But but Cliffy is always right! ! I had no luck with fast swirl.. But I don't recall we predissolved in warm clear water first.
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Happy Scream Day! 😱
Portable Water Filtration & Purification
- Thread starter Eric Billard
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YC, I bring a quart Nalgene bottle of alum solution, with the alum initially dissolved in warm water. and just-in-case shaken before settling bucket distribution. There are slightly different concentration formulas recommended, but I use an ounce+ of alum dissolved in warm water in a quart Nalgene and 2 capfuls for 5 gallon bucket.
A couple Nalgene capfuls of that pre-dissolved solution into a bucket of silty river water works better than just sprinkling dry alum in the bucket; tried both ways, no contest. I bring the alum solution Nalgene and a little grocery store spice aisle container of alum to refresh/refill the Nalgene if needed. Haven’t needed to, a quart Nalgene dispensed by the capfuls goes a loooong way, and a pint bottle with pre-dissolved alum powder refill would suffice.
This video is as good as any.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9BY69KnzoU
A couple capfuls of the dissolved alum solution and, as for the mixing technique, I don’t think it really matters much; I froth the crap out of it, swirly and backwards, sideways and ending with spinning swirly and go have a seat. You may want to cover your settling buckets if you leave them out overnight.
http://photobucket.com/gallery/user/...DcxMjE=/?ref=1
I have sawyer gravity filter hang it up and forget it but. I am going to get a sawyer squeeze and a smart water bottle just fill the bottle and drink it threw the squeeze that it.Just make sure you do not let them freeze
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Katadyn base camp bag filter, one of the originals. I converted up to the newer filter so have my original large bag with the new easy flow filter. I really like it. I do occasionally scoop water off the top of the lake whilst paddling but never in the rivers.I got sick in the mountains in AB once and it was not fun.
I use the filtered water to refill my bottles and usually scoop water out of the river for coffee and cooking as it will be boiled anyway. I take one of those collapsable water jugs with me for camp supply. I have a nice little blue hard sided jug too that works great for base camping.
Of course catching rainwater is always a favourite too.
Christy
I use the filtered water to refill my bottles and usually scoop water out of the river for coffee and cooking as it will be boiled anyway. I take one of those collapsable water jugs with me for camp supply. I have a nice little blue hard sided jug too that works great for base camping.
Of course catching rainwater is always a favourite too.
Christy
I love my Platypus Gravity Works system. I will never pump again.
I was looking for a backup filter for the kit when I came across the incredibly affordable Sawyer Mini kit. It works with the platypus kit. Now I pack some combination of the two kits. I love the dirty bag that came with the platypus kit so much that I even bring it solo, along with the sawyer mini filter with two small chunks of hose. I almost always have a hydration bladder in my pack which ties into the kit so I have never needed to use the syringe for backflushing. I also love my heavy-duty MSR Dromedary bladder but it has a small square spout on the smaller cap that does not create a tight seal with the platypus hose so I cannot use it for backflushing. Anyone else found a solution to this? In a big, heavy packing group I will bring the entire platypus kit supplemented by the sawyer kit, a platypus charcoal filter, a larger container for dirty water, my pack bladder and one or two Dromedaries. That way the sawyer kit can go out on a day trip without robbing the base campers of their water purification needs.
I have only felt the need to use the charcoal filter once on an especially beaver-laden lake with water stained so dark that you could not see through the dirty bag. On that lake I ended up rigging all three filters in series which required zero additional components (just a knife to cut some small chunks of hose). Even the most squeamish companion was pleased with the taste and no one got sick. Backflushing was a chore and I'm sure the third filter was superfluous. I did not have good luck storing and reusing the charcoal filter so I have a new one now that I will hopefully never be inclined to use.
In muddy water I fill my cheap stand-up collapsible container with dirty water and let sit to settle out as much silt as it does naturally, and then gently pour into the gravity works dirty bag. And then backflush, backflush, backflush. I've never taken a long river trip without packing water in, but this thread has me looking into alum and I will probably go that route when I take another western river trip or if great slave ever calls my name. This forum teaches me more and more every time I sign on. Thank you all for being a part of this community.
