Cheap and light filtration?`

Yea I quite often take 1 bottle of powerade and then just wash it out when im finished and fill it up with river water. I have had a drink from a river then around a few corners there was a deer skin hanging above the river and I never got sick from it but you try getting my townie mates to drink out of a river and there is no way in hell theyl touch it, they would rather be de-hydrated. Its surprising that if your told when your young about never drinking water from rivers etc that most people tend to believe it. I find river water to have an excellent taste and my drinking water from home comes from a bore near the kiritaki river with no filtration and ive been drinking it for 2 years and I am still fine

I do not like how hunters often leave gut piles in rivers, but never gotten sick. I guess most animals are reasonably healthy before being shot and there is not many diseases which would jump between goat/deer to humans.

Yea I have heard about a guy that was drinking out of cattle creek then got up to the hut to find 3 gutbags and approx 30 litres of aviation fuel lying right beside the creek, needless to say he wasnt impressed but I am unsure if he became sick or not

WTF! Dumping gutbags in the stream. If I drink a cup of water and don't finish it, I don't even put the rest of the water back. I hope everyone who reads this knows nothing should be going in the water and jobbies need to be laid at least 50 metres away from a water source, preferably in a hollow on a spur close to plants so that the roots of the plants take care of the pathogenic microbes in the bioactive layer of the humus and covered like a cat scat.

I saw it on Alan’s blog too. It’s really amazing!http://alanrayneroutdoors.blogspot.com/2010/08/super-delios-peaty-water-test.html

By filtering the water however good or bad it might be is just being sensible. If you are on a long or short tramping trip the last thing that you want to have is a dodgy stomach. The light weight Super Delios filter is hardly noticeable in the pack so why not use it and know that you are eliminating the chance of being ill. It's not rocket science.

Hmmm...does this thread now belong on the products and services forum?

I live in Canada and had I not been to India and bought a Steripen, I'd have probably continued drinking from streams. In fact, even in India I went about a month drinking just the tap water in the Himalaya and was alright. I even spoke to an older Aussie who'd spent years total in India and always drank the water straight, no problem. Now that sound incredible, but I think it highlights the issue of a healthy immune system. If you've grown up in a city, don't get excited about all this talk of no filtration and vow to always drink straight from the streams. You'll get sick. Immunity is built up slowly, and though I grew up on untreated well water in Canada, I still get sick, and in fact nearly missed my mom's wedding because I'd drank from a small stream on a hike a few days prior. These days, I generally take the Steripen, because I've had my bad experiences, though I won't stress too much either way. I too, have drank downstream from carcasses, but had used the steripen. However, the other big question here that hasn't been addressed is silt. Kidney stones. The other benefit of filtration. In fact, after hearing an earful from someone who'd had to pass a stone, and subsequently doing research, I've decided to start bringing the steripen pre-filter with me. It only takes one grain of silt to block it all up, so it seems like Russian roulette to me at this point, but I'm eager to here what everyone else thinks.

Silt might contain all sorts of nasties but it aint going to cause kidney stones. Kidney stones are a caused by a calcified buidup in the kidneys which filter the blood. There is no direct way for silt to get to the kidneys. However I imagine that too much silt would be like too much bran and I remember the first time I tried that vividly. You are not meant to have the same sized bowl as you would corn flakes.

This is my first post on tramper.co.nz. Yay. Hopefully there will be many more. I figured I'd use this topic, instead of making a new one. So... Water pills. Apparently the active ingredient in modern-day pills is Sodium dichloroisocyanurate (NaDCC). That name stuck out to me, and it looked like a pool cleaning chemical. Which is, exactly what it is. Now I can buy a pack of water pills for around about $20-25 dollars. Or I can buy a whole kilogram of NaDCC (adulterated with cyanuric acid as a preservative) for about $30. I'd imagine that filling up a vial with this stuff, and using carefully controlled doses per litre of water - I could do exactly what water purifying pills do. I could also clean my pool too. :) Is there any reason I shouldn't do this? Other than the hazards of cyanuric acid (which would probably be present in water pills anyway) + melamine, there doesn't seem to be any reason why I can't save a lot of money doing it this way. Also related is Potassium permanganate (KMn04). Do either of them (KMn04 and NaDCC) have a specific purpose in terms of water purification? Can one substitute the other? I have a vial of KMn04 already, and I know it's a lot safer and more versatile than the other stuff, and can be used as a wound disinfectant in more concentrated solutions. So if there's no reason to have both - maybe another vial of KMn04 will suffice? Hopefully these questions aren't too esoteric. Cheers, CBL_Jon.