Revisiting water filtration, continued

From the last time, I had worked a bit with coffee filters and my big sand filter.

Since the throughput is slow, and activated carbon is not cheap, I decided to try an experiment today.  I used charcoal briquette, which I crushed into a powder.  This was used as a filter in the same manner as the activated carbon.  However, it left an orange tint to the water, which isn't good.

A run through with the activated carbon removed the tint.  Now the idea is to use a lot of charcoal, and then clean up that result with a small amount of activated carbon.

The final pass will be through the sand filter, but I want to make that a slow pass.  A dump of a gallon of water at a time goes through it too fast.  I want it to seep through really slowly.  How to do that?

Need to figure out a way to slow drip into the sand filter.  An idea occurred to me.  Why not use the activated carbon for a final cleanup?  The sand filter treatment is not likely to be as clean as I would like.

Update:

Another idea occurred to me:  since this water may have a lot of oil and fat in it, it may be a good idea to put it into the refrigerator, and let it solidify.  Then the fat can be easily separated from the water.  The fat may be clogging up the charcoal filters, too.  These may work better if the experiment works.

Update:

Evidently, there's not that much after all, as it yielded hardly nothing at all.  The next experiment is to see if the water that has no detergent will separate any better.

Update:

Yes it did.  It was quite successful in separating out solids, which precipitated to the bottom.  Some lighter density material floated on the top.  I'm going to try to clean it up some more using the activated carbon.

So far, I have had success with cutting down on my use of water.  It may be under ten gallons per day, but I haven't measured that closely yet.  However, recovery of that water is not going as well as I would hope.  The water won't filter back to a clean level, although I could still try other methods to get it cleaner.

The big question at this point is whether or not it is worth it.