This sound like Ghara https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghara which is very common in rural areas in subcontinent. It keeps water cool in summer. It gives water a very nice earthy taste. Ghara is usually paired with a clay bowl to drink water.
If you can buy a clay bowl or glass, get it and keep water in it on your side and drink from. It will be cool and will have a very nice earthy flavour. But not all clay pots are same quality. Some are not very porous and won't cool the water or give you different taste.
I wonder if you could achieve the same effect more easily/consistently using cement. It's basically how aquifers "filter" water. Limestone is naturally permeable unlike fired clay.. were you need to control the porosity. I'd imagine cement mixtures are much easier to handle and you can make arbitrary shapes (higher surface area and higher hydraulic pressure to increase the flow rate)
Cement is not easy to make permeable. With the clay the trick is to put combustible material in the mix which gets burned off and leaves micropores behind.
I'm in Antigua, Guatemala where the embedded video is from. As the video says, it may be "low tech", but it's not like something you can do very easily for yourself. Ecofiltro is everywhere here. But, it is more expensive then I would have thought - maybe $30 for a clay pot and $50 for it's container.
Hmm just shared this with someone who works in this space in India, they got angry.
> It doesn’t work for 3rd world contaminants.
> White people have been making these for years. Doesn’t work
> We need hard TDS removal also
And the ceramic ones apparently are also bad:
> we had one of these for many years while growing up. the ceramic candles got fungus on them
Viruses are the bigger threat I think and just a filter like this will not stop them HepC and the like would be easily transmittable. Not really “safe”, maybe at best “better than nothing”
61 factories in 39 countries is impressive. But I'm always curious about the real world failure rate. How many of these filters get installed and then crack, or clog, or just get used as flower pots?
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 10.0 ms ] thread[1] https://www.terrawaterindonesia.com/
https://g1.globo.com/saude/noticia/2026/03/14/filtro-de-barr...
If you can buy a clay bowl or glass, get it and keep water in it on your side and drink from. It will be cool and will have a very nice earthy flavour. But not all clay pots are same quality. Some are not very porous and won't cool the water or give you different taste.
It was ceramic, and I think it was the same idea, but we used a pump to force the water through (like a bicycle pump).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_sand_filter
Very confusing.
> It doesn’t work for 3rd world contaminants.
> White people have been making these for years. Doesn’t work
> We need hard TDS removal also
And the ceramic ones apparently are also bad:
> we had one of these for many years while growing up. the ceramic candles got fungus on them
Viruses are the bigger threat I think and just a filter like this will not stop them HepC and the like would be easily transmittable. Not really “safe”, maybe at best “better than nothing”