DIY Water Filtration — 2.5 cents per gallon

The Wednesday Morning Weekly

Our city water is very bad and we used to buy bottled drinking water from Walmart at $1 per gallon — now more recently $1.35 per gallon. It was a lot of work transporting the water and carrying them from the car each trip, not to mention quite costly over the year. Assuming a conservative 1 gallon per day, this results in $493 per year! Very pricey! We also didn’t care for the flavor as we could taste the plastic odor in it. 1 gallon per day wasn’t ever really enough for the both of us for drinking, coffee/tea & cooking. 3 gallons per day is more reasonable. This means if we consumed 3 gallons of this Walmart bottled water per day, over the year it would cost us $1479. This article shares an alternative at 2.5 cents per gallon or $27 per year for three gallons per day.

First alternative was to distill. Before I explain what we do now, I want to share that we first switched to distilling water here at home, after buying a $200 distilling unit from Amazon. The fan was loud and took 5 hours to make a gallon — maybe four hours if you filled it with hot water to begin with. We made a couple gallons per day with this and the fan was loud 10 hours of the day. We calculated the expense of distilling this way and it came out to 18 cents per gallon for the electricity — which was about one fifth of the cost of buying bottled water at Walmart at least.

It consumed 500 watts while running and each gallon took 5 hours to make, so each gallon consumed 2.5 kWh of electricity. So it consumed 5 kWh of electricity every day for two gallons. Currently we pay around 12 cents per kWh where we live so 5 x 0.12 = $0.60 per day in electricity for two gallons or $18 dollars per month. Increase this to 3 gallons per day and it would be $27 per month or $324 annually to produce 3 gallons of distilled water each day; 15 hours of obnoxious noise but at least over $1100 in savings compared to purchasing bottled water from Walmart.

We got tired of distilling. After doing this for a few years and not liking the increase in the electricity bill, the noise, how long it took to make just a gallon of water and the potential for the machine to fail and have to spend another $200 to replace it, as well as the environmental impact, we looked for an alternative.

Filtration. We started looking into water filtration and considered both carbon filtration as well as reverse osmosis. Reverse osmosis is extremely wasteful and costly since it throws away so much water. So we narrowed it down to carbon filtration.

Carbon Filtration. We have chloramines in our city water but we found with dense carbon and slow filtration it seems to get removed very well. We needed something that would filter slowly and also in volume. The Brita filtration seems to work fine but we didn’t like the small containers of water it made as well as the cost of the replacement carbon filters — too much busy work and expense; we calculated the Brita filters cost about 15 cents per gallon to filter. We then found out about the Berkey water filtration system.

DIY Berkey. Berkey’s are a pair of stacked, typically large containers with a pair of large carbon filtration cylinders housed inside the upper container. The lower container contains the filtered water and has a spigot at the bottom. You can purchase a genuine Berkey unit — or other more affordable brands which will host the Berkey filters — but we decided to DIY our own a couple years ago.

Genuine Berkey filters last about 3500 gallons a piece. Since there are two this means the pair can filter around 7000 gallons of water. Which means this pair of filters can last 7 years at 3 gallons per day — I’ve heard stories of people using them for up to 10 years with proper cleaning.

The pair of genuine Berkey filters cost us around $150; we went with genuine — not sure if the more affordable ones do as good of a job but perhaps they do (something I’ll research in 5 years when we need to replace these two year old filters.) Since the pair can filter 7000 gallons this means it costs $150/7000 = 2.14 cents per gallon to filter. This amounts to around $25 per year for filtered drinking water at 3 gallons per day.

The water filters slowly through these and tastes absolutely wonderful at the bottom. I’ve watched videos of people sharing water test results comparing their tap water to the Berkey water and it removed so many harmful things including lead.

Instead of buying genuine Berkey containers, we made our own out of a pair of cheap 3 gallon stock pots — $20 a piece — and a $10 spigot. (My BF is handy with the drill and various bits needed to drill holes in these pots.) You can make the containers any size you like. I’ve even seen people make them with a pair of 5 gallon plastic food grade buckets — but we preferred the steam punk look.

When we need to refill the water for the day, we just fill up a 3 gallon stock pot — which we sit behind the water filtration unit in the above photo — and pour that water into the top container of this filtration unit. So it’s only one time per day we need to do this and it only takes a couple minutes to fill that stock pot up in the sink.

We like that is is noise free and only costs us $27 per year for three gallons of great tasting water per day.

We used some ideas from the following YouTube video to make the DIY container above.

Maybe Don’t DIY. DIY can be time consuming & frustrating; I think the genuine Berkey systems are easily worth the one time cost if you don’t want to hassle with DIY. I imagine they would last a person the rest of their lives. The spigot can always been changed out later in them for about $10 for a stainless steel one. You might even be able to find a used one at a great discount. Also there are third party clones of these containers at much lower prices but I am not sure about their quality.

Summarizing. We are very happy with our Berkey. These filters will last 7 years and only cost us around 2 to 2.5 cents per gallon to filter water. The water tastes great after 2 1/4 years we’ve been using these filters. We expect the water to taste good 5 years from now as well with this same pair of filters. We are saving so much money at $25 per year compared to $1500 with bottled water purchased from Walmart. It’s a silent process compared to noisy distilling. It doesn’t consume electricity so saves money and the environment. It doesn’t waste massive amounts of water like reverse osmosis. It’s much more affordable than Brita filtration and we can fill the entire 3 gallon pot just once per day, making water management trivial.

We have so much water we can use it for anything: my boyfriend fills up his water jug each day for work never buying water from vending machine or convenience stores — which amounts to a COLOSSAL amount of annual savings. We use it for coffee & tea as well as soups etc.

I can’t think of another alternative that makes as much sense as our Berkey setup as far as affordability, water quality, silence and work required to manage the water.

Afterthoughts. I’ve decided I am going to send in samples of both my tap water as well as Berkey water into a lab to test everything including lead. I’ll share scans of the test results here in this article once I get them. I think it’s around $25 per test IIRC. We’ve been using these filters for 2 1/4 years. I didn’t do an initial test after getting the unit. This will be the first time I’ve ever tested the water. I’ll also probably do another test in 5 years and share here as well, to see how well the water is filtered after 7 years of use on the carbon filters.

2024-08-23 Here is an interesting video I ran across on youtube where a guy shares the water test results from his Berkey after 8 years of use. The results were impressive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pt0ZlU1vN00