DIY

How to make your own homemade water filter

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Image: How to make your own homemade water filter

Water is essential to survival, even more so than food. Even in the best of conditions, you probably won’t last more than 10 days without access to clean, drinking water, but you might be able to survive for four to six weeks without food. At the same time, it is important to either purify, filter, or sterilize your water before drinking it. While dehydration is a valid cause for concern, drinking unclean or contaminated water might just be worse, as this may expose you to waterborne bacteria or parasites. SHTF will really happen if this causes you to develop diarrhea, as you will lose even more of what little water you have left in your body. Secure your own supply of clean water by making your own DIY water filter. (h/t to MDCreekMore.com)

Before making your own homemade water filter, you should first be familiar with the proper terminology. Most people, including preppers, tend to use the words filtration, purification, and sterilization interchangeably. While there is some overlap between these terms when it comes to how many commercial filter units operate, these terms do not all mean the same thing.

Filtration involves the removal of solid matter and some emulsified liquids. Purification involves the removal of non-water substances, such as those in emulsions or solutions. Sterilization involves the elimination of harmful microbes. Some filter units may even include layers of activated charcoal to filter out solid matter and remove heavy metals. Also known as activated carbon, activated charcoal utilizes chemical adsorption to remove contaminants and impurities.

Sponsored solution from CWC Labs: This heavy metals test kit allows you to test almost anything for 20+ heavy metals and nutritive minerals, including lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, aluminum and more. You can test your own hair, vitamins, well water, garden soil, superfoods, pet hair, beverages and other samples (no blood or urine). ISO accredited laboratory using ICP-MS (mass spec) analysis with parts per billion sensitivity. Learn more here.

How to build your own DIY water filter

Building your own homemade water filter is much more cost-efficient than buying a completely new one. A DIY water filter also allows you more freedom to customize your filter to better suit your personal needs and preferences. The process is so simple that it will only take you around 20 minutes to build your own water filter.

Items needed:

  • 2 Black Berkey purification elements (or any other purification elements of your brand of choice)
  • rubber washers
  • wingnut fasteners
  • 2 5-gallon food-grade buckets with lids
  • food-grade spigot (preferably the size used for large water coolers)
  • drill with 1/2- and 3/4-inch drill bits

Procedure:

  1. Take one of your food-grade buckets and drill two holes at the bottom using your drill and the 1/2-inch drill bit. These holes should be around four to six inches apart.
  2. Take the lid of that bucket and drill two holes through it using the drill and the 1/2-inch drill bit. Make sure these holes match up perfectly with the holes at the bottom of your bucket.
  3. Take the second bucket and measure a spot around two inches from the bottom on one side of the bucket. This will serve as the hole for your spigot, so make it so it doesn’t touch the bottom to avoid damage.
  4. Once you’ve found the right spot, drill a hole through the side of the second bucket using your 3/4-inch drill bit.
  5. Install your purification elements through the 1/2-inch holes that you drilled at the bottom of the first bucket.
  6. Carefully secure your purification elements using your rubber washers and wingnut fasteners. Make sure that you do not overtighten the nuts as this could damage your purification element and cause it to leak.
  7. To assemble your water filter, first take the bucket with the spigot. This will serve as your base.
  8. Next, place the lid 1/2-inch holes on top of the bucket with the spigot.
    • On top of the lid, place the bucket with purification elements installed. Keep the holes aligned so that the tubes of the purification elements extend through the lid below it and into the lower bucket with the spigot.
  9. Pour water into the upper bucket. This water should drip down through the purification elements and collect in the lower bucket.
  10. Cover the upper bucket with the remaining lid.
  11. Whenever you feel thirsty, simply turn the spigot on and fill a glass with your clean, drinking water.

Learn other ways to secure your supply of clean water by going to CleanWater.news.

Sources include:

MDCreekMore.com

All-About-Water-Filters.com

Levetiracetam versus phenytoin for seizure prophylaxis during and early after craniotomy for brain tumours: a phase II prospective, randomised study.

