I had the same experience as many here. Great place to start out and if you don’t need or want more control then it’s perfect. I ended up on unraid and mostly use docker for apps.

Yes, that’s why I said my explanation was quick and dirty. Regular people don’t know what a plant does.

bruh it’s houston literally everyone is polluting on the east side of the city. the only people that don’t know are the people that don’t wanna know. honestly the fact that their plant never exploded killing people and belching nightmarish shit into the air made them good guys

Correct. Samples are taken regularly in order to determine if there’s something in there that’s not in the models or polymer table.

I can’t name names but there was a plant in Houston, TX that would have incoming water that would glow when a local very large company would illegally dump. I witnessed it personally after I overheard plant operators talking about it and I asked them to show me. Samples of the water would be taken and passed up to state authorities.

That was back when Texas had state authorities that sort of gave a shit about pollution.

They’re all gone now.

No. The far more likely way to handle it is with flocculation/coagulation since plants are already set up to support this.

Edit: the quick and dirty overview: shit water comes in. Chlorine and other chemicals are added to the water which kills the bad stuff. Polymers are added to the water which binds to the chlorine, causing chunks. Chunks removed. Water discharged. You can change the polymers used to bind specifically to which pollutant is coming in.

That part of the process is called flocculation. Using it to add polymers that have additional capability (like removing microplastic) is where you’d want to do it. The cost is the polymer which would be some sort of reasonable, not rebuilding every plant that exists to boil water.

Check out the video on the flocculation page. Does a great job of showing how floc works.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flocculation

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wastewater_treatment&wprov=rarw1

Proxmox

Unraid

UniFi

Raspberry Pi

Docker

I don’t have time to respond, but exploring the capabilities of any of those things would be a great place to start.