Domestic Water Syastem - Roula Gholmieh, Maissa Naim

I wake up, go to bathroom and open the water faucet. I wash my face, brush my teeth. I use the wc and flush. I open the water faucet again,
wash my hands. I go to the kitchen, fill a glass of water from the water distributer, drink half of it, and put it back on the table. I go take a
shower. In the afternoon, I fill up the watering‐can and go out to water the plants. Later, I call my friends and invite them over for dinner. I go
to the kitchen take a cloth with some water and detergent and start cleaning up the counters. I go to the freezer and fill the ice cube trays. I get
some vegetables and wash them using the filtered tap water. Meanwhile, I start boiling some water for the pasta. 2 hours later, dinner was
ready and my friends were here. I accidentally spilled some wine on my pants. So I went up the stairs to the bathroom, clogged the sink put in
my pants, added some detergent and opened the faucet. I went back down, to check on the grill and serve the main course. We sat down and
started eating. Minutes later, water started dripping slowly from the ceiling, my brother started yelling. I realized I had left the water faucet
open upstairs. Oops.
But where did this water come from? Is it different according to the different uses?
It’s raining. The water goes down the rivers along Beirut. It is collected by the municipality, but most of this water isn’t used for domestic use, it
is wasted in the sea. Another water source comes from the ground, from the water tables. Today due to the insufficiency of the river water, the
municipality mixes both river and ground water. Before sending it to our houses, it is treated with chlorine in order to kill the living organisms,
and prevent their reproduction. This water is then piped to our houses. When the water gets to the reservoirs of our buildings, it is filtered from
the excess of sodium and magnesium by a softener device. Then it is distributed to the different water supplies of the house. Domestic water
use is separated into two user categories: kitchen use and bathroom use. Water used for the kitchen must be cleaner and therefore needs
more developed filters. Depending on how bad the quality of water is one gets to choose between a UV sterilizer that kills the microorganisms,
and the reverse osmosis device which can be plugged underneath the sink which is a recent technology consisting of a very fine filter therefore
giving very clean water. The water arriving from the municipality is supposed to be potable water but due to the big amount of chlorine used to
kill microorganisms an external filter is usually added on an individual water pipe to use it for potable water. On the other hand, bathroom
water used for body wash doesn’t need to be that clean, therefore it can use just the normal solid filter of the water pipe or if water isn’t of
good quality a softener device.
In Beirut, people usually get their water from the municipality but other chose to use individually ground water. Therefore the water in Beirut is
of bad quality and usually needs high quality filtering as the reverse osmosis technique, and therefore apply it for the entire water use.