I can see what you are saying ILBob, I've had good luck with my steripen adventure and have traveled overseas with it and also have deet marks on the cover but mine has always came through where ever I go. I have a stainless steel bottle and micro tabs as backups but so far I haven't had to use them. As for batteries, I use a solar cell to recharge my batteries and I can run the steripen all day long with no batteries in the unit operating 100% off the sun with no batteries in the unit. The catch is sunlight. That's why I have batteries for those cloudy days or when I don't won't to drag my cell out. The lamp life will last many years and I have dropped mine on concrete in Portugal's Azores islands and it hasn't failed me yet. I usually like drinking water now, not 4 hours later or 5 minutes after boiling or lagging around a general ecology filter. But to each is own, I would get strange looks in restaurants when using it overseas as well but never got even remotely sick. I could care less what people thought of it weather I'm in the jungle of Philippines or Mexico or in Europe at a bar, if I don't know where the water came from, I treat it.