Simple methods for disinfecting household drinking water.

Area of Science:

• Environmental Health
• Public Health Engineering
• Water Treatment Technologies

Background:

• Conventional drinking water disinfection methods are often prohibitively expensive or impractical for resource-limited settings like villages and urban slums.
• Lack of access to safe drinking water contributes to significant public health challenges in vulnerable populations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and evaluate simple, cost-effective methods for disinfecting drinking water suitable for low-resource environments.
• To utilize readily available heat sources—solar energy and traditional Indian mud stoves (chulha)—for water purification.

Main Methods:

• Two distinct disinfection techniques were developed, leveraging solar thermal energy and waste heat from chulhas.
• Water was heated to approximately 60°C using the devised methods.

Main Results:

• The developed methods successfully disinfected water artificially contaminated with Escherichia coli (E. coli) at a concentration of 120 organisms per ml.
• A disinfection time of 3 hours at 60°C proved effective in eliminating E. coli from the water samples.

Conclusions:

• The developed solar and chulha-based water disinfection technique is simple, cost-effective, and demonstrates high efficacy against bacterial contamination.
• This approach holds significant potential for large-scale adoption in communities lacking access to conventional safe water treatment solutions.