Charcoal Filter Charcoal

Our drip coffee maker has a little water filter inside which needs to be changed occasionally. We changed it for the first time in about 6 years this past weekend. I had bought the wrong filter though (the Keurig one looked like it would fit our Cuisinart!!!!) and the new filter needed to be, uh, drained of some of its charcoal in order to fit.

So, here's how these things work: Water goes through meshy fabric, water goes through charcoal, water comes out pure and not full of chlorine and minerals.

I snipped open the old filter too, so we could see what used filter charcoal looks like. These photos are of charcoal grains about the size of sand grains, maybe a little bigger. In these examples, the new charcoal (photos 1 and 2 where the grains are dry) looks exactly the same as the old charcoal (photo 3 where the charcoal is wet) which had been in service for 6 years. I had thought maybe there would be some discernible difference in the look of the charcoals, but I can't see any.

At the bottom of this post is a closeup of the fabric of the container that makes up this charcoal filter. Looks like a synthetic fiber to me, but I don't know for sure. You can see some crud has become trapped in the fibers. So, REMINDER, change your cruddy old water filters. They're gross!

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The Fabric of our Lives™

Had a request/suggestion for a macro/micro photo (yay!, thanks Peta). This is a cotton ball, all made up of gnarly little strands. You can see that while the cotton strands above appear white, they are actually clear like cellophane noodles.

Below is another shot of the cotton, showing the clear strands a little better. And below that, a crop of the center section of this photo, which clearly shows (no pun intended) that the strands are not white. Rather, these twisty fibers reflect light on many curving and bending facets, making them appear white to the naked eye.

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Mimi's wool winter cap

Today, I adapted my lens by "stacking" another lens with it in order to gain greater magnification. This is the result.

I had been capturing an area about 22mm wide with my previous setup. Now I'm getting about 8-9mm (with a little cropping due to an unfortunate vignette effect).

This is a shot of the fibers of Mimi's winter cap up close. I think that large white line is a dog hair, courtesy of Dash. What you find as you look at smaller and smaller things, is that there are no sharp and hard lines. Everything is a rounded edge at some lower limit, and it sometimes makes for difficult edge clarity in a shot like this.

These fibers appear to be oval, and semi-translucent, making them show up less sharp than I would like. Though this could also be an undesirable effect of my stacked lens which would not be present in a far better lens.

EDIT: OK, so I have an edit to this one. Not only was I wrong about the material (it's acrylic), but I was wrong about its ownership (it's Violet's). The hat, however, is still actually blue-green.

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