Newly Discovered PRIMITIVE WATER FILTER! 100% Effective

water water everywhere and not a drop to drink water is critical to life but it's also potentially deadly according to the Centers for Disease Control contaminated water killed over 6,000 people in the US alone in 2023 and so in this video we are going to take a look at some very low Tech and primitive methods for taking contaminated swamp water making it crystal clear and perfectly safe to drink I've got behind me a jar that is filled with some pretty nasty swamp water there's actually I can see bugs swimming around in this there's all sorts of little algae floating around um there's cattle in this pasture that are alongside the creek so I'm sure that there are there's bacteria and all sorts of nasty stuff in this water and today we're going to use plants to filter this water into what is hopefully going to be pure Safe Drinking Water stick around what we're going to do today is cut a long section of grape vine and we're going to set up a siphon in this jar out of this jar into another clean jar and then we're going to sample both of these Waters send them off to a lab and get the results back to see if this grape vine is actually able to filter out all of the bad stuff in this water that would make us sick so if you're going to give this a try there's a couple of things you need to keep in mind especially in the southern Forest there are a variety of vines it's not just grap Vines out here there's poison ivy there's trumpet creeper uh Virginia creeper there's cross vine there's all kinds of different Vines so make sure that you're getting the right one You definitely do not want to try this with Poison Ivy when I'm cutting these things I'm going to keep tabs on the orientation of the vine so water in these plants flows from the ground to the leaves and I want to maintain that orientation uh flowing from the uphill side or the dirty water to the clean water bucket I have no idea if that makes any difference at all but I think that it probably would so we're going to give it a try now when you cut a grape vine or any Woody plant the xylem when it's exposed to air starts to close immediately kind of as a self-preservation mechanism for the plant and so what I've done to counteract that is just bring a jar of water out here so when I cut this I'm just going to immediately stick the cut end in this jar of water to keep that xylem open and get a better flow through our [Applause] filter for all right so pretty much immediately you're going to see water start to drip out of the bottom of these Vines now I've got a jar here that's been washed and triple rins to collect this water and then we'll send it off to the lab to get it tested now because I don't know what's floating around out here in the air and I don't want the our sample to get potentially contaminated with who knows what falling into this I've just got a clean CL cotton cloth that I'm just going to wrap around here and just try to keep things somewhat but standardized so we'll leave this like this come back in a couple hours take our samples we'll take one out of here we'll take one out of this jar send it off the lab see what we got so while this grape vine is filtering I'm going to set up another filter using a branch off of a cypress tree all right so we've got a piece of a Cypress Branch here now I'm not sure if the orientation makes any any difference at all but because uh water usually flows from the roots to the uh the leaves I'm going to keep that same orientation in this Branch so this is the side that was towards the tree this is the side that was out towards the T the uh the tip of the branches and so this is the side that's going to go into our bottle to form our filter now the first thing we need to do is strip off the bark now we'll just need to trim this to fit in our bottle so just to make sure that we don't get any seepage from around the side to mess up our test results I'm going to go ahead and just seal it with some tape and now we'll just cut the remaining bit off so while we're waiting on these filters to do their thing I want to explain the principles behind this xylm tissue in Woody plants is part of the vascular system and its primary function is to move water and nutrients from the roots to the leaves of the plant and because this tissue is made up of individual cells it can't form just one continuous tube from the roots to the leaves instead where these cells overlap the water has to move through a membrane from one cell to the other the pores of which just happen to be small enough to filter out bacteria so what spawned this whole idea was a study done at MIT where they showed that the xylem tissue in the sapwood of pine trees would effectively filter out all detectable bacteria from contaminated water I thought that was pretty cool so I wanted to try it myself using different plants now it's my understanding that the reason they use pine trees is because the xylem tissue tends to be a little larger so you can get a little bit better flow and the xylem cells are pretty short so you can utilize a short section of pine branch and still get this filtering activity meaning that you're not cutting the top and the bottom off of a single cell and just having one tube that runs right through without having to go through through a