Homemade Berkey Water Filter

This system uses two 5 gallon food grade buckets and costs a little over $100 to make. The equivalent from the manufacture is over $300.

http://www.modernsurvivalonline.com...icle/Making a Homemade Berky Water Filter.pdf

 

I'm making one! Gravity will hold us together!

 

$100? mine didnt cost me a thing

 

The main cost is the 2 filters, between $90 - $100. I'm interested in what you have???

 

linen, sand, peastone, powdered carbon

 

Made your own filter, cool. how much longer will yours last?

 

What Avarice asked. Also curious about what you have the filtering material in and what is the depth of each material.

 

lay the linen or fine cloth on the bottom of the top bucket
cover it with a 3-4 inch layer of sand
nother layer of cloth
6-8 inches of powdered charcoal, not briquets
then peastone on top to catch big stuff
i usually change filter after about 50 gals of water
dont cost nothin so its better to have it clean
the cloth of course can be washed, boiled and reused many times

 

in an emergency dried grass or hay can replace the linen
just toss the first batch ya filter or pass it thru again

 

you can also use the used charcoal to boil the filtered water
making it much safer yet
there are things that will pass thru a filter like this
clay would be great to add but no one wants to wait weeks for their water...lol

 

That's good to know how to do, make you own filter, but isn't it such a hassle?

The Black Berkey filter is supposed to do something like 3,000 gallons each. A system that has two will need to change filters every 6k gallons. That's a lot of gallons, and it's safe to use.

Water is just as important as food, so I'll spend a grip on filters, and make my own Berkey, thanks for the plan!

I bought activated charcoal, for ingestion, for it's properties. Got it in pills and powder form.

I bet we could grab a 55 gallon drum, and put 4 filters on the bottom, place it on another drum, and have water for a whole camp. Too much?

 

in a pinch i can find clay and make my own filter from all native materials
thats what i like being able to do, not have to rely on things i may not have

 

Awesome stuff! I built a filter using a 4" pvc pipe filled with charcoal and cotton. I Layered the two about 10 times alternating coarse charcoal with fine charcoal. Your system seems a little more straight forward. I will have to try it out for myself.

 

We "bugged out" for a weekend with about 35-40 others with two Berkeys. They kept us in clean potable water from the creek. We kept them full and stored the clean water when the tanks got full. We have a multi filter system and an electronic "debugger" on standby. Would like to think we can filter out anything.

 

what a sand and charcoal filter doesnt remove
a good rolling boil will kill

 

I put together my homemade Berkey filter yesterday and tested it out. You are suppose to prime the filters before use, but I wanted to try it out without doing that. I put 5 gallons in the top bucket and checked the output at 1 and 2 hours. 1 hour = just over 1 gallon and the 2nd hour = 3/4 of a gallon. After that I just let it go until it stopped filtering. It filtered 4 gallons and left 1 gallon in the top bucket - not enough pressure to push it through the filters.

 

I built mine using two 5 gallon buckets and a ceramic filter from dirtcheap.com ($32) or you can whole system for $50. Works great down to .02 microns.

 

I built mine last weekend.

2- 5 gal icing pails from bakery
2- Black Berkey filter elements
1- replacement spigot for Igloo type water coolers


The only thing I did different from the instructions first given, was instead of two holes in the lid of the receiving bucket, I cut ONE hole big enough to span the distance between the output pipes on the filter bucket. That way I don't have to be so precise when placing the filter bucket on top of the receiving bucket.

It works great.

Fanderal


P.S. Definitely make sure you prime the filters first.
F.

 

UPDATE:

This past weekend both of my filters came out of their bases. I had heard about this problem on another board, and called the company, just a few minutes ago.


Q: did they fail at the base?
A: Yes

Q: How long have you had them?
A: less than three months

Q: Who did you buy them from?
A: Pleasant Hill Grains

Q: Where would you like me to send your replacements? I will include return postage for the broken filters.


Now THAT'S customer service.


Fanderal