WILD CAMPING WATER QUALITY & FILTERING | KATADYN BEFREE VS SAWYER MINI WATER FILTER

Hi folks, I'm Seamus from Outdoors Inspiration. This is my German shepherd, Petra. Welcome to Outdoors Inspiration Outdoor Essentials and today we're going to talk about water quality, filtration and other treatments. I'm going to struggle with this one a bit I think because for you have a look. Southwest water, holes in the roads, prices going up, bigger bills. I mean there was me thinking it was just for washing with and for drinking but no, no apparently it's for making a profit with. Yeah well I don't think I want to do this one anymore. No no this is this is wrong. Hello Seamus. Not that sort of water. Hiking equipment, water filtration, water treatment, All right yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I know yeah yeah yeah I know it keeps happening but wrong end of the stick again. Yeah sorry mate yeah yeah okay right yeah start again. Yeah yeah that's for the best really isn't it. Okay so water filtration, water treatment and the kind of kind of nasties that live in water around us. All right yeah yeah yeah okay I'm fine with that. Okay yeah all right mate. Cheers then. Bye bye. Sorry about that folks. Got the wrong end of the stick there. That was the producer on the phone. Apparently I'm supposed to be talking about water from a wild campers perspective. All makes sense now doesn't it. So for anyone who's seen any of my videos before you'll probably realize by now I don't really do reviews. I'll give you my opinions and views on things based on where I like to go and the things that I like to do. I'm not an advocate for anything in particular only an advocate for what's right for me. You need to make up your own mind and views based on all those opinions around you really. So I'll look at a couple of water filters and I know that they're both very very popular and they've been reviewed up to the yin yang. All right there's loads of reviews out there they're two of the most popular ones on the market. Anybody and their dog has done a review on it. But of course a review in terms of water filter unless you're a microbiologist or a chemist doesn't hold a lot of scientific weight. What it does do is tell you how it works from a user's perspective. Really we have to look at the manufacturer's data on that particular equipment to get a grip on what its technical specification is. And so for both of these filters I will leave links in the description below to the manufacturer's website so that you can go there and look at the data for yourself. So what do I want to filter it for? It looks clean enough to me. Beautiful clear moorland water and then we've got the cow pats all over and we've got the sheep poo and the pony poo and dare I even suggest that sometimes there might be some human poo in there as well. So within animal faeces there's also other little nasties that like to live there as well. There's bacteria and protozoa living in the water and even viruses may be present within water as well. So if you're thinking of treating your water in any way, filtering your water or just plain old boiling it, first of all you need to understand what's in the water where you go. Okay so in some places the viral threat is fairly minimal, in some places any threat is fairly minimal. But what I do know is after having spent four decades at least tromping over these moors is that I've seen enough dead sheep, dead cattle, dead ponies and dead anything along with all their faeces near on and in the water sources on Dartmoor. And I know that they will exist elsewhere in the country. And you might well say well I've been tromping those moors or these mountains or these hills for years as well Seamus and do you know what I've been drinking the water untreated, unfiltered, unboiled and I've been perfectly okay. And I know that that's true for a lot of people so I'm not trying to convert anybody. That's the God's honest truth. I'm just an advocate for what's right for me and the things that I do in the places where I go. A few years ago I was wild camping and I came back from a particular trip and I had a particularly bad session with the toilet shall we say. So it had gone on for quite some time and the doctor asked me to drop a sample off at the surgery. And so a little while later, not that long, I got a phone call from the surgery saying come in and see the doctor you've got a nasty case of cryptosporidium. I used to be a keen whitewater paddler and slalom kayaker years ago and I used to paddle with mates of mine in the Royal Air Force. And I remember one of the lads, Lucky Jim, actually contracted hepatitis A whilst paddling or at least that's where we believe that he'd got that from from the riverbank. And at a later date he was also diagnosed with vials disease or leptospirosis as it's also known which is carried in rat's urine which was also associated with a particular river trip that we did. So whilst I'm keen to defend anybody's view that they're just happy with water the way it is, it's