While my MSR Sweetwater has been an excellent filter over the years, it is a bit on the bulky side, so I am thinking of getting one of the new purifiers, like the MIOX pen or the Steripen Adventurer. Anyone have experience with these? Opinions? Recommendations?

Thanks,

C. Rowe

I use the MIOX pen. It's a little tricky to use IMO compared to a steripen but it works very well.

I use the steripen and I love it, the draw back on the pen is the water has to be reasonably clear, so you would have to prefilter murky water with a bandanna or t-shirt. Also you can't leave the batteries in the unit for storage or they will be dead over time. It has a small internal drain if left in there. I use the thing, then tale the batteries out until the next time I need it. There is some more info if you search for it on the site.

http://forums.equipped.org/ubbthreads.ph...=true#Post92710
http://forums.equipped.org/ubbthreads.ph...true#Post104842

The MIOX treatment process is well regarded. At least it is when tested in a lab, controlled field use and, I suppose, when everything goes well in real life use.

I'm playing devil's advocate here but in effect making your own chemical tre

The MIOX treatment process is well regarded. At least it is when tested in a lab, controlled field use and, I suppose, when everything goes well in real life use.

I'm playing devil's advocate here but in effect making your own chemical treatment in the field seems to me to be potentially risky.

As I understand it once you have produced the treatment you have to take it on faith that it is indeed what the process is supposed to be producing and the god stuff that is going to convert biologically hazardous water into safe water. If the process fails for some unknown reason how would you know before you drink the water?

I could see someone religiously following procedures, treating a groups water and the entire group ending doubled up with giardia or dysentery.

If I use a chlorine based chemical treatment I can taste and smell the chemical in the water. If I use iodine based chemicals I can see and taste the iodine. It isn't a great taste but I pretty much know that if I follow a standard dosage rate and a temperature-treatment time table I'm pretty much covered.

Likewise boiling is a treatment that I can observe some visibly obvious clues, the water boiling, and a time-altitude table to get reliable results.

As I understand, reading about it and seeing it done a few times I don't see any similar clues to tell me the treatment was prepared properly and is likely to be as protective as I like. You do your thing, drink and then see if you get sick.

But even even if that could be overcome, perhaps I got it wrong, I still have trouble relying on a battery powered electronic device to keep me upright and functioning.

There is no entirely failsafe water treatment. I currently use some combination of gross filtration, i

Clipped again.
FWIW. The rest of the post:

There is no entirely failsafe water treatment. I currently use some combination of gross filtration, iodine or chlorine based treatment, boiling and fine filtration to keep me safe. What particular combination I use depends on how much weight I'm willing to carry, the terrain and availability of fuel, and both the relative and known contamination in the area.

I had good luck hiking the southern forests using a very fine stainless filter or cloth to remove sediment and boiling the water using the readily available twigs and pinecones burned in a Sierra stove. I kept a small ceramic filter and a tiny bottle of iodine tablets as reserve.

I have also used a Sweetwater filter with good results. It saved me time and some weight over the Sierra stove option. I kept chlorine tablets handy for water that may have had human contact. And kept a pour-through filter and iodine tablets as a reserve.

The MIOX pen comes with test strips for testing water post treatment. The pen itself will alert you if something goes wrong with the MIOX process (not enough salt, not enough water, etc)



This could be true of ANY water treatment if the wrong type is used or the type which is used is used incorrectly.



The Mixed Oxidant solution does make the water taste a bit funky...the longer you let it sit, the less funky it tastes. MSR recommends putting drink mix in treated water to mask the flavor if it's an issue. The solution itself smells funky too...sorta like a mix between Chlorine and Ozone.



I agree 100%. I don't trust it to always be there. I carry extra salt, extra batteries AND a straw filter AND treatment tablets.

I do like the fact that it can use any salt from rock salt to table salt...it will even run on Half Salt (tm). The Steripen beats it there however.

They both have good reputations, but I'm not sure either replaces a filter. They replace historical chemical-base purification methods, but that is about it.

No filter makes sense unless it also removes viruses, because you still have to chemically treat it, or boil it to kill them. So why not just do that in the first place?
The Sock

Just boil it. Effective, technologically simple, and light weight. The "need" for water treatment is classic marketing hype, at least for water sources in wilderness areas. I have never contracted anything from drinking "wild" water and I have sipped from definitely polluted sources, boiling beforehand.

Don't rely on anything that requires batteries.

The problem with boiling is that you can't keep moving while you do it...same with a bulky filter. That's the one thing I really love about the MIOX pen. I can fill my canteen anywhere, treat it in 20 seconds and keep walking while I wait for the solution to do it's thing.

