Water Purification Tablets Can Make You Sick! 🤢 Tips for using them safely

what's up everybody welcome back to the channel today we're talking about water purification tablets and how you may be using them wrong i know i have used them wrong several times and a couple times have paid the consequences of that water purification tablets are an awesome way to sterilize water but there's a few things we need to be aware of when we use them to make sure that it's safe there's lots of ways to make water safe to drink bleaching boiling uv light solar distillation filtration and chemical treatment and chemical treatment usually comes in the form of three different types of chemicals iodine tablets chlorine dioxide or chlorine tablets and they're all good they all have their pros and cons for most of my experience i've used something like this which is potable aqua tablets these are germicidal tablets and sometimes they come with another little bottle that takes the bad flavor out of these because these do taste kind of foul when you put them in water so how do these actually work so when these are dissolved in water they actually break down the cell membranes of the bacteria and they neutralize them so without a cell membrane the the organism will die so basically you're just rupturing all these organisms inside the water but they're still in there so it's kind of a gross thought but it is safer to drink so according to the directions on the bottle you're supposed to add two of these tablets per quart of water cap loosely allow a small amount of leakage wait five minutes shake the container to allow screw threads on the closure to be moistened then tighten cap wait 30 minutes before drinking recap bottle tightly keep tablets dry wow that's a lot there's a small detail in there that is really really critical and that is when they say to cap loosely so imagine with me you just went to a lake you dunked your nalgene bottle or whatever into the lake and you put tablets in there you screw this on and you shake it up a little bit you wait 30 minutes now you go to drink it and what contacts your mouth first the threads on here that you just dipped in the water so although all the water inside of this nalgene has been sterilized the capped threads could be harboring some parasites so the right way to do this is to fill up your water to the one liter mark put two tablets in put your cap on loosely you put a finger over it so it doesn't come all the way off and then shake it make sure that all of the threads are getting covered and then wait five minutes so and then come back and shake it again make sure that it's all the threads get moistened and then you can cap it up tightly so after 30 minutes you should have a safe source of water to drink i cannot tell you how many people i've seen ignore that step right there and that is why people get sick using these for the most part because uh they're ignoring the fact that they have that untreated water on the thread still one common misconception is that these make the water perfectly safe to drink and that they remove all of the contaminants and they don't they just sterilize them they neutralize the bacteria the protozoans and the viruses in the water they don't even sterilize all of them cryptosporidium is a really tricky one to kill and sometimes these don't catch that one really important step to making your water safer to drink and a little more enjoyable to drink is actually to pre-filter it and there's lots of ways to do this i've even used my hat i've used my shirt although afterwards you just got a bunch of sludge in your hat or your shirt or whatever so it's not ideal what i found to be really great is they sell these mesh bags at camping stores they're like they're kind of like laundry bags or whatever but they're perfect perfect for straining out debris so really fine mesh and all you got to do is just drop it over like that you can either dunk the whole container in like this but it's best to have like a secondary container maybe a cup or something like that and you just pour the nasty lake water pond water or whatever right through that and then you can just shake out the bag and that keeps a very large amount of nasties out of your bottle right from the beginning even like this bag that i have is like a very fine mesh it's black but you can actually filter through this as well and that's what i keep my water filter in so in case i need to i have a filter bag here these work great though so these tablets they only kill bacteria and some viruses they won't filter out alkalines other chemicals toxins that is something that you need a true water purifier for a filter that can capture those toxins and chemicals and that's usually like a carbon-based filter i only use these as my backup now but even as a backup i want to make sure that i'm doing it in a safe way and i don't get sick iodine tablets are incredibly safe to use the lethal dose for iodine is something like a 1000 gallons of treated water so you'd never be able to consume that much in that short amount of time so it's very safe if i was in a long-term survival situation and i had you know maybe i had to stay out for a couple of weeks or something like that i would be using these to treat my water but i would also boil the water so if i had the time if i wasn't on trail or something like that i would treat the water but then i would also boil it because that's a redundant method of making sure that everything is dead in your water so something to be aware of is sometimes people will get the caps on these bottles switched and then think that they're treating your water but they're using the neutralizing tablets the ones that neutralize the flavor they're not actually using sterilization tablets so be very conscious of the caps because they can be interchanged on these so i've seen that happen before and then people can get sick another way people can have issues with water purification tablets is if they're not getting the dosing right make sure that you know water math on these bottles there's usually graduated lines you want to make sure that you're filling it up to a thousand milliliter mark and putting two tablets in or if you're doing half of your container one tablet if you have an aluminum or stainless container like this make sure you know the volume go ahead and measure the actual water into your new container so you know what it is write it up with a sharpie on the outside of the container because if you get the dosing wrong it's not going to help you hope you found that useful or at least entertaining and we'll see you later