How to make a water filter

Going camping in the woods often means running out of water.  There's a simple solution to that: Making a water filter. Jacob Karhu shows us how.

Transcript

00:00Hi, I'm Jacob Carou, and like many days in the forest, we often lack water.

00:05Today, I'm going to show you how to purify it.

00:13We're going to use a bandana, foam, sand and coal.

00:19We choose three large perches.

00:21And with these three branches, we're going to make a tripod.

00:31I'm going to take the soil bark to make rope.

00:35It works very well with the soil or the stem of the plants that are close to the streams.

00:51And to make the filter, I'm going to use my bandana.

01:09For the materials, we can find everything on site.

01:11The coal with an old fire, the sand on the perch or the moss on the trees.

01:22I'm going to put three layers of filter.

01:24First, the piled coal, to hold the pollutants.

01:29The sand for the fine particles.

01:34And finally, the moss for the big elements.

01:46We're going to look for water. It's often found at the bottom of the relief, but it's not drinkable.

01:51We're going to look for water.

01:58Even if the water is clear, we can think that we can drink it without filtering.

02:00But in fact, it contains bacteria and viruses that are invisible to the eye.

02:03And I've already been sick because of that, because I drank non-filtered water.

02:16I have a pot full of clear water, but I'm not going to drink it directly.

02:19I can either boil it to sterilize it or use a filtering straw.

02:22This is a 0.2 micrometer filter. It will remove 99.9% of the bacteria and viruses.

02:27And I can drink the water directly in a gourd.

02:32The limit of this filter is that you can't remove all the chemical products.

02:34So you have to be careful upstream of the river if there is no industrial polluting production.

02:38In fact, every time I go to remote places, there is never drinking water.

02:43And every time I do this kind of filter, to at least pre-filter the water and then drink it.

02:49This is a 0.2 micrometer filter.

02:51This is a 0.2 micrometer filter.