Actual advice: water

 Huh, would you look at that?

I made this blog purely as humor, to give some laughs to the good folks over at Hubski who've helped me rekindle a belief that the internet isn't a disgusting wasteland of assholes.  But then to my surprise, I got a bunch of real questions, like "how does your water filter work?"

With that in mind, figured I'd share this with you all. Just in case of apocalypse, this is by far the most convenient way I've found to make a residential water filter.  It's also under a hundred bucks right now in 2020--this isn't a Mother Earth News schematic that says it costs $23 but still lists the prices in 1976 dollars.  

Parts list:

• 2 x plastic buckets
• 1 lid to fit the bottom bucket
• 2 x plastic screw-in spigots
• About four feet of 3/8" tubing (your size might vary based on which filter you buy)
• Sawyer water filter kit, Lifestraw filter bag kit, whichever brand you can find (like this).
• Something to hang it from--trees work fine
• Some way to hang it (I'll give you a few ideas below)
• Optional but awesome: Star San foaming sanitizer (so you can periodically sanitize the "clean" bucket)

The basic idea is really simple.  The top bucket is left open, and is suspended high enough off the bottom bucket to give it good head pressure (most of these filters will take about 3 feet of head in order to function).  Don't make it too tall though! If it's too tall, then you'll spill water all over yourself when you fill it.

The bottom bucket is closed, and has a lid on it. Both buckets have a spigot installed (if you're a homebrewer like me, you can just sacrifice a couple of primary fermentation buckets--I had two spares handy, so I just used those; if you don't brew, the Ale Pail buckets I'm using are only $12 online). 

Connect 3 feet of 3/8" tubing to the spigot on the top bucket, then connect it to the threaded adapter that comes with your water filter.  Screw on the water filter in the right direction (it has a "flow" arrow on it to help), and connect the output tube that it came with (it'll be a lot thinner than your primary tubing because the outputs on these are pretty slow; a "fast" filter takes about ten minutes per gallon).

Either drill a hole in the lid of your bottom bucket, or if you're using an Ale Pail, use the airlock hole that comes pre-drilled. Then, thread the output tube of your filter into it.

If you can't find a filter kit that comes with all the tubing and adapters, don't worry, it's super easy to piece it together.  The white threaded adapter you see in this picture is just a garden hose to 3/8" hose barb. The screw threads on every brand I've tried are the same size as a garden hose, so it makes finding adapters really simple. 

Now all you do is open the spigot on the top bucket, close the spigot on the bottom bucket, and fill the top one with water. Gravity and science do the rest. 

Here's a few tips that I've picked up after using this for the last year:

1. Don't worry about a vent hole in the bottom bucket. The air pressure that builds up is actually really nice. You want the bottom bucket to be a more-or-less closed system so that you don't have to sanitize it too often, so ideally, your hose into the bottom bucket should be a pretty tight fit.  As the bucket fills with clean water, it'll build up pressure, which helps give you some nice water pressure out of the bottom bucket. The air pressure also keeps the bottom bucket from overfilling, so even if the bottom bucket is full, you can top up your "dirty" bucket. As you use clean water, it'll relieve pressure and refill itself. 

2. Don't sit the bottom bucket on the ground--have it elevated, so that it's easier to fill other vessels from it. In my setup, the bottom bucket is hung up too, and it has about 10 inches of ground clearance. Then, I put an 8" or so piece of tubing on the bottom spigot--makes it easier to fill tea kettles and other odd-shaped things without spilling.

3. These filters have to be cleaned out occasionally, so don't glue it all together or anything like that.  Once every couple months, you're going to need to blow out the water filter with clean water (you just flush clean water through it backwards to clean it out).  You'll notice when it's time because the filter slows waaaaaay down.

4. Brand is mostly irrelevant, it's more about what's available.  I've tried Miniwell, Lifestraw, and Sawyer filters.  I found that the Lifestraw is the most thorough--it leaves no "woodsy" flavor in the water--but it's also pretty slow.  The Miniwell is perfectly acceptable, but it left more "woodsy" flavor (you could kind of taste the local flora in the water) and that freaked my wife out.  The Sawyer is by a large margin the fastest-flowing, so that's the one I prefer.  It's almost as good as the Lifestraw in terms of flavor profile, so we've found this is our favorite.   This is also where almost all your cost comes in. The Sawyer and Lifestraw will both set you back $50-$60 depending on what kit you can find. The Miniwell is more like $35.

5. Yes, it really does work. In fact, we've tested the water pre- and post-filter, and we keep water testing strips with us so that we can periodically double-check our results.  No matter what filter we're using, we've been unable to detect anything harmful in our water (it's actually significantly cleaner and softer than our water in the city, which is already perfectly drinkable). 

6.  Ok, last one, but: make your top bucket movable.  I originally just used a ratchet strap to strap it to a tree.  This worked, but it meant that I had to lift up buckets and dump them in.  Now I've upgraded to a hanger I made that has a couple of bolts to hold the handle in place and keep it from slipping.  I find this much easier, because I can take it off the bracket, set it on the ground to fill it, and then lift it up when it's full.  Saves me a lot of creek-water-in-the-face type accidents:

There you go folks! I hope this helps somebody out in the future.  It's not a huge amount of running water, but you'd be surprised how much of your day can be done with a 5 gallon bucket.  We wash dishes, clean our hands, make tea and coffee and juice... it's really very "normal" feeling.  

It's very low-maintenance--we usually go through about a bucket and a half every two days, clean the water filter every few weeks, and Star San the bottom bucket once every three or four months to be careful--and having an essentially unlimited source of drinkable water takes a huge load off both your mind and pack-weight. 

If you ever need it, I hope your apocalypse is full of clean water and happy days. If you want to set this up as an emergency-preparedness kit, you can unscrew the spigots, nest the buckets together, and keep everything inside the buckets with the lid on. Since it all screws together in just a few minutes, this is an awfully handy way to never run out of clean water.