Lately I’ve been catching myself reading a lot of survival stuff, more specifically about water filtration. I think that at some point in the near future, the grid will shut off for a substantial period of time, and safe drinking water will become even more important than it already is.
As a result, I decided to build my own water filter. I used just two 5 gallon food grade plastic buckets and 2 Black Berkey purification elements paired with 2 Berkey Arsenic/Fluoride elements. With this setup, you save money on the costly (but pretty) Berkey upper/lower chambers while expanding your water collection capacity.
First, the buckets. Go to your local grocery store and ask them if they have any 5 gallon food grade buckets…chances are that they’ll be happy to give them to you. Wash out the buckets.
Next, drill a 5/8″ hole in the base of the bottom bucket for the spigot. Thread on the spigot by hand, then tighten down using a wrench. This is a tricky adjustment, so I recommend when you fill up your system for the first time, you place the system in your sink in case it leaks. If it does leak, tighten the spigot a little bit more.
Next, follow Berkey’s instructions and prime your filter elements. Essentially you’re running water through them in reverse in order to clear out the process dust and open up the micropores of the filters. This takes less than two minutes per filter.
Finally, drill two 1/2″ holes through the base of the top bucket into the bottom bucket’s lid. Then, install the Black Berkey elements by simply threading them on nice and tight by hand. The optional Arsenic/Fluoride elements are threaded onto the base of the Black Berkey elements and hang down inside the lower bucket.
Run a full cycle of filtered water through the system and dump it…it’ll taste a bit metallic. From here on out, you have up to 6,000 gallons with the Black Berkey elements, and 1,000 gallons with the optional Arsenic/Fluoride elements.
This is an easy project that will ensure the safety of you and yours for a long time when disaster strikes…I now have two of them. Help, I’m becoming one of those crazy survivalist people! Oh, what the heck…I’ll be able to drink rainwater if I have to, and in the meantime I can brew some killer coffee…
Nice plants!
Have long wanted to get potable water from rainwater catchment system. This could do it. Thanks!
If you’re monitoring comments on this after this time…I’m very interested in this project. It seems very straightforward, but where did you get the spigot?
Thanks!
I got the spigot on amazon, i think. they may sell something like this at a local hardware store, too.
Thanks. I found them on Amazon too and wondered if that’s what you were talking about. Now that some time has passed, how do you feel about the filters themselves? I ask because there seem to be a *ton* of irritated people online complaining about the reliability of these things. I have been looking at the other manufacturers’ products and I have to say that there seem to be fewer complaints about stuff from Aquacera, Pro Pur, and Doulton. I want something that will remove chloramine, so not every cartridge is appropriate. BTW, I am looking over the other posts on you blog and enjoying it.
Thanks again.
Good question. I’m always skeptical, and I have a hard time trusting company research on their own products regardless of what it is.
I thought Berkey’s initial studies they used to show the ability of their filters was generally weak, but then I found another study that looked better.
Their customer service sucks for the most part. The diehard Berkey affiliates are great, however. It’s hard to know what to believe.
I don’t know the inside story with the company, but I have heard of the filters falling apart, and I still can’t determine what the reason is for that, other than potentially outsourcing of the construction or it’s just a knock-off copy. I’ve also read that British Berkefeld is the way to go, and the new Berkey is crap.
I strongly believe that competing water companies have affiliates that post on every Berkey-related thing they can find and badmouth the product, with a wise plug to an alternative.
I have gotten tons of eerily similar comments blasting them, with recommendations for a competitor…Pro Pur being the most prevalent.
At the end of the day, I think they’re totally a fine choice. My water doesn’t have a taste anymore, my coffee’s way better, and I would trust them to remove all the crap from my rainwater if the situation arose.
If you think another company may be better, let me know and I’ll check them out too. But for now and most likely indefinitely, I’ll be sticking with what I’ve got.
Thanks for writing!
