A Brita filter =/= a survival straw. There ARE filters you can use to drink directly from water sources in nature that will filter out all contaminants but a Brita ain’t one.
Exactly, there are filters for tap water and there are backpacking or survival filters for filtering dirty water. I use both regularly, but wouldn’t ever take my filter pitcher hiking.
Imagine using the right product for the right job
You must be new here?
Do those straws also take out pathogens? I thought you’d still need to boil the water pre filtering.
The most common cause of symptoms like in OP’s story are multicellular organisms. While still microscopic, they are plenty large enough to get caught in a filter. The filters are usually good enough to catch bacteria too.
I was just about to say you are wrong. Lifestraws don’t filter out things like lead.
Just learn new ones do though.
I always wondered: does these filters degrade?
If they filtering stuff that small, do they clog? Do you need to rinse them? Run water in opposite direction to remove what they blocked before?
They clog and you do need to rinse them, and running (clean) water in the opposite direction is a common way to clean them.
They do eventually degrade or clog to the point of being unable to function and then you have to replace them. Usually they fail such that it gets slower to filter the water rather than letting dirty water through, although that’s not always the case. One time I had a cracked filter, and the symptom was the filtering went suspiciously quickly. I think I drank some only partially filtered water before I figured it out (didn’t get sick though).
Boil your water, then after it cools run it through a charcoal and/or osmosis filter. Even then, it’s still not great. Commercial/community water treatment isn’t some silly little optional process.
Get a water filter that’s designed for camping. The two varieties I’ve seen are either a hand pump or using gravity to force the water through a ceramic filter. Try to pick water that is relatively clean looking (not obviously murky, and it helps to pick flowing water).
Best tasting water I’ve ever had and you won’t get giardia (the most common cause of diarrhea symptoms described above).
I tried a hand pump while camping and never used it again. The tannins in the water (decayed plant matter secretion) isn’t captured by the filter and hit me pretty hard.
The biggest risk out in the woods is microorganisms. If you boil it or use a well designed filter you are likely going to be fine if you’re drinking otherwise clear water.
I wouldn’t just filter the water from the Hudson river and go to town, but if it’s 10 miles to the nearest road I think you’re probably doing better than your tap
Yet.
If you’re going to do all that and still end up with “not great”, why not just distill it?
If you have a licenced portable distillery to take with you camping then power to you.
A pot, a sheet of plastic, a cup, a rock, some sticks and rope and you can distill water.
And a massive amount of fuel.
Have you ever tried to evaporate a liter of water? It takes a lot of energy to do so. Fun for a science project, but if you need enough to stay alive/be comfortable, it’s a lot easier to bring water.
If you’re in the woods, you have access to a virtually unlimited amount of fuel. If you’re in a desert, the fuel source is nuclear. This is a technique taught in survival courses/manuals and military field guides all over the world.
Sure, but gathering wood takes a lot of effort and energy. It’s an option if you don’t have the filters, but the original question was why not distill if boiling and filtering ends up in “not great”.
If I have to survive, and I can do with boiling and filtering, I’ll take “not great” water over spending hours gathering and chopping wood to keep a fire going long enough to vaporize a liter of water.
Not a good idea to drink distilled water.
distilled water is fine the issue is if you drink mostly or only distilled water, it doesn’t have the minerals you’ll find in tap water and long-term missing those isn’t healthy. even so you can get those minerals from other sources like food or supplements most of the time.
Unless you’re starving to death, you absolutely get those from food. The amount of minerals in even hard water is miniscule compared to what’s in food. Drinking distilled or RO water, even regularly is not going to hurt you.
Drinking giardia on the other hand…
I feel like boiling PLUS the Brita would be a pretty solid combo. Boil to kill everything then Brita to remove the remaining inert sediment. I can’t think of any metals or anything that there would be enough of in river water to hurt you after you’ve killed anything that was alive.
I can’t think of any metals or anything that there would be enough of in river water to hurt you
We’re talking about rivers like the one in Cleveland that they caught on fire?
Twice?!
IDK what’s in that but I’ll leave my cup for you haha
It happened 13 times. But not since 1969. The Cuyahoga is now a shining example of environmental restoration with even the most polluted sections meeting the standards of the water quality act.
“we must make america great again. The woke mob has stolen our beautiful burning rivers. We aim to bring them back bigger and better!”
US right wingers when the invisible hand of the free markets somehow fails to un-pollute their rivers:
Cuyahoga is also a great track on REM’s album “Life’s Rich Pagent”
Don’t look at Lake Eerie too closely tho lol
everything has outliers
I had a similar experience at a pseudo pagan ritual/drum thing/moonlit naked dance thing. They’d stocked the sweat lodge with several bottles of water. Some for drinking and others full of river water for tossing on the stones. I failed to correctly identify them in the dark and was very sick as a result.
Editted for spelling
$ sudo pagan ritual sudo: pagan: command not foundPS: I am appropriately sad that I am a person that knows linux and not a person that visits moonlit naked dancing rituals. Meh, you can’t have it all.
You forgot the path “ritual/drum thing/moonlit”.
Hmm. Time to right a CLI utility called
pagan*rite
Write at rite, right?
You can. The group was a mix of crusties, hippies and nerds. Plenty of Linux users among them. Myself included.
:(
It’s a common error. You have to spell it like daemon:
sudo paegan ritualOh but you can. You just have to identity a goal and work towards it.
Since people are just going to make command line jokes and leave you confused, the spelling is “pseudo”.
It’s also the stuff Walter White needed to make the meth tastier or something. Idk, I’m not a chemist.
I actually do know the correct spelling. I’m just sleep deprived.
The missed pro tip: don’t believe everything you see on tv
Are you saying the media would LIE??? On TELEVISION??? Are you sure about this?
In my own home might I add!
At no point does Brita Water Filters claim to remove biological pathogens from the water.
The Brita would (should) pull out various carcinogens from the water since they will stick to the filter rather than the water. But it won’t do anything for bacteria, viruses, amoeba or any other protists. Which would make you acutely sick.
Some filters can do that, not all. Gotta check what your filter is rated for!
Well yeah, next time wait for the water to trickle through the filter instead of gulping from the loading compartment
Anon confused a tap water filter for a camping filter
Britta’d. I think a bottle with and ranging from very fine at the bottom to pebbles on top might be one of those survival things that actually work. Or just boil it. Or both.
Just boil the water instead. Then you can have instant soup.
Bro trust an ads about thing sell on amazon
