Kahola Preppers

Well, I survived my first week back to work. I don't know that my survival was ever in doubt, but some may have questioned my ability to actually do something productive for 8 hours a day. After five years of engineering prior to the sabbatical, much like the proverbial bike, it was a bit wobbly for the first couple days, but then it was back to business as usual. It helps that I'm picking up on all the same projects that I left off on 7 months ago. And I'll probably still be working on them 7 months from now. Yes, things go slowly in the development world. Now we've only yet to see if Lauren will survive her first week. Something tells me she will.

Regardless of our inevitable return to working life, the sabbatical seems only half over. We went straight back out to the cabin this last weekend after work on Friday. It felt as if we just needed to get some business done in town over the week and were getting back to our real lives for the weekend. The only difference at the cabin this time is that I didn't have any projects to work on, so we actually just relaxed the whole weekend. The water filter was flowing, the stone pathway was built, solar shower running, and all of the other little things were taken care of.

My biggest goal was realized out there in the form of a self-sustaining drinking water supply from a system that I built myself. The biosand filter worked wonders on the lake water. Only rarely could you smell even a hint of fishiness, and you could never taste anything off. I had to start using the lake water because the small spring on our property dried up on us after a month without rain. However, I came to like the lake water more (considering how much improved it was through the filter) because the spring water was extremely hard water, which is something no water filter can change. It sometimes tasted like I was hanging drywall--liquid chalk. I don't think I could build a reverse-osmosis filter myself for under $50...

I combined the biosand filter with solar disinfection, and for the last three weeks of being out there, that is all the water we needed for drinking, cooking, dishes, and showering. For the two of us, that equated to about 10 gallons of water a day, or about 300 gallons a month. If we were doing more laundry out there, I imagine that might have doubled that number to 600 gallons a month. Considering the average American household consumes more than 10,000 gallons a month, I would say that we're doing pretty good. You start to really understand how much water you use when you have to manually filter all of your water yourself, and carry it around your property instead of having it piped. However, except for the manpower involved in carrying water around, there wasn't any external power source needed for the purification process. Our Prepper street cred must have surely ticked up a couple notches. Now we just need to get our booby traps installed...

Home on the Range - Now In Color!

Just a quick follow up to that last post--shiny color pictures of some of the projects going on out there.

Old sickle, new edge. 

Mowing the lawn...pioneer style. Except for the hair, I guess.

Our water purification operation. The bucket in the front catches the spring water coming from a buried pipe, and the orange buckets in the back are the biosand filter, found here in its native habitat. In this picture I'm filling the solar water heater with filtered water. Sure beats showering in dirty lake water!  

Bucket getting the spring water. 

Hi-tech water heater. Works surprisingly well based on the low expectations set by its appearance. 

Solar shower. 

Yep, that's a rubbermaid cooler with a valve installed on it. That hose leads down to the shower head. If I fill the cooler the night before with ~115 deg F water, it will be around ~90 deg F in the morning. We usually shower at night anyway though because getting into bed after sweating for 15 hours isn't very pleasant. 

Home on the Range

Hi there, Internet! It's been a while. While we haven't been totally away from the Internet lately, every time we have been around it, its been because we actually had some sort of important business to do. When you only get internet a couple of hours a week, you find that you end up paying bills and deleting emails the whole time rather than writing blog posts. But hark! we have made time to do some writing. Unfortunately, we don't have the cables to upload our pictures as of yet, but hopefully we will be able to coordinate that at some point soon too.

Living at the cabin has been an trip. While we do have an air conditioner (set at a cool 80 deg F anyways), which makes sleeping tolerable out there, we spend the majority of our time outside anyway. Cooking, eating, using the outhouse...even in the middle of the night during a thunderstorm, purifying our water, showering, and just generally relaxing is all done outside. And we've been broiling in the heat some of our days out there. It's so different from our recent stint in the desert because of the humidity. Even some days sitting still in the shade with a breeze, I'm still overheating. But we've got a lake there, so it's pretty easy to cool off. At least its easy to stay hydrated compared to the desert.

I spent about a week setting up all of my projects, and everything is running smoothly. Solar hot water heater is heating, the shower is showering, and the sand is filtering. On a good sunny day, the water heater gets the water up to about 110-115 deg F, so it's not super efficient, but good enough for a hot shower before bed. It also stays hot enough over night to have a greater-than-luke-warm-but-not-quite-hot shower in the morning. And with the low flow showerhead drilled out to work with my low pressure system, we get a decent flow for about 6 minutes of shower.

My sand filter is up and running as well. It filters the water so that it looks crystal clear and clean, but we're not drinking directly out of it yet. The filter reaches it's peak efficiency in purification only after 30-45 days of continuous use, and we're only about 3 weeks into the cycle. So we're using the water in cooking where it's going to be boiled and for dishes, but we are yet to drink it straight. Combined with solar disinfection though, we're solid on the drinking water and haven't even gotten sick yet! Honestly, the spring water would more than likely not make us sick to drink it straight, but I'd rather be extra safe than sit in the outhouse all day.

