How to make a hobo water filter

I shouldn't need to express the importance of drinking water, so lets get right to the chase here. Water has gotten expensive lately, and can cost over a dollar a bottle in stores, which is ridiculous. While in college I learned a decent amount about water chemistry, so I'm going to show you how to purify your water without needing to boil it. This is a multi-layered biological, mechanical and chemical filter.

Items you need:
-Plastic gallon or 2-liter bottle. Old milk jug will work great.
-Rubberband
-Spare cloth or coffee filter
-Charcoal/Activated Carbon
-Access to the ground (you should all have this)

The first thing you need to do is cut the bottom out of your bottle. I don't have a camera on me so I can't show you mine, but it should look like this(minus the ball):

Now what you want to do is get a handful or two of gravel or small rocks. This size you want them about the diameter of a quarter, big enough so that they wont fall through the hole of the jug. Invert the jug like in the picture, and put the rocks in. Now get a smaller particle rock and layer them on top of the gravel size. The second layer should be about pebble size. The third layer should be a fine grain sand. The fourth layer, if you can get any, should be small pieces of charcoal or activated carbon. On top of that put a layer of sand, pebbles and gravel. So your jug should have a sandwich like this:

Gravel
Pebble
Fine Sand
Carbon
Fine Sand
Pebble
Gravel

Once you have that, rubber band a coffee filter over the bottom of spout of the bottle. If you have a spare cloth, throw it over the top layer of gravel.

When this is all set up, you can pour rain/river/lake water or whatever water you want through the top of the jug (remember that the top is now the cut out bottom). As the water goes though the filter, the naturally bacteria on the ground matter will use the nutrients in the water for their own benefit and help clean it. The Charcoal will pull out all the chemicals from the water. The Coffee filter is a 1 micron mesh. That means it will catch small bugs and parasites that may be in the water.

Clean drinking water will come out of the other end, no boiling required. Be generous with the carbon if the water you use appears really dirty. A good sign of really dirty water is a foul smell or discoloration. You should be able to see the water clear up as it goes through the filter. This is probably the only thing that I learned in college that I actually put to good use so far.


That's all for now. If you have any more questions about how this works, feel free to ask.

Stay hydrated hobo's!