Thanks. It’s really hard to filter out (pun intended) the internet noise – somebody will always have an argument against anything.You could be right about the sock puppets, but I ran across this thread which argues against the Berkeys (I am not a sock puppet, BTW, LOL): http://www.hubberts-arms.org/self-reliance-resources/beware-of-berkey-water-filters!/?PHPSESSID=a139a1db8793c98963e899222da22e81
And also this thread (ten pages long) on a survivalist board: http://www.survivalistboards.com/showthread.php?s=fcb4703281d688c2927ef602748c29f1&t=178353
Could they all be puppets? Doubtful, but I am in no position to know. I think that your own experience is probably a better guide, and yet there are so many comments from people who had a Berkey that they liked just fine only to have the replacement filters suck. Having looked around quite a bit, I am considering popping for a CeraGrav LP-5 (with the CeraCarb filters, since I want to filter chloramine out) for the simple reason that the casing, while made of plastic, is not totally opaque so you can see the water levels in each container; I think this would be useful. Paying about ninety bucks for two pieces of plastic and a spigot is a bit hard, though. But for me it might be worth it since I haven’t even been able to see one of these things in action. I would still like to make my own but I can see the logic in the progression you showed in buying your Berkey and then making your own unit.
Thanks for the feedback, and I will let you know how this all plays out for me.
Just a followup (I hate it when people say they will report back and then fail to do it!) on the filter; I received my LP-5 filter with two 9 inch CeraCarb filters today and assembled it without any trouble. So far all I can say it that it sure is slow to filter water…I have had no experience with this type of system so I have no reference point, but man, it is SLOW. I am timing it to see how long it takes to filter water filled to the level of the top of the two filters. To me it looks like we are talking a LONG time, which is disappointing.
Can you tell us how long yours takes do run a batch through?
Also, my interest in the unit because of its supposed transparency due to the plastic material was pretty much a waste of time; while if you shine a really bright light through it from behind you might be able to see the level in normal lighting it’s opaque for all intents and purposes. So from my perspective just going ahead and making your own from a couple of buckets as described here would be just as good and lots cheaper. True, this unit is purpose built and it looks a little slicker than a homemade one would, but is it worth the money? For me, I guess it was in order to examine a working product but now that I have seen one I could certainly make the same thing pretty easily, given a couple of buckets and a spigot. Bob’s Red Mill sells food grade plastic six gallon buckets (Bob’s is here in my town so it’s easy for me to get these but they can be ordered, too) and I think they would work very well for this purpose. I have one of them that I keep our dog food in and I’ve been looking at it carefully; it looks like it would work very well, in fact.
Thanks again for your article! Please let me know how long your system takes to filter the water.
If it’s taking a long time, that may be partially due to the high filtration quality of the filters… and also how many you’re using.
I use a pair of filters and I fill it up each night before I go to bed. It’s full in the bottom when I wake up in the morning.
If I was concerned about filtration speed, I could always add another pair to speed it up, but I haven’t found it necessary.
I get the feeling that it never actually filters all of what you put into it on one pass – by that I mean that if I don’t put more water in, the level in the top receptacle goes down to about two inches and the dripping slows WAY down. If I put more in, it speeds up, which makes sense as there is more element (I have two elements) exposed to the water. I toyed with the idea of adding two more filters to the unit but I think I can get enough out of it with the present setup. Adding two more is supposed to increase the life of the filters proportionately, so it’s a no-change situation costwise. The LP-5 has a 3.5 gallon capacity in each container. There are only two of us in the household (plus our dogs) and I think the quantity we get is going to be enough. I also think that the flow speeded up a bit after the filters became thoroughly broken in, which took several hours.
One small thing I do like about the LP-5 is that it comes with a base which raises it up off the tabletop, allowing you to put items like a cup directly under the spigot. Of course, that also increases the total height of the thing, so nothing is without drawbacks. 🙂 Now that I’ve used it for a couple of days and am getting used to how it works, I actually like it quite a bit.