- Today, we are going to get in the note about H2O!
(upbeat music)
(coughs)
What a party!
Water is the heaviest thing
that you're going to have to carry in the back country.
How do you get around carrying in tons of water?
You do some sort of water treatment.
So I'm gonna go over some different ways
that you can treat your water in the back country.
Water!
This is my show, gosh darn!
Unless you are doing like a day hike
or if you're going to a place
where you know you can carry all of your water in,
you always need to have
some kind of water treatment with you.
Extra water is one of your 10 essentials,
arguably the most important 10 essential,
and it's just a really good idea
to know that you'll be able to treat water.
If you're looking to buy some sort of water treatment
for the first time, it can be a little hard to decide
what's gonna be best for you.
So we're gonna take all of these different options
for how to treat water and test them out.
Water filter battle royale!
(bell dings)
That feels like a weird thing to say.
What is a battle royale?
- [Producer] It's just a bunch of people fighting
for who ends up as number one.
- No fighting.
(bell dings)
Let's get the water purification
versus filtration conversation out of the way.
Purification kills all of the bacteria
and viruses in the water.
Filtration will take it out of the water.
Filtration will remove all the particulates from your water,
which will make it taste cleaner as well,
whereas purification sterilizes it, basically.
So it makes it safe to drink,
but you're still drinking dirt.
At least you're drinking clean dirt.
I'm gonna show you how to use all of these
and then we'll test each one and compare them,
see how they stack up.
Hold on.
Oh, it's already a little dirty,
but not dirty enough.
To be clear, if you found water like this
when you're out hiking and you don't have to filter from it,
you probably shouldn't.
This is pretty gross.
We're gonna do it for science!
What I wanna do is treat one liter of water
with each of the different treatment options
and then compare them based on the ease of treatment,
the cost, the speed, the size and the weight of the filter,
and last, a taste test.
Let's start with chemical treatment.
(bell dings)
Chemical purification is a, it's a chemical process.
So this doesn't actually take the bits out of your water.
It just neutralizes them so they won't hurt you.
There are two main types of chemical treatment
that you'll find with purification.
There's chlorine, and then there's iodine.
(bell dings)
First thing we're gonna do is pre-filter the water.
So I've got my buff.
You can also use a handkerchief
or a clean sock or a t-shirt.
This is taking out the larger particulates
so that you don't have to drink dirt.
I have my one liter of water.
I'm going to add my iodine tablets to it.
Two tabs of iodine.
It's been 30 minutes,
and it is now safe to drink my iodine-treated water.
It looks a little bit unclear, I guess,
but it is totally safe to drink.
As far as speed goes, I did have to wait for 30 minutes.
But it wasn't as bad as four hours, and it required no work,
which brings us to ease.
Basically no effort involved,
just put some drops in and waited for a long time.
Size and weight, this is so small, so lightweight.
And on cost, these things run like less than $15.
And you can actually get another treatment
that you put in your water after you've done iodine
that should neutralize the iodine taste.
Speaking of taste, let's do the taste test.
So first off, it definitely stinks, like metal.
(coughs)
Metallic finish.
Pungent overtones.
Not great.
It's not a great taste.
It doesn't taste super,
it tastes bad.
(bell dings)
Some of the chlorine tabs like these guys
are actually gonna take four hours to react in the water,
and we don't have that kind of time
so we're not gonna test these.
We're gonna test a two-part chlorine treatment.
To do this two-part system,
I'm going to mix seven drops of part A
and seven drops of part B.
I'm gonna wait five minutes for this to react.
So it's been five minutes.
Now, I'm going to add the contents of this cap
into my liter of water.
I'm gonna shake it,
and then I'm gonna let it sit for 15 minutes,
and then it's ready to go!
It has been 15 minutes
and my chlorine-treated water is ready to drink.
This actually looks pretty clear but I guess not great.
Since I've treated it with chlorine,
it is totally safe to drink.
The chlorine has murdered all of the bacteria
and protozoa and viruses, and they are not present anymore.