When I purchased the gravity works system, I read the entirety of the instructions (something rare for me) and have followed them especially in regards to long term storage. I've only had it for 4 years and the system still performs like it did when it was new.
Zac
I was looking for a backup filter for the kit when I came across the incredibly affordable Sawyer Mini kit. It works with the platypus kit. Now I pack some combination of the two kits. I love the dirty bag that came with the platypus kit so much that I even bring it solo, along with the sawyer mini filter with two small chunks of hose. I almost always have a hydration bladder in my pack which ties into the kit so I have never needed to use the syringe for backflushing. I also love my heavy-duty MSR Dromedary bladder but it has a small square spout on the smaller cap that does not create a tight seal with the platypus hose so I cannot use it for backflushing. Anyone else found a solution to this? In a big, heavy packing group I will bring the entire platypus kit supplemented by the sawyer kit, a platypus charcoal filter, a larger container for dirty water, my pack bladder and one or two Dromedaries. That way the sawyer kit can go out on a day trip without robbing the base campers of their water purification needs.
I have only felt the need to use the charcoal filter once on an especially beaver-laden lake with water stained so dark that you could not see through the dirty bag. On that lake I ended up rigging all three filters in series which required zero additional components (just a knife to cut some small chunks of hose). Even the most squeamish companion was pleased with the taste and no one got sick. Backflushing was a chore and I'm sure the third filter was superfluous. I did not have good luck storing and reusing the charcoal filter so I have a new one now that I will hopefully never be inclined to use.
In muddy water I fill my cheap stand-up collapsible container with dirty water and let sit to settle out as much silt as it does naturally, and then gently pour into the gravity works dirty bag. And then backflush, backflush, backflush. I've never taken a long river trip without packing water in, but this thread has me looking into alum and I will probably go that route when I take another western river trip or if great slave ever calls my name. This forum teaches me more and more every time I sign on. Thank you all for being a part of this community.
When I purchased the gravity works system, I read the entirety of the instructions (something rare for me) and have followed them especially in regards to long term storage. I've only had it for 4 years and the system still performs like it did when it was new.
Zac
I use the 130 year old Kelly Kettle to boil water pure.It has no moving parts that can fail and of course is used as a heat source and all other cooking chores.Great for one or two but more than that best bring a filter
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YC, about adding the two Nalgene capfuls of alum solution, I did it that way the first couple of times, and afterwards just dispensed a glug of the solution into the settling bucket. I had a pretty good idea of how much alum solution was in two capfuls and don’t think that measurement need be all that exact.
PP, I’ve had Giardia (which for me wasn’t that bad symptomatically ), Lyme Disease (which I caught early-ish, but may have left me a bit arthritic) and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever (which undiagnosed nearly ended me).
That tick borne crap is bad, and worth diluting some Martin’s Permethrin to spray on pant legs and shoes before a trip.
https://www.amazon.com/Control-Solutions-Permethrin-Multi-Purpose-Insecticide/dp/B00061MSS0
Or during a trip; Permethrin is poisonous for aquatics and felines. I’ll bring a bottle in and spray my pant legs, shoes, chair, tent and vestibule doors in camp in situ; if the overspray is underfoot, under-chair or around tent doors I’m ok with that. Waking up to see a horde of ticks leg waggling on the no-see-um mesh ISO a blood meal is not a great start for the day.
Luckily I also spent 40 years working with infectious disease and docs; the Spotted Fever was finally diagnosed from 500 miles away, from a symptom I mumbled incoherently over the phone while explaining that I was weak, feverish yet having chills, and barely able to walk across the room, let alone drive, and wouldn’t be able to travel 500 miles home in time for work on Monday
My then boss’s actual words (a Walter Reed infectious disease expert) were “Mike, you’ve got Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, you better get to a doctor or you’re going to die”. Great bedside manner, maybe why he was in research.
Doxycycline knocked that crap out fast and I only missed one day of work.
