Cleaning the water... and making plants very happy

Our water-treatment system is finished. .

Here, in Ouled Emgatel, there's no running water. The inhabitants use the well. But we're French, and we're used to running water so... we've installed it. The water has to be brought here. We pay a man from a village a few miles away to bring us, every two weeks or so, a tank of water from a big well near the river. Which he does with his tractor. We put this water in our tank, and that' it, we can shower and everything. We still need three different filters, which make this water drinkable.

By the well... well, yeah, but with a tank !

Someday, we hope, we'll build a well.
As for the waste water, we don't have much of it anyway, thanks to our dry toilets . These are in fact composting dry toilets, and it's really working.
The filters we've built recently only work with our small waste waters (washing-up, shower and washing), and thanks to these we'll be able to use the water a second time, and water the garden with it.

We've built three ponds. The first two filter the water and the third one, the bigger, contains the clean water.

The pebbles will clean the water

How does work filtration?
The idea is to make the water run through a pond, or several ponds, in which you put a layer of pebbles, one layer of gravel, then some sand, and put aquatic plants in it, like reeds or rush.

At this point, in the French version of this blog, I explained how all this works... but English is not my mother-tongue, and it's a lot more difficult to do ! So, well... I won't be telling you about bacteria, filtration and microbes. Lucky you, in a way !

The thanks are working, and the plants are happy