Quote Originally Posted by LesterCHall View Post
Thank you for your ideas Mai! It turns out that the spout idea has occurred to several people, so I reason it must be a good idea. I'm going to continue initial testing with a variation of the original version, however soon I will add a spout and do it in such a way that it is 3D printable. While there will always be my own creative input into my projects, it seems best to put together all the suggestions for spout designs and figure out something that works well. Then there will be field testing with ideas from those in the field.

I figure my role in this now is to carry on with it, incorporating suggestions and printing up a bunch of them for others to test / make use of in the field.

Les

Ah, it does stand to reason that many people would think of a spout. I'm glad that you're continuing at the forefront though, you clearly have a passion for the cause and that's always necessary to get things done.

As your next video illustrates, I think that there are probably several ways to distill water that are already known and for whatever reason not widely enough implemented in areas with undrinkable water, otherwise we wouldn't have this issue to begin with. At some point it does become less of what you can make, and more of how to get it into the right hands. It may be important, at some point when the model is finished, to contact humanitarian groups to see how the purifying ring can actually be delivered. Or, how to make sure that water stills get set up where they need to be.

I think that in a lot of areas, though, especially slums that have unclean running water, the portability and ease of your original idea would be the most useful and easiest to carry out in areas like this where there is not a lot of space for large water stills. When we think about areas without clean water, often the image evoked is that of a dry desert without any sort of plumbing and plenty of space to set up stills, but there are many urban areas around the world that also do not get clean water and do not have the benefit of space. I think the 3D ring would be incredibly useful to people in slums, that get running water but do not have the money to boil it before consumption.