membrane which is what is actually doing the filtering this is one of the reasons why I cut my grape vine so long is because I wanted to be sure that the water had to not only flow through the xylem cell itself but from one xylem cell through the membrane to the next xylem cell and that membrane is where the filtering is actually taking place all right so it's been a couple hours and we've got enough water in our jar to get a sample to send to the lab so just visually looking at this water it looks perfectly clear and clean uh but to be 100% sure there are no nasties in this we're going to send this off to the lab and get a water analysis on it and see what comes back so it's been 48 hours and we finally got our lab results back now I sent two samples one from the dirty swamp water jar here and one that was filtered through the grape vine now I didn't test the water that came through the Cypress because the tests were relatively expensive and mit's already done extensive studies to show that it works I'm going to put these lab results up so you can take a look but as you can see the water that was filtered through the grape vine is on top and there's less than one for eoli which basically means that it was undetected the raw water that came out of uh this jar right here had 43.6 and it's my understanding that these are basically this MPN is the same as colony forming units or something like that basically when they put this on a swab there was 43 colonies of bacteria that formed whereas in the grape sample there was none detected now I don't know about you but I think something as low Tech as is cutting a couple of grape Vines sticking them in some dirty water and getting Pure Clean Water out the other side is pretty damn amazing it's my understanding that these filters will not filter out viruses but I'm not sure how prevalent viruses are in our water anyway and so I'm not even sure that that's a a problem that you need to worry about all right so we've got the uh water that was filtered through the xylon tissue of the cypress tree the water that was filtered through uh the grape vine going to do a little taste test see if there's any difference so first off can't smell there's no detectable smell difference between the two so from the Cyprus I can't it's tastes like pure water it tastes like water you would get out of a a bottle um no no flavor that I can detect it's good very good all right grape vine clear the pallet so this the water that came through the grape vine I'm picking up a very slight maybe almost like a chlorophyll almost which makes sense because if you scrape uh the outer layer off the The Grape Vine bark it is green under there so there is some chlorophyll in there and I think uh because I didn't strip the bark off the grape vine maybe a little bit of that is just making its way into the water but it's def it's not off-putting or anything like that it's just a very very slight uh chlorophyll flavor um kind of like if you just took a piece of grass and put it in your mouth and chewed on it a little bit so the test that was run on this tested only for ecoli bacteria now I'm not a microbiologist but it's my understanding that there are lots of different strains of aoli most of which have zero impact on us and there's only a few strains that'll actually make us sick but the presence of Eola bacteria in your water is an indicator that there could be potentially harmful bacteria in the water now the fact that there was ecoli detected in the swamp water and there was none detected in the sample that was um filtered through the grape vine for me is very encouraging now of course this is just one test and in order to say something definitively you'd have to run a whole bunch of tests and uh probably control for variables a lot better than I did I just wanted to run uh a very simple uh kind of rough test here just to see what happened so I would encourage you to go out and try this on your own it's very easy to do it's something that you can do with materials that you probably have close at hand but if you are going to do this there's a couple of things that you need to keep in mind now I've done this multiple times with multiple different species at different times of the year um under different weather conditions and I can tell you for a fact that the weather has an impact on your flow rates the health of the plants has an impact on your flow rates for example if you do this with a Vine that is water stressed let's say in a drought you're probably not going to get as good a flow as you've seen here and so the takeaways are to use healthy plants that are actively growing and actively transporting water from their roots to their leaves if you do that then you can get a good flow and actually have a pretty dog on effective water filter uh using these very primitive and basic methods

Channel: Clay Hayes

Views: 2,498,241

Keywords: water filter, primitive water filter, survival water filter, water purification, waterborne disease, survival skills, bushcraft, bushcraft survival, survival water purification, survival water filtration system, primitive water purification, primitive water pump, gypsy well, primitive well, pure water, best whole house water filter, backpacking water filter

Id: nSBwJNDDUfc

Length: 14min 37sec (877 seconds)

Published: Sat May 18 2024