Hmm just shared this with someone who works in this space in India, they got angry.

> It doesn’t work for 3rd world contaminants.

> White people have been making these for years. Doesn’t work

> We need hard TDS removal also

And the ceramic ones apparently are also bad:

> we had one of these for many years while growing up. the ceramic candles got fungus on them

Viruses are the bigger threat I think and just a filter like this will not stop them HepC and the like would be easily transmittable. Not really “safe”, maybe at best “better than nothing”

Would would want to chlorinate the resulting water, these filters are only going to remove large particulates.

Clay/sand water filters have been in use for a long time, some from the roman period are still in use.

I do not know whether this is what they meant, but in many places the biggest threat is now industrial pollutants not infectious diseases.

seems like he or she might have an anger and racism problem? "white people have been making these for years?"

PERHAPS instead of being angry at white people, they should look a bit into what they do in their own backyard.

yeah, downvote away :) but it doesnt make it not true, and thats why the downvotes will sting the downvoters so hard

Ceramic filters are very common in Brazil, used in clay recipients which also keep the water cool even in summer without spending energy.

https://g1.globo.com/saude/noticia/2026/03/14/filtro-de-barr...

This sound like Ghara https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghara which is very common in rural areas in subcontinent. It keeps water cool in summer. It gives water a very nice earthy taste. Ghara is usually paired with a clay bowl to drink water.

If you can buy a clay bowl or glass, get it and keep water in it on your side and drink from. It will be cool and will have a very nice earthy flavour. But not all clay pots are same quality. Some are not very porous and won't cool the water or give you different taste.

But there is no filter in the Ghara?

Sri Lankan here. We've had this type of ceramic filter here for at least 35 years: https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0182/4859/7582/files/Ultra...

Definitely. I think considerably more. I have seen the ceramic ones that seem to be a design that goes back to Victorian ones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceramic_water_filter

In the Sri Lankan context filters are more important than ever, but I think activated carbon ones? Water is (heavily, I think!) chlorinated but pollution is pretty bad.

Using clay to cool water in the summer is actually the original purpose of olla pots in the Southwest. They cool the water through evaporative cooling

Andy Ward demonstrated this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBos0j0FszU

Doesn't that imply you're losing water?

Yes it does. But it might be worth it if you have more water than cooling capacity, or if you have an otherwise very dry house that you'd want a little but more humidified.

Yes you are losing water but the phase change energy of water is immense, very little needs to be evaporated comparatively for immense cooling.

Mostly in rural regions, but the 'filtro de barro' water from your grandma's house beats ANY expensive filter you can get, haha!

The passive cooling is almost as clever as the filtration

Being poor sucks but at the same time being poor also makes you find alternative solutions to the incredibly expensive solutions first world countries use today. I really wish Brazil can invest heavily into renewables and free itself from oil and electrify even more of everything we do.

> electrical shower-head

Is that for electrically heated water?

I know that in the US on-demand electric water heater uses an enormous amount of electricity, like 100 amps.

Brazilian electrical shower-heads use 20 to 30 amps max.

At what voltage? (I understand Brazil has districts with both 127V and 220V mains.)

https://www.worldstandards.eu/electricity/plug-voltage-by-co...

Then they don't heat same volume to same temp, it's thermodynamics

Yes but they are also less efficient because they don't have point-of-use placement

I'm in Antigua, Guatemala where the embedded video is from. As the video says, it may be "low tech", but it's not like something you can do very easily for yourself. Ecofiltro is everywhere here. But, it is more expensive then I would have thought - maybe $30 for a clay pot and $50 for it's container.

For far less money than that you can buy a regular particle filter...

There is a company[1] in Indonesia that actually makes very nice versions of this tech.

[1] https://www.terrawaterindonesia.com/

That ad claims it removes microplastics. I was led to believe there are few easy ways to accomplish such a thing. Is this a, "Well technically, we started at 100ug/mL and ended at 99.8ug/mL => reduction!" or is this a meaningful improvement in water quality? The pot looks to just be clay + charcoal + silver - which is not significantly different from other home water filtration systems.

