Water Bottles with Filters?

[Baby Tats]

[quote Racer X]The systems that baby-tats is talking about have about a 4 month life for the filter AFAIK. (algae growth, not build-up usually)
They last much longer. I pull my filter every 6 months and wash it well in hot tap water using a scrub brush. I then run the housing through the dishwasher and then give it a good hot water rinse. When I reassemble I use a small amount of silicone lube on the gasket. I replace my filter after ~1.5 years. The key to keeping algae down is using your filter every day. This keeps the housing filled with chlorinated water. You should also let it run for a short bit before using it as well to allow it to flush. At a usage of two gallons a day you pay about $0.01/gallon for the filter.

BT

[MacMagus]

> now, does anyone know what i should look for in a basic make-the-water-taste-good filter water bottle?

Check your supermarket soft drink aisle for a little bag of disposable filter-caps for water bottles. Each one is good for several gallons. 'Might as well try those to see if you like it before spending $30+ bucks for a filtering bottle and $20 bucks for a packet of filters for it.

[michaelb]

I haven't heard of the "disposable filter-caps that MacMagus mentions, so I don't know what they do or what that is for (certainly not going to be adequate for purifying untreated water in the backcountry).

But I thought lots of us were being clear that the product you want to buy for the use you want to use it for, may not exist in the real world. I am not aware of any bottle based filtering system that really would produce enough water to drink while biking.

Here is just one thread, and if you searched other backpacking related forums, there are going to be many, many others, in which people basically say you would pop your ears out sucking if you were trying to drink quickly out of one of these:

http://www.backpackinglight.com/cgi-bin/...4996#24996

My understanding is you want a carbon element to filter for taste. You don't care about actually treating the water. If you can find one with a ceramic or paper filter element and a separate carbon filter, there may be a way to break off or remove the actual filter part, and just use the carbon element, since you are using clean water to start. Other people here might say that is waste of money, but it would improve the flow.

[MacMagus]

> (certainly not going to be adequate for purifying untreated water in the backcountry).

The stated goal was to improve the flavor of tap water, not to treat water from a wild lake or river.

[Racer X]

mattkime said

" so far i've learned a lot about options i can't use.

now, does anyone know what i should look for in a basic make-the-water-taste-good filter water bottle"

Maybe I wasn't blatantly clear.

The sawyer bottle I posted will do 250 gallons of essentially on demand water for under $50 at the absolute worst cost delivered. That is 5 cents a gallon. It is rated at 30 mL a second, so you can drain it in just over 30 seconds. Do you need a gallon in under 2.5 minutes? And its on-board filtration will meet or exceed any reasonable and safe standard for water purification. Including even the most anal and stringent city water system requirements. It will render a pee and poo filled lake drinking water safe. What more do you what in a 1 qt water filtration bottle? One that ships with a nekkid teenager to hold it between her breastesses while you drink? One that craps quarters out of the bottom every time you fill it in the top, thus becoming a money generating hydration system?

Its Thirstday night, what were you expecting........

[michaelb]

Racer X, have you used the sawyer bottle? I will be surprised if it actually works, or works well enough to use while biking. It probably will produce some water slowly when you squeeze it. But there is no indication that it contains a carbon filter, so no indication that it will affect taste. It doesn't list the micron size for the filter, but it does not filter viruses, so probably a medium to small filter. Filtering water at that micron level is not easy or free; it takes energy or pressure, presumably produced by you sucking or squeezing for every drop.

Mattkine wants to filter at the molecular leval, which is orders of magnitude smaller than that. The chlorine will just flow through a filter like that just like it is not there. The only way I know to filter out chlorine molecules is with carbon activated matrix or through reverse osmosis. Basically the carbon atoms trap nonH20 molecules as the water passes. This requires billions of tiny pores, and enough space and enough time to get them all, so the matrix has to be thick enough to be effective. Each carbon atom only traps one molecule, so the matrix gets used up. Lots of filters are carbon or charcoal activated, so you need to find one with that to really affect taste (as far as I know, in about 20 years of backpacking experience with a filter, and the owner of a under the sink filter and a whole house filter).