$1 DIY Water Filter in a Bottle


There are hundreds of DIY water filters out there on Instructables, Youtube, etc. There are many ways to make a survival or emergency water filter, so I will first say what are the differences with this filter compared to other methods:

1. The real simple innovation in this design is that it increases the flow and rate of filtration by using air pressure from your mouth instead of waiting several minutes for the turbid water to be filtered by gravity as many other filters do. This simple innovation can help you filter lots of liters of turbid water per hour compared to just waiting for gravity to do it’s work through the filter. In an emergency situation or disaster, this could be a big difference!

2. It works 🙂 It helps remove dust, particles, chemicals and even metals from turbid water. You can kill viruses and bacteria by adding a few drops of chlorine after the filtering process or placing the filtered water in a clear, clean plastic bottle under the sunlight for UV rays to kill them.

3. It’s small and portable, it fits in a 0.5 liter plastic bottle
4. It’s low cost, using available materials like a plastic bottle, filter paper or a piece of cloth or kitchen paper towel and cheap activated carbon (I bought 1 kg or 2.2 lb of activated carbon for , you will use 1/5th or around 200 gr)
5. It’s reusable. You can filter hundreds of gallons of turbid water. Once the rate of filtration becomes slower, you can just take out the activated carbon and replace it with unused carbon. You could use also charcoal, sand and gravel inside the bottle.