Jim had been collecting rainwater for years to water the garden during dry spells, but the collapse of the water infrastructure meant he had to find a way of purifying the water himself. At first, he boiled the water, and still did, but it required an awful lot of fuel. In one of his old books, he found a diagram of what they described as a slow sand filter. It required a barrel, but he had hoarded plenty of those over the years, old containers from the days when they shipped fruit juice all over the place. He made a carbon filter from leftover charcoal and PVC pipe and even fitted a recirculation system that, with the aid of a small solar panel and a battery, would run all day, every day. He shuddered to think what he would do if he needed to replace a solar panel; they had been relativel
