Water Filtration Lab Report

During our water filtration lab, we were instructed to design our own water filters in order to filter out as many particulates and living organisms to make the dirty pool water as pure as possible. Our water filter test consisted of a 2L soda bottle that we cup the top off and inverted to make a funnel. We then built our filter bottom up, starting with a rubber banding a coffee filter to the bottom as a final catch-all for the finest particles. In the nozzle of the bottle we stuffed 2 cotton balls. On top of the cotton balls we placed 4 cotton pads. Both of these materials also were inserted to catch very fine particles that might make their way down the early levels of the fitler. We then have an intermediate layer which consisted of a abrasive pad, and on top of that was a round scrubber surrounded by sand. We hoped that

The untreated water appeared green and has visible particulates in it that could be viewed just simply by looking at it. After we ran the pool water through our filter, however, the water that seeped out from the bottom and was collected appeared much more transparent, only having a slightly cloudy tinge. Also noteworthy was that the filtered water had no visible particulates in it. However, because the water was still cloudy, we decided to run a few chemical tests on it to see if it was safe to drink. We first measured the pH of the unfiltered and filtered water. Unfortunately, both pH’s were exactly the same, at 5.5. Thus, our filter had no effect on the pH of the water. We also tested the chlorine concentration of the water. This made sense because chlorinated pools often have high amounts of chlorine, which can also form HCl, an acid which would reduce the pH. Upon testing the unfiltered and filtered, we originally had 70ppm chloride but our filter reduced it to 60ppm. This was intriguing because I did not expect our dingy little filter to have any effect on the molecular