shower or washing machine and also to get rid of the musky smell of decomposing plant and animal tissue.
I hate to break it to you, but all of those things are in municipal water too. Plus runoff from asphalt and farms. It is usually filtered using sand. In most cities, their drinking water comes from rivers that a city upstream has already used the water and then dumped their treated sewage in, so it also contains a variety of chemicals and pharmaceuticals and hormones from birth control pills. Some cities have several cities upstream from them so the water has been "used" 5 or 6 times already. Watch that episode of "Dirty Jobs" where Mike Rowe is mucking out the sewage treatment plant and specifically the tens of thousands (millions?) of used condoms that have to be mechanically separated from the rest of the goop. Fortunately, Hawaii has nobody upstream from us, but still, isn't catchment water sounding pretty good compared to city water just about anywhere?
I remember telling my wife that if she saw the inside of our catchment tank she might not want to drink our water and she quipped that "in Juneau our water came from Gold Creek. Our dog used to swim there. I'm not afraid of rain water" but then to our surprise when we did look in our catchment tank we couldn't believe how clean it was.