What purification technique is better, the purification tablets or boiling?

Hypothesis

Our hypothesis in this question is that we believe that boiling is the better technique. The reason behind our hypothesis because boiling guarantees that it will kill pathogens, viruses and bacteria within the filtered water. Purification tablets take 30 minutes to purify filtered water while boiling only takes around 10-15 minutes. Purification tablets also does not kill cryptosporidium which can cause illnesses and diarrhea. While boiling is considered the best way of taking out cryptosporidium. That is why we believe that boiling is safer than purification tablets.

Here is our plan for an investigation on our experiment that should take us a day to complete. First, before purifying any water we’ll have to filter it because purifying does not eliminate the minerals and dirt within the liquid. To filter we will be using a 2-litre bottle and a glass container to put our half a litre filtered water in. We will be cutting off the bottom of the bottle and fill in two natural resources as our way to filter it. We will use a paper towel at the top of our bottle, half a cup of charcoal, then half a cup of sand, then half a cup of charcoal, then half a cup of sand, and a paper towel on all those ingredients.

Next, we place the 2-litre bottle upside down into the glass container and open the cap. Nothing is falling out because we have the paper towel to hold all of it in. Then, we simply pour the contaminated water from the Oxbow Pond into the bottle and let it filter everything. This process should take about 30-45 minutes according to our research. If we believe that the filtered water may have some similarities as before such as some minerals, then we will filter it again to make the water better.

After the entire filtering process has been finished, it is safe for us to purify the water. For boiling, we will pour the filtered water into a pot, and heat the pot through a stovetop until which the water should be bubbling and have steam. Once that has started, we wait for about 3 minutes before taking it off the oven and letting it cool. For purification tablets, we only need to place only one tablet as the instruction says, a tablet for 0.75 litres. Moving on, we had to stir it for approximately 10 minutes after we dropped the tablet in, and let it rest for 30 minutes. Therefore, that is essentially how we are going to perform this experiment all together.

We are going to use different equipment and tools to record and capture our data. Our prime source of data to see which purify technique is better is our water strips. These will explain the levels of chemicals within the water, such as Ph, Carbonate, Hardness, nitrite, and nitrate by the colour. We will compare the coloured boxes after it was used on the purified water to the different colours on the test strips container. We will record all our data on my phone and took pictures for our Edublog. In conclusion, that would be all the equipment we needed to record and capture our data.

(Test Strips; the top was boiling and the bottom was purification tablets)

We have covered all the procedures we need to conduct our experiment but next is our safety concerns. Some safety concerns that may be present is boiling. Boiling is dangerous because it requires high temperatures to kill off the pathogens and bacteria. It’s best to be with an adult helping you to ensure you don’t get hurt if you are young that wish to try this. An additional risk was extracting the contaminated water because there were thorns and branches on the ground near the Oxbow Pond which were dangerous of wounding me. Thus, that was the clear risks of performing this experiment.

(The left bowl was purification tablets water and the right bowl was boiling water)

Some ethical, cultural and/or environmental issues are how are countries able to purify their water. Purification tablets ensures to kill bacteria and microorganisms in an easier but longer way. However, boiling also kills bacteria and microorganisms, but requires more equipment in a faster way. There are many people in the sub Saharan Africa that have trouble of finding clean and drinkable water because it is scarce for them. Finding which way is the best will save more lives and not let children and people die of dehydration.

As you can see in this bar graph, these are all the visible chemicals we discovered through the water strips and I’ll try to explain each chemical to the best of my ability and how do they affect the water quality. pH or potential hydrogen is primarily the measure of the acidity of the water quality which can be ranged from levels of 0 to 14. However, the range of pH water that you should drink is from 6.5 to 8.5 pH which you can see on the graph that they both land within that range. The lowest level of pH indicates being the most acidic and the highest level of pH indicates that it has the most alkaline. The hardness or general hardness of the water indicates the amount of calcium and magnesium salts. While carbonate, or carbonate hardness indicates the amount of bicarbonate and carbonate anions which they both also refer to the measure of the alkalinity. Having a decent alkalinity will mean that it can fundamentally neutralize acids so the pH may not become more acidic. It’s also important to be aware that alkalinity and alkaline are not the same and have different meanings.

The two differences are the pH and Hardness between the two purification techniques. The pH suggests that the purification tablet technique made the water the closest to being acidic and the boiled water technique is the closest to having the most alkaline. Then the general hardness of the purification tablets appeared to be greater than the boiled water. Since the general hardness was measured in mg/L or ppm if it is between 60-120 it means that it is moderately hard. The boiled water’s general hardness (60) was closer to being soft than the purification tablets hardness (120). Therefore, after researching and gathering the information about each chemical affecting the water, it’s safe to say that boiling is the better purification technique.

Conclusion

Through our data and research, we can state that boiling water is a better purifying technique than the purification tablets, therefore our hypothesis was correct. From our previous graph we could see that the boiled water had a greater Ph and still maintained being a moderately hard water which is safe to drink. The general hardness of the purification tablet may have been greater than the boiling, nonetheless, having a greater alkaline value is safer than having something close to being acidic because there are essential minerals that we need, and it brings benefits like a lesser chance of dying from cardiovascular disease. A mistake that happened to occur was that we purchased an inaccurate water tester that would show unreasonably different numbers of how clean it is. Such as when we used it on the purified tablet water, and it told us that it was extremely contaminated. So, we had to replace it with test strips which made the data seem more realistic. We could have improved our investigation even further by adding small chunks of pebbles into the filter, so that the water is filtered even more and let the purified water from the tablets rest even longer so we could test it again to see changes. The reason that we should have done that because there was some research shown that after one hour after the purification tablet was in the water, that made the even water safer to drink. Overall, boiling is indeed better and safer, but purification tablets can make your life easier of purifying water.

(Research)

https://www.healthline.com/health/ph-of-drinking-water

https://www.greenfacts.org/glossary/wxyz/water-hardness.htm

https://fishlab.com/aquarium-kh/

https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-school/science/hardness-water?qt-science_center_objects=0#qt-science_center_objects

https://water-research.net/index.php/water-treatment/tools/the-ph-of-water