In any situation, anywhere around the world, clean, safe drinking water is always at hand once you have the right tools:  1 a Just Water™ Ceramic Drip filter . . .  2 two stack-able buckets with lids . . .  3 a sharp knife or drill . . . 4 and one tap. Three minute video:

For detailed step-by-step instructions:

www.raincatcher.org/2009/05/water-filter-instructions

To carry a few of these in your luggage to anywhere and everywhere, contact   jack@raincatcher.org

Instructions: Find two stackable buckets, with two lids.

Step 1 Drilling: Drill or cut a 5/8 hole in the bottom of the upper bucket. Drill or cut another hole on the side of the lower bucket, close to the bottom. Drill or cut a final hole in the middle of one of the lids. Three holes total will need to be made.

Step 2  Tap Assembly: Place rubber washer on the tap and guide it through hole on side of lower bucket. Place second washer on the tap threads inside the bucket and screw on the wing nut snugly, but dont over tighten.

Step 3 Filter Assembly: Place rubber washer on the threads of the ceramic filter. Place the filter inside the upper bucket and guide the threads through the hole in the bottom. Place second washer on the threads and and screw on the wing nut snugly, but dont over tighten.

Step 4 Final Assembly: Place the lid with the hole in the center on top of the lower bucket (the one with the tap). Next place the upper bucket on top of the lower bucket, and guide the filter nozzle through the hole in the lid on the lower bucket.

Step 5Just Add Water: Fill the upper bucket with water from the cleanest source available: Rainwater, well-water, river, stream or pond.

The first five gallons will take a few hours to slowly filter down into the lower bucket. An endless supply of clean, safe drinking water is now available. Enjoy. As the clean water level goes down, keep adding water to the top bucket. this way your supply will never run out.

Included with each filter is a cotton pre-filter sock that fits over the ceramic filter if the source water is muddy.  See more stories and instructions in the ‘Water Filter’ category and in the Links’ column titled Just Water™ Filters.

The Hippo Water Roller

Can see Peter Macomber’s  The Hippo Roller video at  www.serumlab.com

www.metaefficient.com has story about the Hippo Water Roller:

Rain ‘n Roll – The Hippo Water Roller

The HippoRoller is a heavy-duty plastic drum that can be filled upright, then sealed and rolled like a steamroller across rough terrain. The 24-gallon (90L) tank weighs 200 pounds when full, but the rolling drum has a functional weight of just 22 pounds, so virtually anyone can use it. The current design has been tweaked to ease shipping and transportation of the carriers, which are manufactured in Johannesburg, South Africa. They are distributed mainly by local NGOs to communities throughout southern Africa, along with training on water purification and sanitation.

A single HippoRoller can hold a day’s water for an entire family of five. Great potential here to work with RainCatcher systems to help people transport water more easily and efficiently from a central location in a village out to individul homes. And what an improvement to go…

…from this…

…to this! (All photos: HippoRoller.org)

Another simple solution to the water problem: Rain ‘n Roll.

For more information, visit the HippoRoller website at  www.HippoRoller.org.

There are 130,000 family coffee farms scattered throughout the Peruvian Andes. KC O’Keefe of Jungle-Tech is helping some of these independent growers to raise the quality of their coffee beans and increase the value of the finished product to be sold on the world market. You can read the whole story on jungle-tech.com. KC and I are designing a RainCatcher system to create a supply of clean water for both coffee production and drinking water. We plan to use his solar dryer structures to catch rain and channel the water into storage bags developed by International Development Enterprises. Go to ideorg.org to read about this ‘breakthrough’ in rainwater harvesting. Once at there, click “Tech Gallery”, then “Rainwater Harvesting” to read about and see the water storage bag in use in Bangladesh. With this product we can do several demonstration projects throught the provinces of Peru. Local growers will help build a RainCatcher/Solar Dryer coffee production system and then be able to take the neccessary materials back home to set up their own. These systems are low cost, low tech, non-mechanical, non-electric solutions for rural farming communities. Our aim is to have these operating on a thousand farms by the end of 2006.

The subtitle for Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point reads: “How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference”. Our project falls into this category. Getting a thousand growers set up and producing better coffee will lead to information and materials spreading to the rest of the 130,000 farms. If growers are able to improve the quality of their finished beans, the return on their efforts will double, eventually affecting one million people who work on the small, independent coffee farms of Peru.

After catching and storing the rainwater, the next chore is cleaning it for absolute safe drinking. Another key person in this story is a man by the name of Humphrey Blackburn. He and his company, Blue Future Filters, have developed the “Slow Sand Filter”, a filter with no moving parts that requires no maintenance or electricity and provides clean water for decades. It removes all the diseases that spread in undeveloped regions through contaminated water sources. Humphrey just received contracts to ship a thousand filters to the tsunami areas and seven hundred to Iraq. The good news is rainwater can be caught and stored and run through these filters and, if rainwater supplies dry up between rains, any old river or stream water can be passed through the slow sand filter. Now we always have a back-up during long dry spells.

I have a solution to California’s, and the world’s, water woes. It’s called the RainCatcher.

In California, and throughout the Western U.S., the demand for water is rapidly outpacing supply. Current and future water needs for home and business owners, as well as for agriculture and industry, is so great that state government is desperately searching for new sources to tap, including adding six feet to the height of Shasta Dam. Massive, centralized infrastructure projects, paid for by increasing taxes and water bills, will not come close to meeting the relentless thirst of an ever expanding population. It is clear that for the next many decades, water will be the defining issue for California and the neighboring western states. What if every house in California caught and stored 10,000 gallons of water each season? That would add up to billions of gallons that wouldn’t have to be imported and purchased.

The California RainCatcher project will demonstrate how easy it is for homes; commercial and industrial buildings; municipal and public structures (office buildings, parking structures, etc) to be converted into rainwater collection centers. In this way each new and existing building can become a valuable source of water for landscaping. This would save billions of gallons each year. The water is free. Catching rain is easy. And plants love it, finding it preferable to chlorinated municipal water. Woodie Guthrie sang, “California is the Garden of Eden”. RainCatcher aims to nourish that garden by developing a new relationship with an old resource: rain. As with the installations we are doing in Africa, once a RainCatcher is in place, when the rains come no one is complaining, everyone is grateful. One at a time, as people get the concept of catching and using rainwater, the first question posed is, “I wonder why we waited so long to do this?” The wait is over, Raincatcher is here.

Where To Start

I am producing the first RainCatcher prototype for use along the coast of Northern California. My rainwater harvesting system will benefit both Californians and people in developing nations. Here’s how people in America can help their counterparts in Africa: Convert your house, garage or new building into a RainCatcher structure and 10% of the cost will go into the World RainCatcher Capital Pool. For every $1,000 spent on collecting rain here, $100 will go to setting up RainCatchers in Africa, where millions of people lack a consistent, clean source of water for drinking and irrigation. Each RainCatcher in America can help create a beneficiary RainCatcher house, school or medical clinic in Africa. This abundant resource will not only be enjoyed by millions here, but also shared with millions in developing countries. We have the capability of providing ample clean water for our own families and for others worldwide.

Manufacturers in Nairobi are making the tents and tanks needed for catching and storing rainwater for drinking and irrigation: Kentainers makes water storage tanks; Tarpo makes the RainCatcher tents.

Let it rain!