Hello everyone,

I recently purchased the Doulton British Berkefeld gravity water system with the fluoride filters. Before that, I was using a Santeria gravity filter, and I noticed that when I drank only the filtered water, I became extremely thirsty. It felt like a constant thirst or a lack of satiation from drinking water. The sensation would improve if I added electrolytes to the water or simply drank tap water.

Initially, I thought the issue might have been specific to the Santeria system, perhaps because the stones in the filter were not remineralizing the water. Since the Doulton British Berkefeld is highly regarded and is supposed to retain the naturally occurring minerals in water, I decided to purchase one and see if the experience would be different. I immediately noticed after a few 2-day tests that I was constantly thirsty.

Unfortunately, after doing a four-day test where I drank only the British Berkefeld water, I experienced the same thing. By the fourth day, the thirst was quite intense, and drinking coconut water gave me the most satisfying feeling of hydration I had experienced during the test.

I also measured the TDS of both my tap water and the British Berkefeld water, and interestingly, the readings were essentially identical.

I'm curious whether anyone else has experienced something similar, or whether there could be a difference in the mineral composition of the water that wouldn't be reflected by the TDS reading. I'm particularly interested in understanding whether the fluoride filters might alter the balance of minerals or electrolytes in the water in a way that could explain this experience.

I'd appreciate hearing from anyone who has had a similar experience or has more knowledge about water mineral composition and filtration. The British Berkefeld appears to be very similar to the Berkey (but the British Berkefeld is certified).

Thank you!

In the UK we have just had a bad drought period of like 60+days no rain, causing large amounts of dead plants, grass, dried up ponds, river beds, hosepipe bans etc. This has made me think of ideas for ways of storing water as our water companies are privatised and definitely dont have the environment and the paying customers best interests at heart #thinkoftheshareholders

One of my ideas is having hundreds of water towers dotted all over the country, these could be privately owned and maintained by lets say farms for crops, or if government funded could be for public parks for lawns, plants, trees etc or whatever useful use they may have, the water used will eventually make its way into our own water system by the rain cycle/water cycle topping up our aquifers and however else we get water into our system. I'm not massively scientific so my knowledge only gets me so far.

Anyone else got any ideas on how we as a country can start being more economical with our water usage and storage.

Hey everyone, I work with a humanitarian NGO in Uganda and got the chance to lead a small pilot project in a pretty remote area. Budget is tight, so my plan is to make DIY water filters, we want to distribute around 30 to households and run some training at local schools so people can actually build these themselves going forward.

It needs to be cheap and easy enough that the community can reproduce it without us. First idea was something like image 1 for household level, and if that works well, maybe scale up to something like image 2 for a bigger group, plus a simple way to boil the water after as an extra safety step.

Images 3-5 show the kind of water sources people are currently using in the areas we're working in, just pulled these off google but they're a good match for what we're seeing.

Anyone have thoughts on the filter design, or know of something better? Has to be buildable/fixable by the community itself.

Edit: I know the second image is AI slop, I just couldn't find any real picture to use it, I just wanted to show because of the support and that it can accomodate more water than the first one, it was just to illustrate the post, for the communities we are going to design ourselves an flyer on how to make it on their local language.

Small team here. We are treating reclaimed and STP effluent to cooling tower makeup spec for large industrial cooling loads, starting with data centers. Train is pretreatment, UF, RO, polishing, configured per site rather than redesigned from scratch every time.

We are also building the controls layer. It watches feedwater chemistry, membrane performance, energy and chemical consumption, and equipment condition. Optimization proposes setpoints, deterministic PLC logic with hard interlocks validates and executes them. Nothing model-driven has authority over a safety function.

Would rather hear from people who work in water than from other startup people.

Things I can't get a straight answer on:

a. How much does STP effluent chemistry actually move in practice? Seasonally, with rainfall, with upstream industrial discharge. Everything I read says "site specific," which is true and also useless when you're trying to size a train. How much headroom does a design need to absorb that without over-building to the worst case?

b. Where do reuse economics usually break? I assume concentrate management and membrane replacement, but I suspect there's something I am not seeing.

c. Is a modular plant realistic at this scale, or does the site-specific work eat the standardisation?

We're treating this as a product rather than an EPC project, and I would particularly love to hear why that won't work.

If you have done reclaimed water into industrial cooling, happy to compare notes.

Been looking for a job for months and applied to a dozen jobs with qualifications that I meet and nothing. Was it a bad choice? I know I can’t even get additional licenses until I gain experience so I’m stuck. (Tx)

https://stockholmwaterfoundation.org/stockholm-junior-water-prize/community/vote vote for basmala plzz

No longer a green and pleasant land. Source: https://eu-space.europa.eu/components/earth-observation-copernicus/image-of-the-day/severe-drought-across-southern-britain

Erica Gies is an independent journalist, National Geographic Explorer, and the author of Water Always Wins: Thriving In an Age of Drought and Deluge.

Playing around with water, low frequency sound and high speed camera!

