So...i Drank Aquarium Water...

[willowstwin]

well... if civilisation collapses (and I'm talking about a zombie infestation here) if I provide my archery skills to keep us safe would someone mind purifying my pee in exchange?

 

[fluttermoth]

Sounds like a fair exchange Come round when you see the first zombies coming; I have plenty of tanks you can pee in!

 

[Ludwig Venter]

Main point is...... your fish will be fine!!!... no harm to them!

 

[Bignose]

Any water.. Including the water from your toilet, if you boil it, then absolutely no problem in drinking it..

The technically correct person inside of me wants to say that boiling doesn't make 'any' water fine. If water has arsenic in it, boiling won't remove the arsenic. Boiling will kill off the vast, vast, vast majority of biological contaminants in it. (Again, to be technically correct, it isn't 100% -- there are bacteria that live in steam hot springs for example.) But, if there is something else wrong with the water that is non-biological, boiling may indeed make the problem worse as it probably has a higher boiling point that water, and boiling will actually just remove water concentrating the non-biological contaminant. And, as any fans of the show Futurama know, being technically correct is the best kind of correct

Oddly enough i was thinking about this the other day; if civilization collapsed and there was no fresh tap water, you could drink the fish tank water and pee back into it and the filter would purify it, so you'd never run out of clean water.
As long as the electric stayed on! Or you had a generator. Anyway, the idea is sound; out filters are only smaller versions of what they use on sewage farms.
You'd have to save some rainwater for changes I guess.

Except that urine is mostly urea, very little ammonia. So the cycling bacteria wouldn't be very good as using it -- they have been cultured on ammonia and nitrite of course.

 

[fluttermoth]

Oddly enough i was thinking about this the other day; if civilization collapsed and there was no fresh tap water, you could drink the fish tank water and pee back into it and the filter would purify it, so you'd never run out of clean water.
As long as the electric stayed on! Or you had a generator. Anyway, the idea is sound; out filters are only smaller versions of what they use on sewage farms.
You'd have to save some rainwater for changes I guess.

Except that urine is mostly urea, very little ammonia. So the cycling bacteria wouldn't be very good as using it -- they have been cultured on ammonia and nitrite of course.

Oh gosh; that's me and my family doomed then!

 

[micko]

[/quote]

Except that urine is mostly urea, very little ammonia.
[/quote]


I take it you haven't had the pleasure of walking into an old folks home?

 

[Bignose]

Except that urine is mostly urea, very little ammonia.

I take it you haven't had the pleasure of walking into an old folks home?

I have read what the composition urine is: http/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urine That doesn't say that what is in urine doesn't smell, it just isn't largely ammonia.

 

[fluttermoth]

Doesn't urea decompose into ammonia anyway though?

Sure I read that somewhere...

 

[Bignose]

Doesn't urea decompose into ammonia anyway though?

Sure I read that somewhere...

Depends on whether a bacteria that produces urease is present. http/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urease Urine itself is sterile (barring serious medical issues), so any bacteria would have to come from an outside source.