Filtering out microplastics is not particularly difficult. I just checked the first water filter brand that came to mind, and their independent test results [0] reported no detectable microplastics after filtration [1]. Having said that, the linked website above does not inspire much confidence. They have independent lab testing, which is good. However, that testing appears to only cover bacteria; and even their, only two types. Their lab testing also does not indicate any sort of methodology, and it is not clear if the lab was even attempting to test the filter, or if they were just testing the filtered water.

[0] Funded by them, and reported on their website

[1] Their sample had a known quantity of microplastics, of which they had a 75% detection rate for their control sample.

Does the water end up including some of the colloidal silver? As it happens, there is someone living in my area who has taken colloidal silver in some fashion for ages, with the side effect of turning the skin a ghastly grey hue. I can't say how they're doing for infections and related illness, other than that they probably also have fewer in-person interactions with other people.

“The pot looks to just be clay + charcoal + silver - which is not significantly different from other home water filtration systems.”

Ah, the at home water filtration systems that encapsulated in plastics! Though the benefit of clean water likely makes any potential plastic contamination from the filters moot

Are microplastic produced predominantly by plastic leaching out of objects, or is it coming from garbage that got mechanically pulverized, UVized, and contaminating water sources ?

Well the difference is that most home water filtration systems (e.g. Brita et al) are made out of plastic, so even if their filters do reduce microplastic levels, making that claim to consumers ("our plastic filters help reduce plastic in your water") might be a hard sell.

From https://www.terrawaterindonesia.com/the-filter:

> A single Terra filter purifies up to 42 liters of safe, pure drinking water a day, equivalent of 2 and a half plastic gallons.

Someone should tell them to check their math.

Those are plastic gallons. Plastic gallons are similar to treetalker gallons and ssl-3 gallons, in that all of these units share the property of being different compared to US gallons.

(The ssl-3 gallon is particularly strange: It isn't even a measure of volume at all.)

Heh never heard of a plastic gallon. I was imagining a plastic gallon jug such as a milk jug.

Yeah, in Indonesia (and other parts of the world), the 5-gallon jug you would stick in e.g. a water cooler is called a "water gallon".

TIL! Not the first time I've made a mistake on account of failing to detect that a different English was being used.

I assume it's a local/informal unit of measure? DDG doesn't know what a "plastic gallon" unit is.

It's not really a unit of measurement but rather just what you'd call the container[1], which in turn is 5 gallon / 19L. But nobody says "My 19L water jug", they they just say "My water gallon".

Since most people in Indonesia get their drinking water from these jugs, stating this filter's output in "gallon" terms is just the easiest way to communicate potential savings etc (since people pay per jug, so they think in jug terms, not in any other unit of measure).

[1] https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61fpdmJYUuL.jpg

I may have had an early version of this at home in Indonesia as a kid. Given how close we were to both sea level and the equator, the fact that the water was cool, even when site power failed for days, was bliss!

Nice. It's like a mini version of a slow sand filter.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_sand_filter

It took me a while to realize that this is not from "lowtechmagazine".

There is something very satisfying about sawdust being a feature rather than an impurity

I wonder if you could achieve the same effect more easily/consistently using cement. It's basically how aquifers "filter" water. Limestone is naturally permeable unlike fired clay.. were you need to control the porosity. I'd imagine cement mixtures are much easier to handle and you can make arbitrary shapes (higher surface area and higher hydraulic pressure to increase the flow rate)

Cement is not easy to make permeable. With the clay the trick is to put combustible material in the mix which gets burned off and leaves micropores behind.

Maybe, although I think cement would trade one set of manufacturing problems for another

That guidance comic is a disaster. The dirty water is the same color as the clean water.

Very confusing.

When I was a kid, we'd go camping, and we had these water filters that you would pump water through, and they would filter it.

It was ceramic, and I think it was the same idea, but we used a pump to force the water through (like a bicycle pump).

Got hackernewsd

they are not kidding about the "lowtech" or at least slowtech part, hey it loaded! no wonder it was slow, it's reporting about 1990 from 2020

They probably could have loaded faster if they shipped less than 80mb(!) for a single page

That used to be one's entire HDD.- :)

Why should I trust an AI generated encyclopedia?

I look at it as gender affirming care, for bigots.