15 minutes is kind of a long time
to treat one liter of water,
but I didn't really have to do anything.
Just a lot of waiting, drop, mixing and then waiting.
So as size and weight goes, they're a little bit chunkier
than carrying some of the tablets,
but I'm pretty sure that this is gonna last a lot longer.
For cost, these are really
some of the least expensive options for treating your water
are gonna be the chemical treatments.
Now let's taste it.
I mean, it tastes like pool water,
but like diluted pool water.
It doesn't taste that bad.
It's actually okay.
(burps)
(bell dings)
- Steripen!
Steripen uses a UV light to purify the water.
Unlike the chemical treatment,
there are no chemicals involved.
You stick this in your liter of water
and swirl it around a little bit,
and then the light will kill everything in the water bottle,
like magic!
The Steripen is great 'cause it won't affect
the taste of your water in the same way
that the chemical purification will.
The downside of the Steripen
is that you do have to have some way to charge this.
If it's not charged up, it just won't work.
But they're really fun and easy to use.
So I turn this on.
It's gonna give me a little notification
to stick this in the water.
And now, a timer starts and it counts down.
And you can see the light!
What a party!
And I just keep doing this.
It's about 90 seconds.
If you do pull the light out of the bottle too quickly,
it'll frown at you.
You'll get a little thing that says
that the water is not safe to drink.
Smiley face!
That little guy pops up, tells me my water is safe to drink.
Speed of filtering water, pretty quick, 90 seconds,
although you do have to do some work in that.
Ease of use, I mean, it's not that hard.
You do have to pre-filter,
but the stirring is kind of annoying.
I don't love that.
And then the lights and stuff,
and if you mess up, you have to start over.
It's not particularly heavy.
It's not particularly chunky.
But it's not particularly small either.
You do have to carry extra batteries
or a way to charge this, but it will filter
about 50 liters of water on one charge.
They're definitely more expensive than chemical purifiers.
Far as taste goes,
tastes like water.
(bell dings)
Pump filters.
So the way that the filter works
is that it will pull up the water
and then catch all of the bacteria and the protozoa
and then allow the clean water through.
The general idea is that this part
with the little floaty on the end goes into your water.
The little floaty just makes it
so that the tube stays on top of the water
because all the sediments are gonna float
to the bottom of your water source.
And you know, you don't want that stuff.
And then you put this onto your bottle and then you pump it.
(upbeat music)
Pump it until you have a liter.
Let's do it.
Ready?
- [Producer] Set, go!
- All right.
All right, that's one liter.
One liter!
- [Producer] Two minutes, 15 seconds.
- Oh my gosh!
So with a pump filter,
there's a little bit of maintenance involved.
You do have to backwash or clean out the filter
as you have to do with most filters.
And it's pretty easy to do that on the trail.
There are a lot of moving parts and pieces,
so you have to be able to do some trail maintenance
or repairs and things like that.
Overall, really good,
really simple method for filtering your water.
Two minutes is kind of a long time
to filter one liter of water,
and it definitely takes some effort,
which takes us into ease of use.
It's kind of tough.
I mean, it just takes some muscle, I think.
And depending on how dirty your water source is,
it's gonna be even harder.
It's big, it's heavy, but it's reliable.
These vary in cost from like 50 or $60 up to
a lot.
As far as tastes of water goes,
that is delicious water.
Next!
(bell dings)
The Guardian is very expensive.
Let's address that right now.
I think it's like $350 or $400, but it's amazing.
This is a pump filter,
but it has such a small filter system in it
that it's actually considered a purifier.
So it will take out viruses.
So the Guardian has two tubes on it.
One of these tubes will be
where the water comes in to be cleaned,
and then the other is where the water goes out,
which is the back washing property.
Ready?
- [Producer] Yep.
- Set.
Go!
Oh, this is so much easier.
- [Producer] 40 seconds.
- 40 seconds?
It's kind of, I guess, gets into the whole
like you get what you pay for thing.
40 seconds to filter a liter of water is amazing.
