When you're out in the wild, you need a pump to keep you from getting sick. That is, you need to keep your water nice and clear from things like giardia and cryptosporidium, both of which make you sick.
I originally purchased a Pur Scout for my water-filtration needs. It was perfectly okay. It pumped water from the creek, presumably cleaned it (I never got sick), and spewed it into my Nalgene bottle. It even had a nice little attachment so that it would stick into either a wide-mouth or narrow-mouth bottle. I'm a narrow-mouther, myself, although most everyone else I know is a wide-mouther. To each their own.
The problem with the Scout was its useable life - it didn't last very long, before getting all clogged up with gunk. Even prefiltering the water didn't help much. One trip was the useful lifetime of a filter. And the replacement filters cost nearly as much as the device itself. If I recall correctly, the Scout cost me $75, and replacement cartridges cost $60. That makes sense, considering that everything other than the filter is just a couple of pieces of plastic. Then, the scout crapped out on me during a trip. Luckily, a friend also brought along his filter - a Sweetwater. One look, and I was hooked.
First of all, the Sweetwater has a lever pump. Rather than a simple handle to grab on, you actually use leverage to pump the Sweetwater. This makes treatment a lot faster, and makes your hand cramp a lot less. Trust me, pumping a little bit of water is easy, but when you have to treat ten liters for the whole group, it gets tiring.
Secondly, the Sweetwater has a nice little outlet spray. When you overpressure the filter, it sprays out the outlet, instead of further munging up your filter. Now, you have to remember to point it away from you, or else the first spray will catch you by surprise, but it's a great feature. Eventually, as your filter clogs up, the spray will blow more and more often. This is when you would curse and go spend another $60 if you had a Scout. But....
This unit is field serviceable! That's right! Whip out the little brush, scrub the inside of the filter a few times, and voila! You're good to go again. I was so taken with this feature that I told the people I was with (most of whom are co-authors on this blog) about a gajillion times that the Sweetwater was field-serviceable. Bliss.
Sweetwater also makes a neato little gadget that you can attach to the outlet hose of the pump, so that you can screw it straight on to a Platypus. I'm sure we'll get around to reviewing the Platy, but suffice it to say - it rocks. You can probably hook this up to just about any other filter on the market, since it just mooshes in to the end of the outlet hose, which looks pretty standard. Definitely helpful, since when it's all screwed together, you don't have to worry about your Platy falling over and dumping its contents on the ground as you fill it up. This used to be a big problem, since the Platy is softsided, so its shape and center of gravity shift around as it gets filled up.
Theoretically, with two of these little doohickeys, and a dedicated dirty-water Platypus, one can rig a gravity filtration system for the Sweetwater. Basically, the dirty-water Platy goes up, and feeds down into the filter, which drips into the clean-water one. Never tried it, mainly because I don't want to carry around an extra Platy that I can't drink from. I'm sure I'd get them mixed up.
Interestingly, Sweetwater no longer exists as a company. A while back, Cascade Designs bought them (the people who make the Platypus). But then Cascade bought MSR, the makers of a competing pump-style purifier, and folded the Sweetwater into the MSR line. It looks like the Sweetwater is here to stay, it's the lower-end model where the original MSR one is the higher-end one. I can't speak to whether or not it's changed since then, though, any feedback on that would be awesome.
Even weirder, MSR makes a direct competitor to the Platypus line. I wonder if this is the end to the Beloved Platypus. But that's another tale.
2 comments:
I just deleted a comment here. One thing I REALLY don't want to have happen is have this blog turn into a repository for linkspam.
So, Linda Symmons, if you really want to comment on the writing (and I know - it's evocative, you should be commenting on the writing!) say something more constructive than "Interesting Article", with a link to some random commercial site that seems to be a pretty clear attempt to grab googlerank.
I've been using my PUR Backpacker water filter for about 10 years now and feel I need to speak up on it's behalf. ERic's Sweetwater is a sweet piece of gear, no doubt about it. On our last trip, I wound up pumping multiple liters of water with both his and my water filters and I'm honestly not sure which one I prefer. The lever-design of the Sweetwater is definitely easier to use than the mechanism on the Backpacker - which is basically a straight in-and-on pump thing. The spitting action when it gets overpressurized annoys me, but is tolerable. The main advantage to the PUR is that it pumps more water with each stroke - it took roughly twice as many strokes to fill a Platy with the Sweetwater as it did with my PUR. The down side is that each stroke is a little harder on the PUR, so I'm not sure the actual time it takes to pump a liter is significantly different. While the PUR doesn't advertise itself as being field-serviceable, it's never needed servicing in the 10 years that I've been using it. There was one time when I was pumping in a particularly gritty stream and though maybe taking it apart and rinsing it would help. Foolishly, I did this over said rushing stream and watched one of my o-rings float rapidly away. I called the nice folks at PUR for a replacement and they sent me an entire new casing for free. For that alone, I'm a PUR loyalist - although I do think the cost of their filters is a bit pornographic (although I've gotten much less persnickety about having a new one for each trip.)
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