(Well heck, I’m just watching paint dry. Literally, latex paint over pink foamboard, and will instead blather about a peculiar time in my life)
If that medication was Flagyl (metronidazole) for Giardia it can make you photosensitive, so if you were to take it watch your sun exposure, And, I know from personal experience, DO NOT drink alcohol while taking Flagyl. Maybe especially don’t wash them down with beer.
I was given Flagly for the Giardia when my two week inpatient E.coli study was up. And a pocket full of cash ($22 a day x 14 days! Riches beyond dreams of avarice!). I was not given any instructions or contraindications for taking Flagyl, just handed a bottle of pills and “A take these X times a day ‘til they are gone”
I did what any red blooded American 18 year old with a sudden pocket full of cash would do upon release from a sterile and monitored in-patient environment. I partied for days. Some of the after-parties, with a cohort of twenty suddenly cash flush fellow guinea pigs, gathered together to celebrate their freedom, were epic, multi-day affairs.
Thank goodness they kept some of our money until we appeared for the required follow up visit. I left one after party on a Saturday night and when I came back Wednesday it was still going on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKaQzQAlNn4
I kept passing out and coming to face down on the carpet or in the dirt. I was drinking quite a bit to make up for lost time, and oh heck, it’s time to take my Flagyl. When I went back for the follow-up a week later I mentioned that I felt fine gastrointestinally, had developed a brain tumor, because I kept blacking out.
“You haven’t been drinking have you?”, asked with a look of wide eyed horror. I burst out laughing at the inanity of the question before I could sputter a reply. What the heck do you think I’ve been doing, beer is the only thing we haven’t figured out how to smuggle onto the ward.
(Paint is drying nicely, best keep blathering than screw with it just yet)
With some practiced smuggling technique we did not lack for much on the ward, and the “old hands” were particularly inventive. This was a sealed ward, flying a quarantine flag. The windows didn’t open. But they once had opened, via a since removed hand crank. One early roommate rubbed a pencil across the missing handle gear-toothed connection and fabricated a window crank.
He would crack the window barely ¼”open, roll a joint from his smuggled-in stash and stick the joint in the end of a drinking straw laid out on the concrete window sill. An exhale straw went on the other side of the windowsill.
Close the blinds just in case. Lean in and inhale through the straw. Wait 30 seconds, lean out and exhale through the other straw, with all smoke and odor remaining outside the building. He was brilliant. And, I should add generous.
There were upsides to being a guinea pig for vaccine studies. It funded a bunch of wandering cross country trips. The vaccination page of my passport was a head scratching thing of wonder. Typhoid, Heptavax B (several doses), Imovax rabbies vaccine (several doses), H1N1 Swine Flu, Cholera, A. Victoria, several nasty strains of E.coli. It was a hypochondriac traveler’s wet dream, and yet I still managed to catch things not on the list.
I met some interesting and bizarre people during those (need I mention co-ed) studies, a couple of whom made their living as guinea pigs. I was however not interested in that steady money gig as a human subject teaching interns how to perform rectal exams; Turn your head and cough, Next, Turn your head and cough, Next, and eventually ran out of infectious diseases to be vaccinated against or challenged with.
But, on the last inpatient day of the last study for which I was eligible (immune to dang near everything they were working on, or been challenged with it) my morning physical was conducted by the Director of the Institute, who I had come to know well.
When he finished my physical I looked him in the eye, pulled my empty pants pockets inside out, shook out some lint and said five words that changed my life:
“I need a real job”
Started as a glassware washing Laboratory Assistant II. Thirty five years later I was managing the largest dedicated research facility on campus, had helped design that building from ground up, and worked on the retrofit design of two other laboratory buildings.
Those five simple words changed the course of my life. Freaks me the heck out when I think about it.
And that’s all I have to say about that
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Otm4RusESNU
PP, I’ve had Giardia (which for me wasn’t that bad symptomatically ), Lyme Disease (which I caught early-ish, but may have left me a bit arthritic) and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever (which undiagnosed nearly ended me).
