t h e m a y f i l e s is foremost a family blog, chronicling everyday life. Life including natural, healthy eating (with recipes thrown in at random), home educating (with ideas popping up sporadically), an attempt to homestead on .2 acres (with very meager yields), raising 3 of 4 children with a rare genetic disorder, and lots of highly personal family triumphs and failures. You may also find an eclectic array of musings on politics, exercise, sewing, emergency preparedness, backyard chickens, and religion. This blog isn't a campaign to glorify anyone or anything. Just simply a record.

3.06.2009

Water, Water Everywhere and Not A Lot to Drink

When I taught Earth Systems, one of the systems we spent a good deal of time investigating was the water system, or the hydrological cycle. Our water system is a closed system on this earth. That means, we never have more or less water on the earth it simply changes forms.

Despite the fact there is plenty of water we often experience shortages, based on where we live, the greater climatic cycles, and pollution. It is disturbing to me as I read about the hormones, antibiotics, flouride, and other poisons in our water. Our naturopath had us drinking only bottled spring water. We tried that for a while, but it feels wasteful with all those bottles. In addition, I don't know how much the label of "spring water" can be trusted. We have a small Britta carbon filter, but that doesn't solve the problem of our showers, cooking water etc.

We also can't rule out, in these tenuous times, the risk of contamination, unintentional or intentional.

All this taken into consideration we are installing a purification system for our entire home. It includes 3 steps. There is an advanced carbon filter, a UV light, and a water conditioner. The conditioner softens the water without salt, and without removing the beneficial nutrients in the water.
The drawbacks of this system are that it does not filter out heavy metals like lead, arsenic, mercury etc. To do this we need a reverse osmosis system. Reverse osmosis purifiers, pull EVERYTHING out of the water. Unfortunately this makes the water nutrient deficient and extremely acidic. Not good. In fact I have been reading some very interesting things about the benefits of alkaline water.

We are debating about installing a reverse osmosis filter and alkalinizer under our kitchen sink in addition...I don't know....sometimes it is difficult to know when it is enough...when my family is protected enough...often I think if I just stopped reading and researching and lived in a shell life would be easier. But easier isn't better.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Isn't water converted to oxygen and then part of glucose (H) during the process of photosynthesis and then we make water from the glucose and oxygen during cellular respiration?

I like your idea. Clean water is so good, and we have little of it left and it seems our solution is to add more and more stuff to it...to make it better. mmm?

Good Luck deciding. you should always do all you can for your children.