If at first you don’t succeed,
Try, try again.
That’s the old rhyme. We would rather say,
If at first you do not fail,
Try, try again.
Men will talk about their grindset. Their tools and techniques for driving on and up. Failure should be right there among them.
I have not failed, not once. I have found ten thousand ways that won’t work. -Thomas Edison.
If we want to do new things, we have to try new things. If at first we succeed, it means we don’t fully understand it yet. Only after we’ve iterated to failure do we understand the boundaries of what works.
Even if the new things you are trying are tried and true things, they are still new to you.
Failure, in an experiment, is a form of success.
This is a great weekend to get together your food stores and to decide whether you are going to go with poultry, lambs, or pumpkins, or something else. If you already do some of those, pick just one to add. Stretch. Then streeetch some more.
That’s what we are doing.
Our own stretch this year for food storage is experimenting with water storage and pemmican. Our stretch for home farming is potatoes and peanuts.
We hope to experience some great failures.
We already have one. Not too shabby.
***
First up was this home filtration system idea that my neighbor suggested. Neither of us had done it before. We needed to try it out.
Here’s the model we used.
Several of us were going camping so he lent us his tool for measuring foreign particles in water. It doesn’t measure viruses and bacteria directly. (Pollutants are also a concern, but in an unreliable drinking water scenario your first priority is to make sure you aren’t going to get cholera and die). The tool is still good enough. If our homemade filter can reduce the ppm, then it’s at least possible its catching bacteria, and maybe some viruses.
The most reliable methods for remedying a dodgy water supply are probably a commercial filtration system, bleach or some other antiseptic, or boiling. We already have all those options. We wanted to stretch by trying something less expensive and more portable than the commercial filtration system, potentially less toxic than the bleach, and less reliant on fuel and energy than boiling.
We grabbed water from a nearby stream. It looked crystal clear. But once we had it in the jug, you could see the brownish tint of contaminants. (The picture below doesn’t quite do it justice.
The tool confirmed that the water had foreign matter in it.
We then cut the bottom off a plastic jug and used it to make our improvised filter system. We started with a bandanna, a few inches of activated charcoal we brought with us for the experiment, sand from off the bank. We didn’t have grass in our campsite, so instead of hiking back to get some, we were lazy and next used dried cottonwood leaves. We then added gravel.
One homemade water filter coming right up. Just add water.
We added water. The results were not promising.
The tool confirmed.
We talked it over and decided to run the filtered water back through the filter to see if we got improvements the second time.
Nope.
And nope. Our filtration system just about doubled the particle count.
The water in the jar smelled strongly of cottonwood leaves. We didn’t have a water filtration system. We had the world’s most elaborate coldbrew cottonwood tea maker.
Who’s going to drink it? We dared each other. No one volunteered.
Does this mean the home filter method doesn’t work? NO. Not really. There could be a trick we don’t know, something we did wrong. It could be that using cottonwood leaves was a mistake. It could be that it did filter out harmful bacteria and viruses, it’s just that the cottonwood flavor particles are really small and still got through. It could be that like other filtration systems you have to run several gallons through it before it works. We don’t know. We may try again some time.
But we learned something very valuable. We learned that we cannot rely on a homemade filter to work for us.
The next method we’d like to test is exposing a glass jar to UV light in sunlight for several hours. The only problem is finding a cheap and reliable method to test for bacteria and viruses. Particle testing wouldn’t be enough for that set up.
Note: if this had worked, we would want to know how many times the charcoal could be used. If you have to make new charcoal every time, you might as well boil the water. New charcoal each time defeats the purpose of having this as a less fuel-intensive alternative.