So now that we've spent all this time doing projects, cleaning, raking, weeding, and cutting the lawn (with a sickle, yes a sickle), we've finally got some time to just relax out there, without any TV, Internet, or phone calls to disturb us.

My DIY Biosand Filter

I've been thinking for a long time about how we will get drinking water out at the lake. Its a question thats got obvious applications beyond our little sabbatical. I've done a little work with Engineer's Without Borders (although not as much as I would like), and civil engineering work in developing countries primarily covers delivering clean drinking water and improving sanitation systems. Unsanitized drinking water is one of the top causes of death in children around the world. So this has been a learning experience in more than one way for me. After researching lots of different methods, I decided to build myself a biosand filter.

The foundation that has done the work to develop and promote the biosand filter has extensive plans on construction and studies on efficacy of the filter [PDF]. Their design is a bit over the top for our use though, using concrete and sheet metal to construct the thing. So my challenge was to build my own biosand filter for as cheap as possible, to make so that I could easily move it around, and design it in a way that I can repurpose the parts when we're done using it (cradle to cradle design, baby!). The design closely matches all of the recommended dimensions from the biosand design manual. Here's what I came up with for $40:

3 x 5 gal. HDPE Bucket (doesn't matter which--all HDPE (#2 plastic) is food safe)
3 x Bucket Lid
1 x 3/8" Brass Close Nipple
2 x 3/8"x3/8" Brass Hose Barbs
2 x 5/8" Neoprene Washers
4 x 5/8" Galvanized Cut Washers
5' x 3/8" ID Vinyl Tubing
6' Silicone Weatherstripping
16 x Zip Ties

Construction is rather simple, and just consists of three main steps:
1. Install a simple outlet on the bottom bucket and attaching tubing,
2. Attach the lids to the bottom of two of the buckets,
3. Drill holes through the bottom of the buckets/attached lids.

After all of this, it is just a matter of obtaining sand and gravel, and washing the silt out of those materials. I haven't done this step yet because I don't want to haul 50 lbs of sand from Kansas City to Kahola. I'll do all that once we get out there. You can find a video of this process here.

(Here's just a quick aside about the use of buckets. I would have loved to find something in a single piece that wouldn't have required joining, but I couldn't find it. 12" pipe was too expensive, a 55 gal plastic barrel was too large in diameter, and no trash cans I found were tall enough. If anyone has any ideas of a plastic alternative, I would love to hear them.)

And here's how you build the thing! (Note: some of the pictures show some out of order steps, like the holes being drilled before I say to, due to my experimenting and messing up some steps. Maybe some day I will take more helpful pictures...)

Step 1: Install the outlet.

Here are the materials, except that you will need 4 fender washers instead of just the 2 shown. The things you see there are the fender washers, neoprene washers, 3/8" pipe nipple, 3/8" hose barbs, and about 5" of 3/8" vinyl tubing. 

Drill or cut a hole in the bucket. Make sure you leave enough room for the washers to fit on the inside of bucket. 

Here's what the outlet looks like assembled. (Note again that you will need 4 metal fender washers instead of 2 to get a good seal)

Here's a view of the outlet on the inside of the bucket. 

And again on the outside. 

Step #2: Connect the Buckets. 

In order to seal the bucket to the lid I used silicone weatherstripping. It was much cheaper than big a rubber o-rings. 

Install the weatherstripping to the bottom of the bucket and attach the lid back to the bottom of the bucket. (Never mind those drilled holes...kind of did it out of order myself...)

Set a lid from one bucket on the bottom of the bucket and drill holes for zip ties. I used zip ties because they were cheap and available. You could use bolts & nuts, or sheet metal screws to connect the lids with the buckets as well (if they're galvanized). 

  

Here are some of them installed. I used 8 total to get a good seal. 

Step #3: Drill a bunch of holes. 

They don't have to be particularly uniform or a specific size. I used a 1/8th inch drill bit and just went at it. 

Here's what it looks like finished. 

Now you just have to assemble the thing and attach the outlet hose. The tube should loop over the bucket handle, and the end of the tube should sit 4" above the bottom of the top bucket. This allows the water to sit above the top of the sand to keep the biofilm that forms from being disturbed. 

The only thing left to do is to add 3" of coarse gravel at the bottom of the bottom bucket, then 3" of fine gravel. Then you fill up the rest of the bottom bucket and the middle bucket all the way full of sand. This will give you the recommended 23" of sand in the column. 

P.S. Looking around for some info while I was writing this post, I found another website that had a similar design for the biosand filter using buckets. It is supposed to only cost $20, but there isn't a lot of details on design.