Abstract:
Quality water for human consumption is a primary duty of the Government at Local, State and National levels but in this sense government has failed at all these levels. Individuals and group of people in communities decided to get borehole installed in their homes and communities in pursuit of quality water for their consumption. But, current cost of boreholes installation has increased beyond their reach again due to Naira devaluation in the world market. Hence, this research sought for way of solving this problem by identifying domestic well water treatment as a means of quality water production for human consumption plant of 6,000 Litres capacity was designed and installed. In order to achieve this, this research identified activities involved in domestic well-water preparation, possible units and their components, developed the layout, estimate costs for each unit, as well as the labour involved, calculate the interest rate of the capital involved; and determine the due date for the project. For easy computation, simple software was developed for decision making, “Decision Support System” (DSS) written in JAVA Programming Language. This decision support system was tested and validated using a case study. The estimated cost for the whole project was N465,000 compared with boreholes installation of 1.5Million Naira (N1,500,000). This project caused a reduction cost of 69%. But considering costs of three major common types of domestic well-water plant installations in this house community used as case study: Hand pump borehole of 50 metres costs N605,000; motorized/ Electric borehole of 60 metres costs N1,097,800 while Solar powered borehole of 70 metres cost N2,609,600. This research reduced these costs by 23%, (N140,000); 57.64% (N632,800) and 82.18% (N2,144,600) respectively. The due date for the project was predicted to be 97 days but the project was completed in 92 days which shows that the effectiveness is 94.85% and risk involved in this project to be 5.15%. The laboratory test of the sampled water collected proved the treated domestic well water fit for human consumption. The developed DSS will be of good use for individuals, communities, water project managers in a developed and developing countries. Improvement on this project and its developed DSS can be of good use in farm irrigation, animal husbandry, small and medium scale industries that needs quality water for their production.
