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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
The water coming out of your faucet is safe to drink, but that doesn't mean it's completely clean. Chlorine has long been the standard for water treatment, but it often contains trace levels of disinfection byproducts and unknown contaminants. Georgia Institute of Technology researchers developed the minus approach to handle these harmful byproducts.
Instead of relying on traditional chemical addition (known as the plus approach), the minus approach avoids disinfectants, chemical coagulants, and advanced oxidation processes typical to water treatment processes. It uses a unique mix of filtration methods to remove byproducts and pathogens, enabling water treatment centers to use ultraviolet light and much smaller doses of chemical disinfectants to minimize future bacterial growth down the distribution system.
"The minus approach is a groundbreaking philosophical concept in water treatment," said Yongsheng Chen, the Bonnie W. and Charles W. Moorman IV Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. "Its primary objective is to achieve these outcomes while minimizing the reliance on chemical treatments, which can give rise to various issues in the main water treatment stream."
Chen and his student Elliot Reid, the primary author, presented the minus approach in the paper, "The Minus Approach Can Redefine the Standard of Practice of Drinking Water Treatment," in the Environmental Science & Technology journal.
The minus approach physically separates emerging contaminants and disinfection byproducts from the main water treatment process using these already proven processes:
The minus approach is intended to engage the water community in designing safer, more sustainable, and more intelligent systems. Because its technologies are already available and proven, the minus approach can be implemented immediately.
Journal information: Environmental Science & Technology
More information: Elliot Reid et al, The Minus Approach Can Redefine the Standard of Practice of Drinking Water Treatment, Environmental Science & Technology (2023). DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.2c09389
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday September 16 2023, @06:48PM (1 child)
Sorry, you misunderstood me. When I said "I" can't pull up the 400' one, I literally mean "I", as in me, by myself. I can and have pulled up 130-150' ones. It's not fun, and you wish for some wedge blocks so you can rest a bit.
If there was a way to open the check valve at the bottom so as to drain the pipe during a pull, I could probably pull the 400' one. With wedge blocks.
A guy came out and did it by himself with a fairly simple 3-wheel rig. 3 wheelbarrow looking wheels in a triangle, all coming together tightly in the center, at least 1 driven by a motor, in some kind of strong frame. What to do with 400' of black poly pipe was more the issue. He didn't charge a ton either. No big rig or derrick or crane, but it was all black poly. Maybe yours is steel pipe? That would require a crane.
No, I would not drop a stick of dynamite in a well. It'll all just collapse. Something else percussive, maybe an m80 or something small, maybe, but even then it might not do much good. Yes, it's silted up from years of use and some abuse. That's normal- silt moves toward the hole and of course the total available area is smaller and smaller as you approach the cylinder. So naturally it clogs.
Hydrofracking ("fracking") is sometimes used for waterwell development. It hopes to force bigger gravel into the fissures and hold them open so the water (or gas or oil) can move toward the well.
We'll see. It'd be nice to have the old well more functional, for many reasons, including its water always tastes better than the 400' one.
Iron pyrite is also a problem for some groundwater.
You might find "DeepRock" interesting.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Saturday September 16 2023, @07:52PM
Oh, poly pipe. That's cheating. Mine had 400 feet of 3 inch steel pipe. Never mind the water, the pipe was several hundred pounds per section (and I vaguely recall there were 28 sections). It was about all the truck they brought could lift. But just poly, yeah, I'd think that could be levered out by a clever one-man-band -- same principle, just smaller. Have heard of someone trying to pull poly with a truck; suppose it could be done if you had a wheel for it to roll over at the lip, and enough linear clearance.
LIS I don't know what they do to unclog 'em nowadays. I'd talk to an old-timey well guy, they have all kinds of tricks we'd never think of.
Yeah, iron clogs stuff up, and lemme tellya, arseloads of calcium salts in the water corrodes stuff good too, and for best results, combine the two (welcome to the desert, where no one who drinks tap water suffers from mineral deficiency). Worst thing the well can do in that case is sit idle. After I left the desert, my old place sat vacant for a couple years... I've heard from the new owners, and they already had to replace my new pump and new pipe after only about ten years, probably because it sat there concentrating corrosives while it wasn't in use, and that jumpstarted the corrosion that otherwise might have taken 25 or 30 years to eat through it.
Our water down there wasn't just "hard" .... you've heard the old biblical complaint about having to make bricks without straw? Pikers... we could make bricks without mud! (Just about literally. Every year I scooped an inch of salt out of my swamp cooler.)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.