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Maybe homesteading isn't for the faint of heart, as it does require some work that those residing primarily in the big cities will likely never experience. My favorite thing? Water purification in the form of solar distillation! The process is very simple, water evaporates, and condenses on a surface as water without the impurities. Really simple stuff. But a lot of people tend to not understand how to perform distillation in this manner, so let's get started.
You will need the following.
- Your own property or a rental out in the country that'll allow you to modify the yard.
- Have relatively sunny area you can reserve for the solar distillery
- Two large plastic tarps
- Several very long pegs (used to hold one of the tarps in place)
- One 5 to 10 gallon bucket
- A shovel
- Lots of heavy rocks
What happens is fairly simple. You dig a hole roughly 3 to 4 feet deep, enough to give at least 1 foot clearance above the bucket, and wide enough so that the bucket has 1.5 to 2.5 feet surrounding it on all sides. Tarp in the ground is inset in the hole with pegs around it's perimeter in order to secure it into place and prevent the water from seeping into the ground. You can use any water source poured into the area surrounding the bucket, can be from a dirty creek, lake, ocean, and yes even urine though I suggest against that.
Once you have your water supply inside, surrounding the bucket, you'll need to cover it with the other tarp. Use the big rocks to secure the tarp at the top around the edges of the hole. Once secured, you'll use one final rock placed in the middle (over where the bucket is) which will indent the tarp so the water condenses and drips down into the bucket over time.
If you have enough water surrounding your bucket that your bucket is free floating, you can weight it down with some tungsten or an already well cleaned rock.
For increased efficiency, I've spray painted the outside of my tarp (the top one covering the hole) black to absorb additional sunlight to increase evaporation inside the distillation well, though you'll need to leave roughly 50% of the tarp unpainted I've noticed to achieve the best results.
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://www.cryptodeaf.x10.mx/2018/03/01/what-ive-learned-homesteading-preservaraffic/
One of many ways to get fresh water.
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Much obliged :) You can do it on the stove top or with a heating element in a lab setting using distillation that would normally be used for chemicals, but this is a lot cheaper.
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We are getting ready to start homesteading. We are just getting tools and learning right now, but when the kids are gone, so are we.
We bought a countertop distiller that does four litres at a time. We store some for when the water is shut down, but we mostly use it for making soap.
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Soap was a very strange project for me to start, had a couple failures which still turned out OK though. Used too much menthol in one bar =\ so it kinda burns but turned out to be excellent for washing somewhere that already has pain, so soothing. The other bar I made far too gritty, buuuuut oil. Washes that away easily.
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Yeah, we have made a lot of soap. I used to buy it from a lady here, but she quit making it, so we bought her whole setup for $200. Got 5 moulds, 75 lbs of lye and tons of other fragrances and additives. We're out of lye now and that should tell you how much we have made, roughly.
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That's a lot of soap .... I typically buy my lye from Amazon, usually fairly cheap all things considered.
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We get ours from Home Hardware now. It works really good, and is cheaper than Amazon. For us in Canada anyhow. We don't need to make soap for a few years now, but we will probably do some for gifts.
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Rock on then :) I've not bothered to check elsewhere, mostly because it's generally a pain to get to a store when you can't drive
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Oh for sure. I get a lot from Amazon because we live in a remote area, but if I can support a local store I do. I figure that if I don't throw a bit of business their way, I can't complain when they go out of business.
I love to complain. ;)
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True, I just don't live anywhere within walking distance so it becomes difficult. I do shop at this particular discount store that's a mom and pop type shop, spend roughly $150 monthly there alone because of how much cheap stuff I can get.
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