Washing the Water

212 Washing the Water

The Queen of Clean has run out of things to make sparkling and is searching for new things that need her attention. Water is one of them.

You think it’s impossible to wash water? Think again. It’s not easy. And the answer is not obvious. You’d think if you wanted to clean the tap water, all you’d have to do is run it through a filter. Nah. Who knows where those filters have been? And do “…you know what they put in those things? Charcoal! And what is charcoal? It’s black dirt!”

So charcoal filters are out, and so are the filthy plastic doodads in which they’re housed.

You can freeze the water and scrub it, then put it in the teapot on the stove and melt it back down. But that only gets the OUTSIDE of the water clean. What about the INSIDE?

You can take the frozen water and turn it into ice chips and then use a Scotchbrite sponge on each side. That method’s pretty good, but it’s not perfect.

The best way (so far) is to clean the tap water with bottled water. This is tricky because the two mix together in ways that make identifying them difficult. If not impossible. But it can be done.

Here’s how: take one part bottled water and one part tap water. Put the tap water in a clean (read sterile) container. Then, mix in an equal measure of bottled water. They do combine, of course. But on the way to combining, the bottled water rinses off the tap water.

This leads to another problem: how do you separate the newly dirtied bottled water from the now clean tap water? There is no really good answer, and the Secret Mountain Lab is working on that. But for now, it’s a two-step process.

1. Pour the washed water and the washING water into a container, then seal the container.

2. Let it sit for 72 hours, then carefully and gently pour off the top, leaving the sediment (both the sediment you can see and the sediment you CAN’T see) on the bottom of the container.

Presto! There’s you washed water.

Of course, how can you be really, truly, certain that there isn’t extraneous dirt in the spring water? Oh, sure they seal the bottles and all that. But you never really know, do you?

Of course, you can get distilling equipment from your local moonshiner, and just purify the water by adding nothing to the machinery but the water.

Either of these last two methods works well with small quantities of drinking water. But washing clothing or taking show calls for the need to make this all work in much larger quantities.

So far, there’s no way to make enough of this stuff to take a full shower.

Unless, of course, you like showering or bathing in scrubbed ice chips.

I'm Wes Richards, my opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.

(c) 2007 WJR