There are many things we can do to mentally and physically prepare for a SHTF moment, whether it is a situation where you need to get out of dodge ASAP or if you get lost in the wilds. I'm busy working on improving my practical skills that could be used if I ended up in that type of scenario. I thought I'd share my experiences as they may be useful to someone else too.
I went on an investigative mission today. I'd rather have been hiking but instead I found myself in an outdoors shop drooling at all the cool gear I was going to can't afford to buy yet.
My mission was to find out what options for water purification there are available and the price points of them as well.
I was disappointed with the variety as I was looking for a make by P&G which is available online and seems extremely cost effective compared to other options. It seems that many of the well known brands you simply can't find in walk in shops these days. The local pharmacy doesn't even sell them there which surprised me considering that if you need stuff when things start going wonky, the pharmacies would be a first point of call. Well at least now I know not to bother there.
The shop assistant that was helping me was quite knowledgeable but said that as far as he knows the only difference between the two main water filtration and purification options they have is that the more expensive of the two doesn't leave any taste residue in the water while the tablet forms do.
I've used water purification tablets before when I went to visit Madagascar and to be honest I couldn't even tell it had been chemically altered, so the guy could have just been trying to make a better sale out of me. The drops were approximately three times the price of the tablets and one bottle would treat 300litres of water while the box of tablets contained 50 tablet which would effectively treat 50litres of water so from that point of view, the drops would actually be more cost effective as they treat 6 times the quantity. The one thing that would worry me is the shelf life as the tablets would probably last longer as they are not in a liquid form which is probably more susceptible to degradation than a solid form. You also would probably want to minimize the amount of liquid in a bug out bag scenario as far as possible.
The drops seem to be better at combatting more dodgy things in water than the tablets do. I was very impressed to see that they even combat Staphylococcus! I think I've watched too many episodes of House where people have died from things like a Staph infection which should be easily treatable. Anyway I digress.
The soluble formula has metals in it that are used to kill bacteria, fungus and viruses and can also be used to sterilize wounds. That's a great additional plus to this product.
The other thing that I can see from the tablet form is that it is not as effective in treating Bilharzia as the drop form is and only combats 6 common waterborne diseases where the drops kill up to 15. This might really just be a bad packaging problem but if they aren't up to the same standard, well it's making me lean more towards the drops than the tablet form.
Also the part that I really didn't like about the tablets is seeing that the chemical that kills the bad things is Sodium Dichloroisocyanurate. I'm not a chemist but generally things that have the word cyan in them mean that they include cyanide and after seeing the warning label on this one, I was left wondering just how safe these are. You can't get it in your eyes or up your nose, but you can drink it...I'm really starting to veer towards no, but at the same time in a survival situation you sometimes have to choose the lesser of 2 evils. Water that will definitely kill you vs water that might irritate your innards.
The last option is to fork out a LOT more money and get what they call a life straw which is basically just a really sophisticated filtration system. The one thing that immediately stood out to me with this one was that it filters out microplastics. That's certainly not something that either of the other two do. Pesticides? Yes, I'd like to have the pesticides and chemicals as well as bacteria and parasites gone from the water so this is looking like a much better investment.
Unfortunately as with all things, these filters do have a finite life span but one bottle will filter 4000litres of water before the lifestraw membrane microfilter reaches it's end of life (this is probably an estimate, how would you tell though?) and the carbon filter would need to be replaced every 100litres. Still not that bad value for money. Unfortunately I didn't look at the filter replacements to be able to factor in the replacement cost over time, but considering we drink on average 2litres of water daily, this one filter wouldn't even last two months. I would need to buy a stock pile of these things to keep this bottle going long term and in this particular instance, perhaps combining the bottle with the drops would actually be a much safer bet once you run out of spare filters (or the shops are no longer able to supply them).
So in a nutshell I would ideally like to have all three but currently if I were to purchase one to start with, I would probably go with the drops as they seem to provide the best value for money.
Have you used one of these products before? What was your experience? Which one would you choose as your first option? Let me know in the comments.