never affected them, what I can say from personal experience is it has affected me and it has affected my friends and colleagues around me. So now I always treat, boil or filter my water. Now I have a friend, some of you who know me will know him, who is a chemist who works in the food industry. When I say the food industry he designs drinks and I'm not going to name names. However he is a keen backpacker, hiker, wild camper, cyclist and he sampled some water in an upland reservoir. This reservoir is at about 1700-1800 feet and he sampled the inlet streams that go into it and he sampled the water from the streams coming out of it and he sampled the water in it and tested it in a lab. Once he'd sampled that water he determined that it wasn't fit for human consumption, it was teeming with bacteria both on the inlet streams, the outlets and in the reservoir itself. That's why our water companies filter and treat our water before it comes out of our taps. Now I'm not trying to scare you off, don't go complaining to your water companies. It's the nature of water, stuff grows and lives in water. But for my money if I'm going to drink it I want to make sure I've either treated it, boiled it or filtered it in some way. What you do is entirely up to you. Now your very first line of defence is to select where you get your water from. Get as high as possible, that is to say above the farmland and any farm influences where chemicals or runoff could be running into the water supply. Keep away from grazing animals and check above where you're about to take the water from. Look for clear, clean running water and look for fast flowing water. So originally the first line of defence that I used was chlorine tabs which I put into the water. Usually it's about one tablet per litre. Now you've got to go with manufacturers recommendations on these things. The recommendation at the time was that if you were out in winter or cold conditions, freezing conditions, that you double dosed with these, i.e. two per litre. So on one particular trip in February in the Lake District I decided I was going to double dose my water so each litre got two tabs within it. Unfortunately for me I subsequently developed an intolerance to chlorine so what was happening is I was a keen swimmer and I was doing a lot of swimming and every time I went to the swimming baths I'd come out and I'd have a cold for about a week. I couldn't shake it off and I was getting this sort of post nasal drip thing and lots of coughing and spluttering and then it would go away again and it was persistent and then I realized that this was linked to the to the chlorine in the pool or the treatments in the pool and I suspect it was overexposure from that particular trip. So I don't use chlorine tabs anymore. So the first filter I want to talk about is the Sawyer Mini. It's readily available from many retail stores and it retails at about 30 to 35 pounds depending on where you get it from. It will filter down to 0.1 of a micron and that is to say in real terms 99.9999% of bacteria and 99.9999% of protozoa. A very effective bacterial or microorganism filter. What this filter won't do is filter out viruses. So things like hepatitis A is not going to touch. So the filter comes as standard with a 16 ounce bag. I've actually replaced this with a one litre bag but the thread on the top of here is interchangeable with most other threads of bladders. It's a very simple system to use. You have a dirty bag that you fill with the water you then squeeze it down through or allow it to drip through into your clean receptacle whatever that will be. So I can use this platypus for example provided that I always use this as my dirty water bag. Fill up two litres and it attaches quite happily as well. So now we've got two litre squeezing capacity through this particular filter and other sizes of bladder are also available. This is a one litre bag obviously larger than the standard bag that came with the filter. So I use a couple of these as my dirty bags to fill up with. So the Sawyer Mini is a hollow fibre filter and the hollow fibre filter is contained within a sealed tube here. That means it needs back flushing from time to time because particulate matter will get in there and bung it up and you don't want to find that that's happened during your wild camping trip. So it actually comes supplied with a syringe or plunger whatever you want to call it and what I do is when I get home after using it I fill this up with fresh water. I put it onto the reverse direction of flow. You can see there's an arrow on there for flow and I back flush it with clean water to make sure it's ready to go for the next time. So we just need to expand that bag first and then fill it with water. And now squeeze our filtered water into the receptacle that we're going to use, in this case a platypus. It's one of the regular criticisms of this particular filter is that the flow rate from this is not particularly speedy but in fairness it's fast enough for me I think. I mean there are other