That tick borne crap is bad, and worth diluting some Martin’s Permethrin to spray on pant legs and shoes before a trip.
https://www.amazon.com/Control-Solutions-Permethrin-Multi-Purpose-Insecticide/dp/B00061MSS0
Or during a trip; Permethrin is poisonous for aquatics and felines. I’ll bring a bottle in and spray my pant legs, shoes, chair, tent and vestibule doors in camp in situ; if the overspray is underfoot, under-chair or around tent doors I’m ok with that. Waking up to see a horde of ticks leg waggling on the no-see-um mesh ISO a blood meal is not a great start for the day.
Luckily I also spent 40 years working with infectious disease and docs; the Spotted Fever was finally diagnosed from 500 miles away, from a symptom I mumbled incoherently over the phone while explaining that I was weak, feverish yet having chills, and barely able to walk across the room, let alone drive, and wouldn’t be able to travel 500 miles home in time for work on Monday
My then boss’s actual words (a Walter Reed infectious disease expert) were “Mike, you’ve got Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, you better get to a doctor or you’re going to die”. Great bedside manner, maybe why he was in research.
Doxycycline knocked that crap out fast and I only missed one day of work.
(Well heck, I’m just watching paint dry. Literally, latex paint over pink foamboard, and will instead blather about a peculiar time in my life)
If that medication was Flagyl (metronidazole) for Giardia it can make you photosensitive, so if you were to take it watch your sun exposure, And, I know from personal experience, DO NOT drink alcohol while taking Flagyl. Maybe especially don’t wash them down with beer.
I was given Flagly for the Giardia when my two week inpatient E.coli study was up. And a pocket full of cash ($22 a day x 14 days! Riches beyond dreams of avarice!). I was not given any instructions or contraindications for taking Flagyl, just handed a bottle of pills and “A take these X times a day ‘til they are gone”
I did what any red blooded American 18 year old with a sudden pocket full of cash would do upon release from a sterile and monitored in-patient environment. I partied for days. Some of the after-parties, with a cohort of twenty suddenly cash flush fellow guinea pigs, gathered together to celebrate their freedom, were epic, multi-day affairs.
Thank goodness they kept some of our money until we appeared for the required follow up visit. I left one after party on a Saturday night and when I came back Wednesday it was still going on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKaQzQAlNn4
I kept passing out and coming to face down on the carpet or in the dirt. I was drinking quite a bit to make up for lost time, and oh heck, it’s time to take my Flagyl. When I went back for the follow-up a week later I mentioned that I felt fine gastrointestinally, had developed a brain tumor, because I kept blacking out.
“You haven’t been drinking have you?”, asked with a look of wide eyed horror. I burst out laughing at the inanity of the question before I could sputter a reply. What the heck do you think I’ve been doing, beer is the only thing we haven’t figured out how to smuggle onto the ward.
(Paint is drying nicely, best keep blathering than screw with it just yet)
With some practiced smuggling technique we did not lack for much on the ward, and the “old hands” were particularly inventive. This was a sealed ward, flying a quarantine flag. The windows didn’t open. But they once had opened, via a since removed hand crank. One early roommate rubbed a pencil across the missing handle gear-toothed connection and fabricated a window crank.
He would crack the window barely ¼”open, roll a joint from his smuggled-in stash and stick the joint in the end of a drinking straw laid out on the concrete window sill. An exhale straw went on the other side of the windowsill.
Close the blinds just in case. Lean in and inhale through the straw. Wait 30 seconds, lean out and exhale through the other straw, with all smoke and odor remaining outside the building. He was brilliant. And, I should add generous.
There were upsides to being a guinea pig for vaccine studies. It funded a bunch of wandering cross country trips. The vaccination page of my passport was a head scratching thing of wonder. Typhoid, Heptavax B (several doses), Imovax rabbies vaccine (several doses), H1N1 Swine Flu, Cholera, A. Victoria, several nasty strains of E.coli. It was a hypochondriac traveler’s wet dream, and yet I still managed to catch things not on the list.
