The modern world is a wonderful and curious place. We live in a world that, while functional and interdependent, often completely cuts itself off from the natural world that supports it. Our food still comes from farms, our energy still comes from deep inside the earth. Our whole system of life is built off utilizing natural resources that most of us have never seen and don’t know anything about. But it pays to keep a keen and open mind and know all you can about the resources that you and your family need to survive. That all families need to survive, really. This can involve thinking about some things that you otherwise might not. Take water management systems, for instance. What follows is a short list of things that they test for and why they do it.
- Bacteria, viruses and disease
There are so many different things that water filtration systems can test for but one of the primary things, in any place and any location, is the presence of foreign organisms in the water. Let’s go back to the past for a second and look at how these systems came about. Only through doing this can we gain a greater understanding of why these types of systems of home water treatment came about. It’s not just about testing for hard water, after all. It’s about a lot of different factors all at once. For long centuries before the Romans, most societies from Sumeria to China, from Asia to Africa and every in between, were centered around rivers and coastlines. The reason for this is that they absolutely had to be. There was no other access to water that wasn’t the water they pulled in from buckets and whatever other transportation means they had available to them. Oxens, carts, horses, whatever it was. Now, this was the best they could and it was all they could but it certainly was far from perfect. Often times, this transportation would contaminate the water itself and made people sick. There was also the issue of waste water being dumped back into the water source which made everything even worse. Without any water management systems, this fostered a lot of bacteria in the water and made a lot of people ill a lot of the time.
The Romans and Now
When the Romans came to power, however, they introduced one critical invention that changed the face of evolving modern society. The aqueduct. This allowed for running water to flow into homes for the first time and bypassed a lot of the foreign agents that would fester in the water for other civilizations. There were still problems, of course, but for the first time a mass amount of drinkable water was available. Fast forward to today and, with a few improvements, we still use this system along with modern inventions like damns or levees. It’s what has allowed to grow towns and cities in deserts that would otherwise have no water. But it doesn’t mean we’re safe.
The real use of in home water purification systems
Water management systems are just a small part of a much greater fight, one that’s been going on for millennia. We may have beat the odds when it comes to a clean, mass amount of water but it doesn’t mean the fight is over yet. It isn’t only bacteria that we have to worry about. With such massive infrastructure, we also encounter the problem of water contamination from a plethora of other sources. Mudslides, for instance, can occur in desert areas and fill reservoirs with dirt and pollution. Speaking of pollution, our rampant use of fossilized energy fuels our garbage habits and dumping any sort of waste can leak into groundwater and also lead to deadly contamination. While public systems can often clean this up, it also helps to have your own personal private water management systems come to help you along the way. This is to ensure that no contaminants, whether living or non-living, can get into your water and make you sick. Stay on top of these problems at all costs and fight all the way.
