On a side note, has anyone ever used a steripen ? I've been looking hard at buying one of these for backpacking and hunting excursions, and would like to hear comments from someone who has experience with the product.

Thanks nursemike and benjammin; you are right benjammin, mono-methyl hydrazine is what I meant, my spelling and grammar is not the greatest. Thanks for the great info on the breakdown,I am glad to know that heading into UV (even with the steripen years ago)and charcoal filtration was a good move but I also realize as time goes on so does our technology and threats.

Ozone I looked at in the past and have briefly experimented with but it was for air pollution control only to find out years later it was causing a negative improvement to our health and eating away all the rubber in the car. (I had experimented with a Cosonka in the car/truck for years and it cased a lot of troubles with the electronics and rubber seals in the vehicle not to mention giving me a cough that hasn't seam to go away yet) (Too much ozone exposure I guess)

When I worked for Nasa for over 10 years in the past, I had worked with hypergolic fuels in SCAPE suits (Self contained environment ensamble)for many years and have been exposed by both MMH,N2O4 and Anhydrous ammonia which has cut some more years off me and after many years with the program and long drives the gas prices and future program vibility finally forced me to move on to a different field. But those years exposed me to a lot of different technology and when we did water treatment on the shuttle, we had allot of UV going on which led me into the UV area. I figured if it was good for Nasa then it was probably a good thing to go into. I'm still learning and I'm no rocket scientist but I have seen dome strange things while working there and a lot of disturbing things that never makes it to the press. Some things I guess the public doesn't need to know or mass panic can be a bigger problem I guess. Anyway the stress out there is unreal and it's like a burden has been lifted off the shoulder leaving. For example: If a meteorite was to hit us down the road and kill masses amount of people and there wasn't any know way to recover from it but to build a space craft and sit up there and watch it happen then I don't want to know.

Opps straying off topic again, sorry for the rant, anyway I am trying to learn more into the water aspect and your very fortunate to be at the ground level and I got a lot to learn benjammin. Thanks for the brief insight and that will point me into more technology's and I will look into ozone additionally again as well as the UV.
Thanks

jcurphy, I've been using a steripen adventure for awhile now and I haven't had any problems yet. The main thing with it is the water can't be too turbid (muddy or cloudy) a way around this is to prefilter it through a bandanna or I use a Katadyn combi filter which has a replaceable silver impregnated ceramic element and a refillable, activated carbon cartridge so I can clean up the water from bigger viruses and organic compounds (pesticides) and then I follow behind it with a steripan for viruses. I don't mind the two items as a combo, the UV treatment has been working well and I think in the future it may replace some types of chemical treatments. I tried the taste of a friends miox and didn't care for the taste and didn't care to carry along gator aid to mask the taste plus didn't like the dwell time either. The steripen is compact and I can drink the water now, not hours later. If you do get one, don't buy the solar recharger, it's a waste of money; but a portable solar panel, it will charge it significantly faster.

There is a rival between the steripen folks and the miox folks like GMC VS Ford. both are great products it's just preference to me. A good advantage for Miox is good for large treatment of water which I like but it takes awhile for the process to work and the taste gets better with time as it dissipates from the water if stirred and aerated.

http://www.katadyn.us/brands-products/ka...combi-plus.html
http://www.hydro-photon.com/steripen_products.html#traveler

Unless you're using some sort of pressure vessel, you cannot raise the temperature of liquid water over 100 degrees C (or whatever the boiling point is at your altitude). Temperature is constant during phase changes; adding more heat will simply increase the rate at which it becomes steam.

I'd agree with you that distillation is the only sure-fire way to get rid of the really nasty stuff.

The name of the game is free radicals. If you are looking to kill off any little germ in the water, then free radicals are the ticket. High valence ions and ionizing radiation breaks down the organic molecules and destroy the integrity of germ cells, in fact, all living cells disintegrate in the presence of free radicals, which is why we take vitamins called anti-oxidants, which react with the free radicals we are constantly consuming. Most organic molecules have weak enough bonds that UV radiation of about 10 electron volts is enough to break them, which is why UV exposure is a hazard for us. UV does basically the same thing the free radicals do. The difference is that free radicals can react to break the molecular bonds of one molecule, then move on and do it over and over again without ever binding up unless they encounter something like an anti-oxidant which captures them in a stronger molecular bond so they can then be neutralized.

So bombarding the water with free radicals and ionizing radiation works wonders for killing nasty little germs, and can help reduce other organic contaminants, though probably not enough to make a reliable difference. Chlorine has been the most popular free radical application for a long time, but because the chlorine ions persist long after application (which does have it's benefits, as residual chlorine can help to keep the water from being re-infected), and all that chlorine consumption and eventual release to the environment is not so desirable. Ozone breaks down after application fairly quickly, and UV is containable to the point of application, so although there isn't any residual benefit, there is also no residual debtriment, bioaccumulation etc.

Chronic exposure to Ozone causes emphysema. I know of a couple former dam operators that liked to walk the generator floor a little too much, and developed the disease.

I guess with free radicals being a key and UV ans ozone being good tools for breaking down the molecule bond probably explains how they are purifying water in Africa by using clear plastic bottles exposed to the sun for long periods of time. I wonder if something like a steripen with the low wattage output of the filament (which works great at killing viruses)would have and significant effect on petroleum, fertilizers and other man made products introduced into the water in a Katrina type scenario. The recent Myanmar disaster with more rotting bodies in the water along with chemicals (like Katrina) continues to show me that the old boiling and distilling water for water purifying water may not be enough with VOC's in the water. AS I look at the increase in coastal natural disasters globally are increasing, I am trying to find that one or a series of devices that I can use to purifying polluted fresh and salt water in the event of a disaster of this nature. Distilling water or RO with active charcoal pre filter with UV injection has been as close to this that I have come to convert contaminated fresh and salt water to drinking water.

As for the ozone, it was working wonders with the fires in Fla. plus any odors in the car when I experimented with it, but at the time the EPA never really had any good info on the health effects that I could find using it for what I did.I may have introduced emphysema to my self as you suggested being a non smoker to the levels of ozone being exposed. I know ozone dies off in 30 minutes usually but some times the Cosonka was left on in the vehicle when traveling from me forgetting to turn it off. I guess if I die off with emphysema down the road it will be a whole lot less painful than all the other things that I was exposed to working on space crafts.

I had three friends permanently disabled I worked with side ny side and they were assigned jobs ahead of me that ended up permanently disabling them. I was fortunate those days not to draw that winning job assignment. One was exposed to a material that he founded on the space shuttle payload liner on a trip back home to earth that has deteriorated his health from handling it, another had his DNA altered by long term exposure to Hypers, and the third took a radiation hit from a isotope that was thrown into the WCS system (toilet) from a stupid astronaut that decided to through a highly radioactive experiment in the toilet. Wat a job with no pensions, you work on cool stuff with extreme dangers daily with little pay and no retirement. Sign me up.....

Sorry about the rant again, thanks for the explanation and breakdown on this, it sounds like you have one of those fields with job security for a long time plus the benefits of vendor support for decades.

Andrei....We too are in FL....I'll tell you this.....buy bottled.....get it from the 'wholesale stores' (BJ's, Costco etc). As for the rain collection.....I tried this very very briefly. Just for chuckles we put a 33 gallon can under the roof during our usual seasonal daily rain.....the can filled in less than 2 minutes. Plan to have you system fill quickly and need to hold a lot but also plan for these very long times between rains (and they are getting longer)......good luck.