Tuesday, May 29, 2012- Water Chlorinators

Today I observed an installation of a water chlorinator in a small village near La Trinidad called Machapa. We were going to leave around 10am but there was a bad storm the night before that destroyed part of the road between La Trinidad and San Isidro. Therefore, a lot of the workers couldn’t make it into the office until late afternoon, but it worked out fine for me because I needed to improve my plan of work and translate the experiment I am going to do from English to Spanish.

Walter finally arrived around 12, and we were ready to go around 1. We went by motorcycle, which was a little uncomfortable since we were transporting two backpacks and a whole bunch of PVC pipe. The water tank for the village was located in the forest on the other side of town because it actually feeds two towns. The road we had to take was pretty bad. It was incredibly steep, had huge rocks, and was washed out in places, so of course we took the motorcycle. I was pretty scared I was going to fall off the back, but we made it to the top.

Water tank before the install

Walter assembled the chlorinator on the ground first. It is made out of PVC and plastic pieces. It is a relatively cheap way to purify water by removing most waterborne diseases, so that it is safer to drink. I calculated it out that it would cost $150 for the initial install and then about $5 per month to purify water for two communities! The ingenious part of the whole thing is that the chlorine tablet is suspended a little bit inside the pipe. This way the amount of chlorine added to the water is controlled by the flow of water through the pipe. When there is less water, less chlorine will be added.

Water Chlorinator

The water chlorinator is then installed so that the water enters the chlorinator first before the water enters the holding tank. The goal is to have about 3ppm of chlorine in the tank.

After the chlorinator was installed.

After we finished the installation, Walter brought me to his house since he technically lives in the same village. His mom gave me cookies, sweet bread, and coffee. She even gave me a bag of cookies and bread for me to take with me. People here are so kind and hospitable!