I met some interesting and bizarre people during those (need I mention co-ed) studies, a couple of whom made their living as guinea pigs. I was however not interested in that steady money gig as a human subject teaching interns how to perform rectal exams; Turn your head and cough, Next, Turn your head and cough, Next, and eventually ran out of infectious diseases to be vaccinated against or challenged with.
But, on the last inpatient day of the last study for which I was eligible (immune to dang near everything they were working on, or been challenged with it) my morning physical was conducted by the Director of the Institute, who I had come to know well.
When he finished my physical I looked him in the eye, pulled my empty pants pockets inside out, shook out some lint and said five words that changed my life:
“I need a real job”
Started as a glassware washing Laboratory Assistant II. Thirty five years later I was managing the largest dedicated research facility on campus, had helped design that building from ground up, and worked on the retrofit design of two other laboratory buildings.
Those five simple words changed the course of my life. Freaks me the heck out when I think about it.
And that’s all I have to say about that
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Otm4RusESNU
Water softening has nothing to do with canoe tripping. No one has a faucet or plumbed shower. What we don't want is grit and viruses and bacteria.
I am surprised more ppl don't use a Platypus .... i have for quite a few years and it hasn't failed me yet
Somehow I missed this...
I started in the 80's with First Need, switched to some MSR or another, and more recently a Katahdin whatever.
Last few years it's been the Sawyer. I carry two empty 1 liter beverage bottles with me, the one with the label removed is for unfiltered dunking, the other one with the label still attached is for the filtered water. I love the compactness of the Sawyer, and using the squeezable 1 liter bottles makes for fast filtering. That's for drinking water only, any rehydrating or coffee, tea water is boiled in the Kelly Kettle.
I started in the 80's with First Need, switched to some MSR or another, and more recently a Katahdin whatever.
Last few years it's been the Sawyer. I carry two empty 1 liter beverage bottles with me, the one with the label removed is for unfiltered dunking, the other one with the label still attached is for the filtered water. I love the compactness of the Sawyer, and using the squeezable 1 liter bottles makes for fast filtering. That's for drinking water only, any rehydrating or coffee, tea water is boiled in the Kelly Kettle.
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I use a Platypus in camp and a Lifestraw when moving.
Part of that may be due to when you buy a filter it can last a long time. I still use a Mini Works that I bought in 1990 before there was a plethora of choices'
I added a MSR gravity filter because it self fills the Dromedary Bag I use on the water and yes for laziness! Once you get into a system ( any brand) I think you stick with it.
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In the Ozark scenic riverways South central Missouri we boil spring water in an old 1 gallon tin can with a coat hanger bail ,then 8 drops of Clorine bleach .
I had to figure out how to provide clean disinfected water for a crew of 7 in a voyageur canoe during the Yukon 1000 mile race. I knew that the silt especially on the lower Yukon below Dawson is so dense that it sounds like radio static on the bottom of your canoe as you paddle through. You cannot see as much as a millimeter into it. I read about using alum, but that does not disinfect or purify for drinking. So I found a product by Pur, meant for 3rd world countries, that will do both jobs. Paddling continuously for 18 hours a day, 7 people need a lot of good clean drinking water.
I started by prefiltering through a filter in a colendar into a 5 gallon bucket. then mix in the chemical packet and stir (in any direction is ok). Let stand during our very brief "overnight" rest period. The next morning there will be several inches of a gooey sludge at the bottom of the bucket. Carefully pour the top clean clear water into a large clean jug to distribute separately to each paddler's daily drinking containers. The taste is terrible, but it is safe to drink. After a week of paddling, no one became sick or dehydrated. We did this same method in two different 100 mile race years.
I started by prefiltering through a filter in a colendar into a 5 gallon bucket. then mix in the chemical packet and stir (in any direction is ok). Let stand during our very brief "overnight" rest period. The next morning there will be several inches of a gooey sludge at the bottom of the bucket. Carefully pour the top clean clear water into a large clean jug to distribute separately to each paddler's daily drinking containers. The taste is terrible, but it is safe to drink. After a week of paddling, no one became sick or dehydrated. We did this same method in two different 100 mile race years.