Ease of use, kind of tricky
to get that to stay in the water,
but overall, pretty easy and not a lot of effort.
Size and weight, it's still chunky.
It's still kinda big and hefty.
Cost, it's really expensive.
Don't get me wrong.
If you can afford to get something like this,
there are a ton of pros to this guy.
As for the taste test,
wow, that's even better than the,
man, how is that possible?
It truly feels like $350 water.
(bell dings)
There are three parts to a gravity filter.
You have your dirty water bag, filter system,
and then your clean water bag.
This is our dirty water bag.
This is the one that we are going to dip into our river,
collect water in, roll the top and close it up,
and then we'll hang it up high.
And then the water is gonna run through this tube
to our filter and our clean water bag.
So I'm gonna go ahead and detach this tube
from the bottom of the dirty water bag.
This bag has a valve on it
that will keep water from coming out,
so you can easily transport this to your dirty water source
then bring it back to where you're hanging your water up.
So now, I have a little more
than one liter of dirty water in this bag.
Gravity filters require a little bit more space,
so I'm gonna move somewhere where we can test it.
I have my dirty bag of water hanging up high,
and then I'm gonna take my clean bag of water
and put it down on the ground.
So I'm gonna unclip this
and then the water will start filtering,
and we'll have clean water.
It's been five minutes.
I have about three quarters of a liter.
It's possible that I didn't set this up correctly,
but either way,
it's definitely losing points on the speed category.
But as far as ease goes,
I didn't really have to do much work, just kinda hung it up.
For size and weight, it is on the bulkier side.
For cost, these are expensive.
Really, the benefit of a gravity filter
is you set it and forget it.
You'd just hang the bag of water up
and then you can come back later and have filtered water.
It makes them a really good base camp option.
Seven minutes for one liter of water.
(bell dings)
Bottle filters!
All of these work, function in the same way.
You fill the bottle with dirty water,
insert the filter into the water like this,
and then you drink the water like that.
So I have the LifeStraw flex bottle here.
I'm going to put my filter into the bottle, screw it on.
Now that I have my water in here,
I can just go ahead and drink it.
Let's see how easy that is.
Yeah, I think I drank some water.
It's kind of slow.
It's like hard to do.
If I could explain to you
what is happening inside of my mouth right now,
it's like I'm putting in so much effort
in getting like a teaspoon of water.
But I didn't have to do anything besides fill this bottle,
so that's nice.
I don't know.
I mean, I'm sort of like meh about the whole concept.
We're gonna do the BeFree filter.
So we're going to fill this bottle with dirty water
and then we'll put this filter in and drink it
and see if any easier than the other one.
(suspenseful music)
Oh, no!
That's user error for sure.
We're gonna put our filter in.
Oh my gosh, world of difference.
This one is so much faster.
Ooh, I'm sorry.
Is that bad if I pick favorites?
I like this one a lot better.
Let's just see how well it works as a squeeze filter.
Oh my gosh!
- [Producer] Holy (beep).
- Wow, this is actually very quick.
I'm impressed.
(burps) Really easy.
It's pretty quick, actually,
for filtering water for drinking as well as for cooking.
It doesn't really require very much effort whatsoever.
Fill a bottle, drink bottle of water.
Size and weight, pretty small.
Not super expensive,
slightly more expensive than the chemical purification,
but overall, probably your most cost-effective option
that isn't chemical treatment.
Oh, you're perfect.
I love you.
(bell dings)
So what did we learn from watching me drink dirt?
There are a lot of different pros and cons
to water treatment options.
So whether you're choosing chemical purifications
'cause you prioritize cost and weight,
or choosing a gravity filter
because you prioritize ease and quantity of water,
there are just a many different reasons
why you might pick your version of water treatment.
If you have a favorite way that you treat water,
go ahead and leave that in the comments below.
If you liked this video, hit the like button, subscribe.
Now get outta here, and I will see you guys outside.
(upbeat music)
Water filters, so crazy!
It filters out everything.
It filters out poop.
It does filter out poop.