I am trying my hand at a water filter, we have been burning with the wood stove and I have been saving the charcoal, I cut a small water bottle at the top and added a small piece of filter to the neck, added the charcoal to the bottle which was about a 2 inch layer. On top of that I added about 2-3 inches of sand and poured my tap water threw it.
Now I have well water and a filtering system but it uses filters that I cant afford or as things get worse may not be available. So sooner or later we will be drinking iron water again, it wont hurt you or kill ya LOL but it taste like crap.
So this is why I am trying a sand style filter. After trying the charcoal, then the sand I found you need a layer of sand then charcoal then sand again as the charcoal would stain the water a dark charcoal taste and look.
So far the layer of sand, charcoal and sand again seems to filter out most of the iron taste. I will boil all my other water like rain or pond water if it comes to that but this is to keep my from traveling to a local spring to get water as I am sure others are there.
If this works and so far it is, I will make a larger systems with some 5 gallon buckets to up the amount to have on hand.