If I'm camped I won't even bring it out as it's just a waste...way easier to boil then.

"No filter makes sense unless it also removes viruses, because you still have to chemically treat it, or boil it to kill them. So why not just do that in the first place?
The Sock"

IMO, pending more information, viruses aren't really much of a problem as long as humans aren't present. Of course finding an area not traveled by humans is another issue entirely. The wilderness is getting smaller every day and what wilderness there is is increasingly less wild than it used to be.

That said even when humans are doing their thing in the water it is fairly rare for anyone to get infected by otherwise well filtered water. The threat is far more theoretical than actual IMO. People infected usually have been exposed to water that was not filtered. The reason being that viruses are pretty fragile out on their own and so they tend to travel contained in or attached to other materials that are easily removed from water by even a basic filter.

This is related to the old argument over using condoms. Claim is that the pores in a latex condom are larger than the size of an AIDS virus so condoms are useless. But studies of those who use condoms consistently show that condoms stops the transmission of AIDS.

Reason being that the virus doesn't travel out on its own. it attaches to other materials and rides. Stop the transmission of these much larger biological materials and you stop the virus.

PS. - All that said I usually carry a treatment that is good against viruses for those cases where I suspect that the load of infectious diseases in the water are likely high.

Traveling in the remote swamps or the SE well away from populations and in areas seldom traveled by hikers or hunters I feel pretty confident in just filtering the water.

In a case where the water is likely contaminated by sewage, like the flooding seen in NOLA, I would use a treatment that pounds on viruses.

Of course in that the water also has oil, pesticides, other toxic chemicals along with raw sewage and every other possible contaminate so I would use every method I could reasonably manage.

Art_in_FL, I have to respectfully disagree. Because even if there are no humans around, there are animals around doing their thing. And that can make you sick, which is not a good thing anywhere, but especially out in the "wilderness".

I'd rather not risk it. Treating water (no mater what the means) is not so big a hardship.

I used to believe that. If I couldn't boil, I would drop in an iodine tab. Or not, if I was feeling lazy.

Sucking down water with agchem run off in it changed my opinion (and helped me loose ten pounds in two days ). Carbon filters are your friend.

With the steri-pen, be aware that batteries go fast in cold weather. Carry spares and (you probably already do) carry a back up (chemical or filter).

With any chemical treatment that I know about, in cold water you'll need to let the water stand for quite a bit longer than the instructions say.

Another item of note is that iodine, probably the most popular chemical treatment for outdoorsmen in N America, really does not do a good job on cryptosporidium although it does work well on girardia. Crypto isn't very common, so iodine may still be an appropriate choice, but something to be aware of.

One further thought: boiling is darned effective and will kill off a lot of things that might well survive iodine, but you do have to be able to make fire AND have enough fuel available. If you like higher altitudes (9000+), you have to hump liquid fuel -- wood except in an emergency isn't an appropriate choice at higher altitudes due to slow growth rates and fragile montane/alpine eco systems. Liquid fuel weighs a fair amount, which makes one of those little vials of iodine tabs ever so attractive.

I had very good experience with the MSR MIOX. Twice using it the fields and I did not suffer any ill effects.

I even use the MIOX at campsite to treat water in big container before I using the water for showering. Try treating your bath water with other methods such as steri pen, tablet, etc. is not very feasible.

Recently, I am using the MIOX when I stay at hotels in 3rd world countries. Although some hotel do provide electric kettle in room. But the kettle is usually very dirty. So what I do is before I go to bed, I would fill up a platyus 2 litre bag with tap water and treated it with the MIOX. I will leave the bag overnight and next morning I will have a 2 litre of treated water for drinking.

Here's an interesting link to a posting about filters on the CDC site:

http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dpd/parasites/cryptosporidiosis/factsht_crypto_prevent_water.htm

In the posting it says:
Filters labeled only with these words may NOT be designed to remove crypto

One of the items listed is:
Ultraviolet light

Am I reading that correctly? UV does not kill cryptosporidium? Crypto is relatively rare in the contiguous states, Canada, and Alaska, but not necessarily elsewhere. If I'm reading this correctly, a Steripen would be a poor choice for international travel.

Steripen's website says:
SteriPEN™ is the only portable water purifier that uses ultraviolet (UV) light to destroy waterborne microbes. Whether your source is a woodland brook or an overseas hotel tap, SteriPEN purifies clear water by destroying viruses, bacteria and protozoa—including Giardia and Cryptosporidium —- in seconds. Carry a SteriPEN to disinfect water wherever you travel, hike, camp or trek. It’s the fastest route to pure, safe drinking water anywhere.

