Water purification?

tknife

tknife

Joined
Mar 18, 1999
Messages
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I am in process of updating a few things in my pack, and am looking to move on from iodine (hate the taste!) for emergency water treatment. I am looking at the Aquamira tablets (chlorine dioxide) They also have the drops that come in two separate bottles, but that is not as compact.

I'm looking for something that has a long shelf life as it will mainly stay in the bottom of my pack for emergencies and maybe only be used one or twice a year. Does anyone have experience with these, or want to recommend anything else I should look at? I mainly wander in the the hot chaparral and deserts of California, and have had to rely on some pretty sketchy water sources occasionally. (On long trips, I carry a Pur Hiker pump filter, and always have a metal cup for boiling. But unless it's a dire emergency, fires are prohibited in a lot of places)
 
micropur mp1 (also chlorine dioxide) is my goto for winter for several years now - one tablet per liter and wait 4 hours. msr aquatabs is also a tablet but the instructions state only 30-minutes is required - i have yet to try this one though...a reliable friend said that micropur is just being overly cautious so they recommend a wait time of 4 hours but for warm water (non-winter) 30 minutes is really all you need...just throwing it out there.
 
Excellent, appreciate the feedback! I was a little unclear on the time it takes. But looks like this may be the way to go. Also looking at the Lifestraw. Price is reasonable, though it has its limits. I always thought of them as a gimmick but they have been used in some pretty extreme areas of the world for filtering water.
 
JoberSeven said:
i'm looking into water filters myself. would you recommend the Pur Hiker pump filter?
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Definitely, highly recommended. Though the company was purchased by Katadyn a few years ago, the Hiker model is exactly the same. Mine has been in use for about 20 years and has been used hundreds of times. I can get a quart of water in less than a minute of steady pumping. For best results, try to go a few inches below the surface of the water, but don't touch the bottom. The pre-filter at the end can clog easily if you touch debris. In clear water, I get 40-50 gallons through a filter.
 
Any time the water is cloudy or murky you will want to pre-filter. The advantage is that the big stuff will filter out with a large pore filter, like a good bandanna, coffee filter, or even a quick sand-filter. Even with tabs, organics in the water will react with the chlorine and render it useless, so having a couple stages you can quickly run the water through is well worth it I think. As far as how much muck a filter can handle, its all a matter of size. Something like an MSR mini-works can handle pretty mucky water due to its larger filter size, but that's at a cost of weight overall. The sawyer will need backflushing at some point regardless, so minimizing the crud is going to help you the most, and really just use the filter for the biological component.
 
Will be adding a Sawyer Mini to my day hiking kit in the near future. Along with either the MSR Aquatabs or the Katadyn micropur mp1. Both come as individually wrapped tablets which means they have a longer shelf life and are very light compared to the tablets that come in the bottles.
 
nelly619 said:
I can recommend the Lifestraw and the Sawyer mini. I have and use both.
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Second this. I took a class where our only source was a stagnant pond and used the sawyer after running it through a bandana and never died or got sick.
 
The Special Forces guys I went to SERE with like straight bleach in an eye dropper. I forget how many drops per canteen.
 
Sawyer mini all the way. It can clog but the cleaning tool is lightweight and easy. Like others have said, pre-filtering turbid water is good for all purification methods.
 
Gotta say I'm a fan of the Sawyer Mini. If you have a camelbak, you can use it inline with the hose for either filling or drinking. I would definitely prefilter anything questionable though--it doesn't have a ton of surface area. I usually carry a Katadyn Hiker Pro and a few MSR Aquatabs backpacking, but for emergency stuff I carry a Sawyer Mini and some aquatabs. I'm not a fan of chemical treatments in general though--they tend to kill the good bacteria in your gut in addition to the bad stuff in the water, not to mention they don't taste great. Boiling and filtering together really is best for dirty water though, because boiling can break down some of the toxins that filters and chemicals won't remove. I've had to drink very awful water before, and boiled after filtering. As the water cooled, there was about 1/2 inch of sludge that settled in the pot for each liter of water. I don't know what that sludge was or how it made it through the filter, but I was glad I boiled it. Didn't get sick either :barf:
 
That's pretty insane stuff. I wouldn't worry about chlorine getting into your intestines, and anything that can handle stomach acid, can handle the little chlorine that is left. Taste I am fully on board with though.

Boiling does break down some toxins, but its not something I'd rely on, as there is no way of knowing whats in the water, and most of the water toxins I'd be worried about, boiling doesn't touch, like cyanobacteria and similar. not worried about botulism in my water as much.

Sludge after boiling, only thing I can think of would be very high mineral content, but that much should make the water undrinkable. weird stuff man!
 
Regular city water is chlorinated already. Swallowing some water with less chlorine than what you'd get from a day at the pool is unlikely to kill your stomach fauna.

And we are talking about emergency supplies, not how to live in the country.
 
gadgetgeek said:
That's pretty insane stuff. I wouldn't worry about chlorine getting into your intestines, and anything that can handle stomach acid, can handle the little chlorine that is left. Taste I am fully on board with though.
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Armies move on water that has been hypo calcium chlorinated in storage after having been purified.
 
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