filters that are faster but I don't have a problem with that. Pure Dartmoor stream water free to 99.9999% of bacteria. So the other filter I want to talk about and discuss is the Katadyn Befree, another really popular readily available filter on the market. Again it's a hollow fiber filter and this will filter only bacteria and protozoa. It will not filter viruses from your water. And again it comes in a variety of bladders. This is the one litre, there's 0.6 of a litre and there's also a three litre bladder available for this. And once more it's a squeeze action going through a hollow fiber filter but on this occasion the hollow fiber filters are quite accessible. That means there's no back flushing so we can fill this up with a clean water source, put the filter in, give it a good shake and a clean around, throw away the water because this is always the dirty bag anyway and that's the filter then cleaned. That seems simple enough to me that's for sure. Happy days you might well say. However when we discussed the Sawyer Mini a moment ago we said that it would filter or that the filter had a life of a hundred thousand gallons. That's a lot of water. The life of the filter on this from the manufacturer is one thousand litres. One other drawback is the size of the thread on this particular bottle. It's much larger and it won't fit your standard bladders or any other bottle that you own. Very probably won't fit any other bottle that you own. So if you bust it, break it or split this you're going to have to find a way to fix it out on your wild camping trip if you want to continue filtering your water. And if you have time look up a channel from Carnival Hiker you'll see him out recently taking one of these and just putting it straight into a cup and drinking from it because that is one way around that should you split the bag. Because this bladder has a wider aperture it's so much easier to fill up. There we go, done. Van the Sawyer Mini. And the flow rate on this particular filter is much faster. And because of that faster flow rate and because this is already a drinking bottle it makes it very simple to drink straight from. So two similar filters that operate in different ways. About a tenner difference in retail price between the two. Originally I always went with a Sawyer now I'm more inclined towards the Katadyn B3 simply because of that flow rate. I can use it as a drinking bottle and it's just so simple there's no back flushing but that doesn't make the Sawyer a bad filter and I'd recommend it to anybody that's looking for a filter of this nature. Now I started off by talking about the chlorine tabs and chlorine treating or chemical treating your water. I'm not a fan of that personally anymore there's lots of people that do it lots of people are happy with it. I just don't do it anymore but the benefit of this is that of course it will not only kill bacteria it will kill viruses but you must be prepared to wait. It'll break down the cell wall of bacteria and deactivate that bacteria and protozoa fairly quickly but sometimes it can take up to 30 minutes for it to act. You've got to give time for any water treatment or chemical treatment you put into that water to be enacted and to kill any viruses that are within that water. And then of course there's the traditional method boiling your water. So boiling the water for about one minute and leaving it to cool completely should free it from bacteria, protozoa and virus that are in there. Now I say one minute that will be dependent on altitude because water boils at a lower temperature with increase in altitude so above about 6,000 6,500 feet I think they recommend that you're boiling your water for about three minutes. So that about wraps things up. Like I said these aren't reviews it's just my views and opinions on what I do where I go with the stuff that I've got. I'm just sharing my knowledge. Now you might just say well blow the wool wet I've been drinking it for years and it's never harmed me and I don't need to treat my water and that's absolutely fine if that's the way you go. All I'm saying is that I have had chryptosporidium I've known people that contracted viral disease and hepatitis in water and I wouldn't wish it upon anybody. So those are some first-hand experiences. So if you if you like this video please give us a thumbs up have a look at a few more of my videos you might enjoy what we do if you do perhaps you might subscribe to the channel I'll be really flattered if you want to follow us. Have a look in the description below I'm going to put a link there for a remote canister stove giveaway it's a free draw that we're running to the end of the month so I'll be picking out one lucky subscriber at the end of the month but you've got to be in it to win it. Meanwhile folks wherever you are whatever you're doing stay safe be safe and we'll see you either on our next wild camp or on a Thursday night for our Outdoors Inspiration Outdoor Essentials. Take care folks. Come on then Petra. Onwards and upwards. Petra come.