Somebody's got to be off here.

If you look on the Steripen website, they link to a scientific article which compares various purification methods against crypto. The Steripen does very well in this experiment versus the chemical methods. The Steripen does just as well as heating (I guess that means boiling). As long as the water is not turbid, the Steripen seems effective.

"May not be designed for..." is not quite the same meaning as "does not work against...".

Well, that's just one study. I haven't tried finding any others that substantiate that claim.

I saw that study. I'm more curious now as to why the CDC put that warning on their site.

My guess would be that their warning was meant very literally. Their study only applies to filters which use ultraviolet light (many of which are probably gimmicky and do not expose the water to ultraviolet light long enough to kill cryptosporidium oocysts). Since the SteriPEN is not technically a filter, this particular CDC study does not apply to it. Using the SteriPEN according to its own instructions should yield similar results as the studies done specifically on the SteriPEN.

I was thinking along similar lines. I don't think the particular NSF protocols mentioned on that page (53 and definitely not 58, which applies to RO) can accomodate UV products. There's an NSF 55: Ultraviolet Microbiological Water Treatment Systems protocol, however I'm not sure if that applies to personal purification products or just larger products for municipal use. And I'm not sure if NSF 55 mentions crypto.

I looked at the NSF site as well. NSF only tests products submitted to it. The submitter must pay for the cost of the testing. I suspect that Steripen hasn't submitted for testing as of today.

The question I have is re viruses. Does Steripen kill viruses too? Or did I miss that on the site? If Steripen kills viruses, then it might be a really great thing to have while travelling in warm climates, superior to filters.

I don't think I'd depend on anything battery operated in a cold climate, but I suppose one could always take spare batteries, and can warm the batteries by placing them in a pouch around one's neck which will increase performance.

My thought on the CDC is that the SteriPen may not kill the cysts. Basic science, there are cysts (kind of like the microbe version of a spore) and then there's the active microbe. So, killing Crypto would technically be correct, if it's killing the active, mobile form. Leaving the cysts un-treated would thus cause both Steripen's claims and the CDC's claims to be technically correct.

Of course, that still leaves the cysts to wake up in your gut and give you diarrhea.

I've been reading up more on this today. UV irradiation (254nm, like the Steripen) does inactivate the crypto cysts, preventing sporolation or excystation. Although most articles do mention in the discussion section the hypothetical possibility of some DNA repair mechanism eventually reactivating the cyst, all the studies I've read do conclude that the inactivation is irreversible.

Regarding the question about why the CDC says UV may not kill crypto, I ran across one comment for a household UV purification system regarding crypto. The kind of system that works with your kitchen faucet. It mentions that a particular countertop model is not really recommended if you're worried about crypto because at the usual rate that household water pressure flows through the unit, any given volume of water may not be exposed to UV long enough to thoroughly inactivate any crypto cysts. However, with the Steripen, you are thoroughly exposing the water to UV, so I see no reason to think that it won't effectively kill any crypto cysts in the water.

And regarding the lack of a NSF certification, apparently the NSF protocol is rather specific and a UV product like the Steripen doesn't fit into the protocol, therefore it can't readily be tested by NSF. That's why Steripen advertises the fact that it passes the EPA standards for water purification. The EPA protocols require a similar level of purification as the NSF standards, but the protocols are flexible enough to accomodate a product like the Steripen. So, as I mentioned before, as long as the water isn't turbid or full of sediment, limiting the transmission of UV throughout the water to be purified, the Steripen should do a good job.

Actually, looking this stuff up was a good exercise for me since I do have a Steripen myself.

The Steripen does great against viruses.

I used to use one, but my biggest pet peeve was the way it let you know you had filled up a bottle or had a dirty cylinder was to squirt you without warning!

I currently use a PUR hiker and love it. I use the ubiquitous MP-1s as a backup. And of course there is always boiling.

Interesting. Was that on the Steripen site and I missed it? Can you point me to any studies or articles?

I've never carried a full on filter. I've hiked with guys who do and my opinion was always that they were bulky, time consuming, and just not 'hiking' gear.

That's why I picked up the MIOX Pen. I guess had the Steripen been readily available when I made the purchase I could have gone either way but I'm not unhappy with mine in the least. My only beef with the steripen is that the water needs to be clear and you need to have the right bottle to get it inside. I like narrow neck bottles and bladders...seems to me like the Steripen would be awkward with those vessels.

I also carry MP-1s as backup.

You may wish to check out some of these threads:

Steri-pen vs. MIOX

MIOX Testing

MIOX

MSR

Pete