Biosand filter and cyanobacteria

[Guest]

#695

Would you be able to provide any information regarding whether the biosand filter safely removes \”blue green algae bloom\” (cyanobacteria)?

According to the literature I have on Cyanobacteria, boiling the water only works to release more toxins into the water.

Thank you for the clarification.

[Eric]

#696

Hi

OK I\’ve had a look and came up with 2 documents, one that looks at
intermittent and the other at continous flow filtration. In general, it
looks pretty good as far as cyanobacterial toxins are concerned.

The first is a study done by Bojcevska and Jergil in 2003. They looked at
normal BSFs and those with GAC added. They found that all filters removed
toxins but seemingly at different rates, but were not entirely sure if the
process was due to GAC or biological degradation more. There are contact
details for the authors on page 3. This study seems to have been done in
Mozambique using intermittet BSFs.

The second is by Grutzmacher et al in 2002 which found BSFs to be effective
at removing both dissolved and cell-bound microcystins, and this was
attributed to biological degradation. These experiments were run on large
scale continally operated filters.

Let me know if you would like me to email these documents to you

Cheers

Eric