How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It - James Wesley Rawles [28]
Materials:
• 4 food-grade HDPE food-storage buckets (3- to 6-gallon capacity), with lids
• 1 to 4 Berkefeld white ceramic-filter elements
Construction:
• Drill one to four half-inch-diameter holes near the bottom center of the upper bucket (the same number of holes as you have filter elements). Space the holes at least two inches apart and no closer than one-and-a-half inches from the edge of the bucket. With clean hands (to avoid contaminating the filter pores), insert the filters into the holes, screwing down their nuts on the bottom of the bucket. The nuts are plastic, so do not overtighten them, but they must be tight enough to compress the O-ring seal, or the seal may leak—and this would be a contaminating leak. The filters must point upward into the upper bucket, to avoid damage and to allow for periodical cleaning.
• Using a jigsaw, cut a seven-and-a-half-inch-diameter hole in the center of the lid of the lower bucket.
• A third bucket is used to carry water. The fourth bucket is used as a prefilter. This has a piece of tightly woven cloth that is wired or taped over the top. Since the cloth will be saturated and will drip over the edge, the pre-filtering step is best done outdoors or in a large laundry sink. If treating river, stream, or pond water, be sure to use a prefilter. Just using a couple of thicknesses of T-shirt material will greatly extend the useful life of your secondary filter element(s).
Use:
• Set the bucket with the hole in the lid on a low, stable surface. Stack the bucket with the filter element(s) on top of it. Gently pour pre-filtered water into the upper bucket, until the bucket is nearly full. Note: Be very careful not to spill any water down the exterior of the upper bucket, or you will contaminate the water in the bucket beneath. This is a slow filtering process, so be patient. Even with four filter elements, it will take a considerable time to filter six gallons.
Well “Torpedo” or “Bullet” Bucket Construction Plans
If you live on a property with well water but don’t own a backup generator, or if you anticipate a situation that will outlast your stored fuel for your generator, then you should learn how to construct a well torpedo. This is a PVC tube with a flapper valve at the bottom, which, when sent down the well shaft, hits the water and causes the tube to fill and then sink. When you pull on the rope, the flapper valve closes, sealing in the water for you to pull up the well shaft.
For any readers who aren’t familiar with them, narrow-shaft well buckets—also sometimes called “bullet buckets” or “torpedo buckets”—are designed for manually drawing water from modern small-diameter wells that are more than twenty feet deep. Shallow wells (less than twenty-foot depth) are much more efficiently accessed with a hand pump, such as a traditional pitcher-type cistern pump (available from Lehmans.com) or a home-fabricated PVC design by Keith Hendricks, as shown at the Perma Pak Web site (snipurl.com/honqb). Deeper wells require a sucker-rod actuated pump.
Have a deep well but you can’t afford a manual pump or you don’t foresee anything but short-term emergency need to draw water? A bucket will do. The following method works, but you will first have to pull out the pump, wiring, and its draw pipe before you can use an emergency bucket. Most modern wells have four- or six-inch-diameter casings. Well buckets can be made from PVC pipe and some fittings available at nearly any hardware store. The only hard-to-find item is the foot valve. Use a four- or five-foot length of three-inch-diameter white PVC pipe if your well has a four-inch casing, or four-inch-diameter pipe if your well has a six-inch casing.
Assembling the Bucket:
• For the top cap, drill a hole in the center and insert a threaded eyebolt with lock washer and nut to hold the lifting/lowering rope. Use PVC