Life-saving clean water while on the move and travelling with the LIFESYSTEMS Water Filter Bottle from LIFEMARQUE, by Mike Gormley.
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Clean water is an essential to life, we all know this. However obtaining it is not always easy when away from mains taps or retail outlets. Carrying a decent supply of contaminant-free water is not so easy either, as is heavy so you can’t realistically carry all that much and especially so if intake is high when active and/or its hot.
So, a filter system that is capable of removing particulates, chemicals and heavy metals as well as bacteria and other health-damaging contaminants is a really good, if not essential, item to have with you. These days even in our mountain streams we cannot be sure the water is quite as fresh and clean as it might look. In the UK we are generally quite lucky but that’s not to say an animal might be lying dead just upstream or some other unseen chemicals might be present in that fresh-looking chuckling stream. Overseas, of course, the likelihood of contaminated water can be a good deal higher. Even in supposedly ‘fresh’ tap water the risks can be there. So, a light and portable water filter is no bad thing to have in your kit.
This LIFESYSTEMS bottle and filter weighs in at only 255g empty and is able to filter up to 600 litres of potentially contaminated water, so this one litre capacity bottle is able to provide many times its own volume of clean water; if you think about it, over half a tonne! Even if you have good clean water out of the tap, a filter like this can remove the tastes of the processing so even at home this can have its benefits.
This entire assembly is very robust so will put up with the rough and tumble of travelling life. It is simple to take apart to rinse though and to replace the filter cartridge when necessary. I am certainly not in a position to be able to verify the impressive claims for the filter system, which states a near 100% ability to fully remove contaminants from the water, but these claims are covered by various test standards so this and the British company’s long pedigree should give a high level of confidence.
Perhaps my only minor criticism is that the drink-through nature of this system means you can only really drink from it and not easily use it to filter water ‘for the pot’; for example to reconstitute dried food pouches or make a brew.
[images © Jean or Mike Gormley]
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