Hi Econiru,

Thank you for your insight and advice on the way to get the water cleaned.The process you elaborated on is indeed very practical and useful in our context.

I will definitely keep it up and do something with it.

Thank you.

David Kimani.

Sir.,

You could do biological treatments, such as involving microbes or symbiotic mutual plants which can digest the nutrients in the polluted water bodies.

Em bokashi mud balls are relatively best to treat the polluted water bodies. EM.1 contains three crucial microbes namely, lactobacillus, yeast and Rhodopseudomonas microbes can eat the nutrient from the water.

How to make EM bokashi mud balls:

You should collect the sludge from the river and dry it under shadow. Take same part of clay soil and mix the both soil together and add stock solution em.1 with jaggery. You make the mix until you get a lump of laddu texture (this mean when you take hand full of mixture and hold it in your hand it should come like sweet laddu). Then make bokashi balls and keep it under anaerobic condition, after a 10 days you can see white thread like structure which means ball is developed well.

Then this can be put it in the polluted water bodies and you can observe the result. First observation will be removal of bad smells.

Thank you JK Makowka,for your input. We are actually trying to find out what can work. The river is some distance from our project and not near the source of the pollution. The collection of the water does not present much of problem because we can use protective covers.

We are much more worried about the conversion of the dirty water to reusable Water.

Thanks.

The feasibility of this very much depends on the kind of pollution there is.

Searching for the name of that river for pictures lets me suspect that there is a lot of hard to remove chemical pollution from urban areas in it. And even if a simple filter would work for low quality water use cases, someone still needs to fetch the water from the river, exposing them to this pollution.

If you are upstream of the main pollution sources, it should be possible to install a relatively simple sand filter though. If the turbitidy is high, a simple to backflush/clean system (upflow) would be preferable for maintenance reasons.
The easiest is probably to install a rapid sand filter meant for swimming pools.

Hi SuSanA members,

Thank you for welcoming me to this forum.I am seeking information about available Water filters models that we can use to clean up waters of a polluted river water running near our project site.

For a long time, I have been thinking about the rehabilitation of the Ngong River waters.I would like to gain some insight on this topic from experts.

Specifically, we would appreciate the opportunity to address this water problem considering that the Nairobi Water Company supply is irregular thus,the Mukuru community grapples with the critical problem of lack of regular water supply.In our project,we sometimes use this water to unblock the toilets usually by flushing the manholes not the toilet basin.This is because the blackish color of Ngong River waters may cause the toilet basins to get dirty and rusty with continued use of it.The distance from the river to our WASH Project is about 30-40 meters.

I have been thinking about the possibility of use of water filters to clean up the water and use it in our project to flush toilets only and not for drinking purposes.This is because they maybe relatively affordable compared to other water treatment processes.However, if there is alternative idea to address this problem and make it safe for drinking, it is most welcome.

Thank you.

David Kimani

Executive Secretary,

Mukuru Water and Sanitation Project,

Nairobi, Kenya.