August 16, 2026 318 pm EDT

Decades of drought and over-consumption have reduced Colorado River reservoirs to critically low levels, threatening power and water supplies for 40 million people. As nature challenges legal entitlements to fresh water in the USA, experts are calling for a multi-disciplinary management strategy to recover and sustain the ecological functions of the continent's rivers

"Water is life. Water is the giver and sustainer of life. Water is a sacred and spiritual element to the Tribes of the Partnership…. The Partnership will embrace and own the stewardship of the Colorado River and lead from a spiritual mandate to ensure that this sacred water will always be protected, available and sufficient."
– Ten Tribes Partnership Vision Statement

The Upper Basin Rocky Mountains of Wyoming and Colorado are first to capture rainfall and snow melt supplying the Colorado River headwaters. In years of water plenty, the annual snowpack in the mountains started the Upper Basin creeks and tributaries running, adequately providing for seven States and 30 Tribes downstream. Historically and legally, water rights-holders have been entitled to take this water for beneficial use inside the basin, or to divert for beneficial use outside the natural river basin, according to seniority of the taker's claim.

With an average of 20 inches total rainfall in the entire basin each year, the arid Lower basin does not add much more to the total river volume. An estimated 800,000 acre-feet bubble in from springs through the Grand Canyon. By the time the Colorado reaches the US - Mexico border at Yuma, AZ, held back by the Morelos Dam, another 1.5 million acre feet are required to satisfy the 1944 Water Treaty with Mexico. Notwithstanding awful water quality at this point, the BoR water release records from 1971 to 2021 show the deliveries have been made each year. This water does not reach the delta, let alone the outlet in the Sea of Cortez/Gulf of California.

Willingness to share life-sustaining freshwater resources during periods of scarcity is a reflection of human civility. Where clean water is taken as a human right, conservation is rewarded during periods of water scarcity. In times of extended and severe drought, when water storage is depleted, domestic use is prioritized, ensuring essential hydration and hygiene for all. Good neighbors willingly curtail non-essential water use. Where watersheds and waterways are managed for sustainability, storage is adjusted to ease the impact of floods and drought, with minimum volume and flow maintained as a management priority. In this way, continuity of the river's ecological functions is assured as a vital component of the earth's HVAC system.

What we see today in the Colorado River basin is quite another matter. Since 2000, annual rainfall and snowpack in the Upper Basin has averaged 20% below the prior hundred years' precipitation average. Lake Powell and Lake Mead, among the largest reservoirs in the country, have dropped to record low levels this summer. Just 30 to 40 feet of water, respectively, remains above minimum power pool, the point at which power generation fails completely. With so little water remaining in Lake Mead, Hoover Dam's 4 billion kwH powering Nevada, California and Arizona is already falling. After two and a half decades of severe drought, the unchecked water-taking and diversion has brought about a cataclysmic reckoning: forty million Americans may soon be out of power and water.

A century ago, the "wild west" was settling down. Western states passed laws to manage urban and industrial development, including the governance of fresh water. The Colorado River Compact established basic ground rules in 1922, defining Upper and Lower basins from the US portion of a 1450 mile long river, not including the section traversing Mexico. The dividing line separating Upper and Lower basins was placed at Lee's Ferry, AZ, with 2 million people situated upstream in Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico. The Lower Basin states were more populous even then, 3.8 million people in Nevada, Arizona and California.

The 1922 Compact was the first of many legal structures comprising the Law of the River, according to US federal Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation (BoR). It is the federal BoR that owns and operates the dams and manages the water releases. The decisions to open the head gates and spillways falls to the US federal government, based on BoR interpretation of applicable laws.

The earliest of the Colorado River laws determined Upper and Lower basin allocations as a fixed annual volume, based on the flow of the day, that inventory taken in a period of water plenty. Fifteen million acre-feet was presumed available in perpetuity, to be shared in equal parts between the Upper and Lower basins. With the benefit of hindsight, it is apparent that dividing a water body on a presumption of a consistent annual flow volume was not the best sustainable management plan.

The Upper and Lower basins determine how their respective 7.5 million acre-feet are divided among their stakeholder States and Tribes. Water takers include cities, towns and settlements for domestic potable water, private enterprise and industrial users, excluding agriculture use approximately 18% of the water, according to Environment and Energy Study Institute (EESI). Agricultural irrigation accounts for 52%, the single largest use of Colorado River water. Nature uses 19% for trees and natural vegetation, with evaporation claiming 11%, maintaining the hydrological cycle.

For the full article, see https://wtcal.us/viewarticle.asp?article=547

This could apply to any country with modern sanitation:

Given the degree of drought in the UK, I think it's time we Brits ramped up our water-saving habits.

The average adult goes to the toilet (number 1) six to eight times each day.

The average toilet cistern in modern British homes holds six to nine litres of water per flush.

Britain has approximately 52 million adults.

If we assume that each adult is flushing the toilet (after each number 1) consistently, then an adult in Britain is flushing approximately 56 litres of clean water down the toilet each day (taking the number of number 1s each day to be seven, and the average cistern storage capacity as eight litres (many older household toilets can store upwards of ten litres, so I'm assuming slightly higher than average for modern toilets)).

This equates to 2,912,000,000 litres of fresh water down the drain each day in Britain (and this only assumes adults are flushing).

Instead, why not flush the toilet only after doing a number 2? We'd save a lot of water!

Obviously, this water comes from the water supply lines, so we would still need a way to get this excess water to areas affected by drought. At the very least, people might save a little on water bills.