Two questions: Effectiveness with turbid water & Keeping

[Guest]

#903

Thanks to Everyone for sharing here!

I collect my household water from rainfall and in a pinch pump it from the creek in my back yard. I have been running a multi stage mechanical filter followed by a UV filter. I started out filtering down to .5microns.

The water quality was ok but the filter cartridges plugged quickly. I added additional “pre-filter” stages and that helped some but not enough. I changed my filter cartridges to only filter down to 5 microns. The cartridges no longer plug but the water is turbid and smells bad. I wouldn’t even consider drinking it.

Questions:

1) What kind of issues may I have with the BioSand filter due to the turbid water?

2) In order to maintain operation during freezing weather I am considering insulating the barrel and placing a submersible aquarium heater in the sand. I would manually switch the heater on during freezing temps. Is this practical?

Thanks again.

[Eric]

#904

So to be clear, you’re not using a BSF at the moment it seems? You shouldn’t have issues with turbid water coming out of a BSF as they tend to be good at removing particulates. What I’d do is to keep your current filters as a post-BSF filter system, where BSF removes the larger particles.

Never heard of a heater in sand before. For sure you’d need to protect the filter from freezing otherwise perhaps many of the microbes inside will die off. I’d insulate it very well and/or make an outhouse for it to keep the worst of the weather off. But in any case, in cold weather biological processes slow down so I would think the filter functions less efficiently anyway in terms of pathogen removal. But in terms of adsorption which will be a large factor in particulate removal, I’m not sure if that is affected as much by colder temperatures?