A few years back I planned a trip in Killarney - a place that, for those who don't know, has some of the cleanest water on Earth. There are lakes in that park where (thanks to acid rain) nothing yet lives again. You can see a hundred feet to the bottom in what would otherwise be a tea-stained Ontario lake.
That trip was poorly and, for lack of a better term, optimistically planned. We made a few "emergency" camps. We had a Katadyn gravity filter that plugged up after the second day. After that, we relied on water tablets, the kind you put in a water bottle and let sit for ten minutes before drinking it:
www.mec.ca
We did eventually unplug that water filter to make it useable again, after much backflushing and slishsloshing. At one point, we made an emergency camp at the side of a beaver pond. We had to pass the water first through a shirt, then through a coffee filter, and then through the filter proper.
It really me yearn for the days of letting the silt settle to the bottom and then boiling it over a morning fire the next day.
(I returned that Katadyn filter and got my money back. I'm much happier now with the Platypus system.)
That trip was poorly and, for lack of a better term, optimistically planned. We made a few "emergency" camps. We had a Katadyn gravity filter that plugged up after the second day. After that, we relied on water tablets, the kind you put in a water bottle and let sit for ten minutes before drinking it:
Aquatabs Water Purification Tablets 1L | MEC
Water Purification Tablets 1L: Rapidly dissolving iodine-free tablets that can be used over the long term with no adverse effects. They are safe for adults (including pregnant women) and
www.mec.ca
We did eventually unplug that water filter to make it useable again, after much backflushing and slishsloshing. At one point, we made an emergency camp at the side of a beaver pond. We had to pass the water first through a shirt, then through a coffee filter, and then through the filter proper.
It really me yearn for the days of letting the silt settle to the bottom and then boiling it over a morning fire the next day.
(I returned that Katadyn filter and got my money back. I'm much happier now with the Platypus system.)
I have been using a Platypus gravity system in camp and a BeFree on the water (and as a backup). They have worked out really well for me.
The design flaw in the Katadyn system is that the filter sits in water, for hours. This swells the filter fibres, tends to not only restrict flow, but also let in more dirt that then plugs the filter when it dries.
The Platypus two bag system, on the other hand, has the filter sitting dry, unless it is actively filtering. I think this is a major factor why it seems to work so much better than the Katadyn gravity filters. That, and it's a lot easier to backflush a two bag system than a one bag system.
The Platypus two bag system, on the other hand, has the filter sitting dry, unless it is actively filtering. I think this is a major factor why it seems to work so much better than the Katadyn gravity filters. That, and it's a lot easier to backflush a two bag system than a one bag system.
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I've been using the Platypus for years and have found that it's really important to (briefly) backflush the filter after every use. I didn't do it originally and the filtration rate declined very quickly.
Used to use the Miniworks, love it still. My brother has the Sweetwater, but never uses it. Also really like that one. But for the last several years, maybe 6, I’ve been using the Platypus Gravity Works 4L. The new MSR version of this, with the guardian filtration is a bit more superior. However, I have never had any issues with my Platy. Every second bag of clean water, i back flush through the system. I notice places where the water has a little silty bottom, or “muckiness”, the filter clogs sooner. When I’m on lakes like Superior or Michigan, very clear water, I can use the filter a little longer before I back flush it.
Perhaps one day, I’ll get the nicer MSR gravity filter with the guardian filter, but for now, and many more years, my Platy is nice
I also have a trail shot for backups or emergency situations. That’s an arm burner and takes forever to fill up a nalgene. And if you’re cooking or drink a bottle fast, it’s annoying to have to pump it all over again.
Perhaps one day, I’ll get the nicer MSR gravity filter with the guardian filter, but for now, and many more years, my Platy is nice
I also have a trail shot for backups or emergency situations. That’s an arm burner and takes forever to fill up a nalgene. And if you’re cooking or drink a bottle fast, it’s annoying to have to pump it all over again.
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