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Hello Freewheelers,
Lone Ranger here.... Your water pump has a stainless steel strainer, that takes out everything down to the fine sand level. The problem is that a fine speck of sand can jam up the internal valving just enough to have the pump short cycle every five minutes or so until the speck is blown our. We do not have significant problems with the pump we use, not even maybe 1 in 500, except for this "debris in the valve" leaking down of the system and short cycle on the pump.

In a fast moving stream, the suspended sand in the creek could be a problem. Or if the suction line was too close to the bottom. Better to bucket it out with a 20 litre like you are on track with, let settle and then suck it out of there. Filtration would be OK, but these pumps have a limited suction head, and filtration works better if you pump through it rather than try and suck through it. It would take a long heavy lead and a pump down there at the creek to go through a filter pumping it up to the van... Not sure it is worth the effort, although I have often designed it in my mind. I use 2- 20 litre two handed stainless boiling pots that I carry, that double in use for prawns or mud crab or something I might stumble on.

The short answer is let the water settle a minute and suck out a little ways above the bottom. And the filter on the pump is a simple twist off O-ring sealed unit like a swimming pool pump... Regards, LR

so maybe buy a cheap chinese stainless steel cheese grater ( something to create a space but let in lots of water) & then put a filter sock around it , fix the end of the hose inside the grater & then drop that in the bucket
elevate the bucket to around floor level so the pump doesnt have to work as hard
gypsum will settle out clay in water ,is it safe ??? what else will do this job?

Hello Freewheelers,
You say is it safe? Well if you are not going to drink it, anything like that is safe just for showers... Gypsum if it works...

As to mechanical: Pump will do fine on anything sort of less than and meter of head to suck up.. How else to do it??? ( Your questions )....

The problem is with that white coffee sort of water somewhere like the Diamontina…. Channel country sort of place, it just does not settle out, the colloidal clay is in solution… The Lone Ranger worked out a system years ago to try and get it out of the water… I was going to get silly with high pressure ceramic cleanable filtration from one 20 litre bucket to another at the van location with a separate pump and portable filter. I abandoned the idea as too expensive to bother for most. We are not that desperate for water in the outback… Yet anyway… Not sure it is practical to bother unless you were on a specific opal site or gold site and had no choices.

Regards, LR

Taking the Mickey out of me again aye? You must own a chevy...

OK for shower water.... One objection,
I know I don't want any aluminum derivatives in the water, or aluminum (aluminium in oz) cooking utensils, for that matter... With 1000 % more aluminum in the brains of Alzheimer’s Patients, I don't want to give it more ammunition. Doesn't matter whether the chicken or the egg is first, whether the Alzheimer's disease aggravates genetic structure that collects the aluminum, or the aluminum accumulation that causes the Alzheimer’s... I would not add anything to water I was running through my Sterilizer that I might consume.... Get a reasonably clear source of water to make good drinking water out of...

What was my name again, Oh yeah, LR