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OBJECTIVE: Phenytoin (PHT) is routinely used for seizure prophylaxis in patients with brain tumours during and after craniotomy, despite incomplete evidence. We performed a prospective, randomised study to investigate the significance of prophylactic use of levetiracetam (LEV), in comparison with PHT, for patients with supratentorial tumours in the perioperative period.
METHODS: Patients were randomised to receive LEV, 500 mg/body every 12 h until postoperative day 7, or PHT, 15-18 mg/kg fosphenytoin followed by 125 mg PHT every 12 h until postoperative day 7. The primary end point was the occurrence of seizures, and secondary end points included the occurrence of haematological and non-haematological adverse events.
RESULTS: One hundred and forty-six patients were randomised to receive LEV (n=73) or PHT (n=73). The incidence of seizures was significantly less in the LEV group (1.4%) compared with the PHT group (15.1%, p=0.005), suggesting benefit of LEV over PHT. The observed OR for being seizure free in the LEV prophylaxis group relative to the PHT group was 12.77 (95% CI 2.39 to 236.71, p=0.001). In a subgroup analysis of patients who did not have seizures before craniotomy, similar results were demonstrated: the incidence of seizures was 1.9% (LEV) and 13.8% (PHT, p=0.034), and OR was 8.16 (95% CI 1.42 to 154.19, p=0.015). LEV was completed in all cases, although PHT was withdrawn in five patients owing to liver dysfunction (1), skin eruption (2) and atrial fibrillation (2).
CONCLUSIONS: Prophylactic use of LEV in the perioperative period is recommended because it is safe and significantly reduces the incidence of seizures in this period.

This is how spiders spin silk for their webs.

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Researchers have uncovered the mechanism that allows spiders to build such strong webs.

ZoranKrstic_web_shutterstock_

Image: Zoran Krstic/Shutterstock

One of the world’s strongest materials, spider silk, has baffled scientists for centuries. It’s lightweight, stretchy, stronger than steel, and produced by spiders using water as a solvent, but how do these animals produce this fibre?

It all comes down to silk proteins known as spidroins, which are made of about 3,500 organic compounds known as amino acids. Spiders store spidroins as soluble proteins in their silk glands. But, when they are about to use them to spin their web, the structure of the spidroins changes as it exits the spider’s silk gland, becoming solid fibers.

Scientists from the Swedish University of Agricultural Science and the Karolinska Institute have found that the spindroins reach an acidic pH level of about 5.7 inside the glands when the spider is making its web. They also found a higher concentration of bicarbonate ions inside the gland when the web is being spun.

According to their research, both ends of the spider’s silk grand have different pH levels, which helps these proteins become a solid fibre that can be spun into a solid web. They also found that the pH level has different effects on the stability of the two regions at each end of the spindroin proteins. “While one of the ends tended to pair up with other molecules at the beginning of the duct (N-terminal) and became increasingly stable as the acidity increased along the duct, the other end (C-terminal) destabilised as the acidity increased, and gradually unfolded until it formed the structure characteristic of silk at the acidic pH of 5.5”

TAVR associated with lower 12-month mortality rates than open-heart surgery.

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Transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) was associated with lower mortality rates than conventional open-heart surgery in high-risk patients with aortic stenosis 1 year following surgery in a US trial.

All-cause mortality at 1 year was 14.2 percent in the TAVR arm using Medtronic’s transcatheter bioprosthesis CoreValve compared with 19.1 percent in patients who underwent surgery (p<0.001 for non-inferiority, p=0.04 for superiority). [N Engl J Med 2014; doi:10.1056/NEJMoa1400590]

The rate of heart attack, stroke, or related death at 1 year also improved in the TAVR arm at 20.4 percent compared with 27.3 percent in the surgery arm (p=0.03).

Previous studies have shown TAVR procedures can improve outcomes for patients with aortic stenosis who also have an increased risk of death during surgery compared with medical management. TAVR is an alternative for those who cannot tolerate surgery – about one-third of about 300,000 people with aortic stenosis globally.

In a national US cohort of aortic stenosis patients, of average age 83, patients were randomized to TAVR with CoreValve (n=390) or surgery (n=357). Patients were included if they had at least a 15 percent risk of dying within 30 days of surgery. An extreme risk sub-cohort included patients whose risk of dying or irreversible complications within 30 days of surgery was greater than 50 percent. Both groups proceeded to the comparison portion of the trial after the TAVR arm met initial non-inferiority requirements.

The trial did not meet its secondary endpoint to reduce cardiovascular and cerebrovascular events at 30 days, and the event rate was 8.2 in the TAVR group and 10.9 in the surgery group (p=0.10).

The death rate at 30 days was 3.3 percent in the TAVR group and 4.5 in the surgery group, which was not statistically significant and which were lower than estimated in the surgery arm.

Lead investigator Dr. David Adams, professor and chairman of the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, New York, US, suggested that this may have been because the trial population was actually at lower risk than intended. More patients also refused surgical treatment than refused TAVR treatment.

However, more TAVR patients (22 percent) required pacemaker implants 1 year after treatment than those who were randomized to surgery did (11 percent, p<0.001).

Still, the possibility of alleviating aortic stenosis in inoperable patients led the FDA to approve Medtronic’s CoreValve early, even though the benefits for lower-risk populations remain to be seen, noted Dr. Valentin Fuster, a cardiologist at Mt. Sinai Hospital and editor-in-chief elect of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, during a discussion of the research. Fuster was not involved in the study.

“To be able to change the valve without opening the chest, I think, is a great accomplishment,” he said.