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What's a good design for a water intake from a stream?

I've stayed at several small communities that get their water from a stream. Everywhere I've stayed that intakes surface water has had issues. Sometimes the pipes get clogged. If there's filters, the filters get clogged and when it rains hard, the intake gets flooded with organic matter (e.g. leaves, sticks). So every time it rains hard, water stops flowing until someone goes to manually remove the debris in order to unclog the intake.

I know that large-scale systems (e.g. power plant cooling) use active solutions (i.e. mechanical systems requiring energy) such as a traveling screen.

But I'm specifically looking for small-scale (e.g. 1,000 liters intake per day) to medium-scale (e.g. 10,000 liters per day) passive (i.e. no moving parts) solutions.

What clever passive raw water intake solutions can be built for a small-to-medium sized off-grid house/community that minimizes required maintenance in turbid surface water collection?

Fred
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Michael Altfield
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2 Answers2

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The best intake solution I have seen used is the Aquashear intake based on the Coanda effect.

The water rushes over the top and some sticks to the bars and drops while the rubbish carries on.

I saw it in use to feed a small (2kw) hydro-electric system in a wood which blocked so often with leaves it was sad. Then the aquashear was fitted and the owner only needed to clean about once a month and so little even he could not believe it.

There is no reason why it could not be employed to supply drinking water systems and it has no moving parts and can easily supply the capacity.

See enter link description here

Solar Mike
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Best strategy is a progressive sieve filter. enter image description here

Uses mesh various sizes to capture progressively smaller matter. The bigger filters catch debris that's easy to dispose of without knocking whole filter out of service. enter image description here You may also try idea IF you have sufficient stream flow a water wheel with a mechanical arm to push a scrapper to remove debris from the filter.

Final strategy is build a venetian well. Pinnacle clean water tech, minimal power. System uses captured water thru a filtration medium which collects bottom of a well. Then harvested. If you build one to permit the stream to flow into the well and gravity fed enter image description here

LazyReader
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