If you’ve ever been hiking in the woods, the outback, the jungle, or anywhere else away from the city or suburbs where you live, you are certainly aware of the importance of carrying your own water. If you can’t carry enough water, you are probably familiar with ways to purify the water you come across. The two most common methods are to use a filter to remove impurities or to use tablets (such as iodine) that kill anything living in the water you collect. They each are good enough to be common; however, they also both have drawbacks that make them less-than-ideal for many circumstances.
Filters have several problems, the biggest of which are that they don’t necessarily filter everything and they are hard to clean and maintain. A filter works by simply having tiny passages that water can pass through, but everything over a certain size will get stuck and not make it through the filter. The smaller the holes are, the more effectively the filter works. On the other hand, small holes clog quickly with everything they are filtering, especially very fine sand and dirt particles. Filters that are selective enough to block most of the tiny viruses and bacteria that a hiker should be wary of clog regularly and require a lot of effort to keep clean. Additionally, every time you want water, you have to perform a bit of manual labor to pump that water through the filter. It’s a lot of work to use, a lot of work to clean, and large to carry.
Tablets are also popular for exactly the reasons filters are not. They are small and lightweight, and all you do is drop a tablet in your bottle and let it sit a while. The problem here, though, is that it takes a while to be effective. The tablet will kill anything living in the water (and many viruses, too), but you may have to wait 30 minutes from when you get to a water source until you can drink the water you collected. If that weren’t enough, it also drastically affects the taste of the water you’re drinking (have you ever tasted iodine?). Still, for many they are preferable to carrying and using a filter.
A relatively new method, however, is to use concentrated oxygen in an electrolyte form, called aerobic oxygen. Like tablets, it’s lightweight and small (I carry a two-ounce bottle that’s about the size of a film canister) and is effortless to use. Like the filter, it works instantly and leaves the water tasting fresh. You fill your water bottle, put in about 10-15 drops of the aerobic oxygen solution, shake it once, and drink. One small bottle will last weeks in the wild.
Aerobic oxygen changes the chemistry of the water so that organisms are unable to live in it. It has no taste, no odor, and no color. It is harmless to your system, and in fact some believe it might help boost your digestive system’s ‘good bacteria’ count. It works instantly when you add it to a bottle of water. As a side effect, it seems to boost the overall oxygen content of your blood, so you have more energy too (in fact, it’s often sold as a supplement for athletes for this very reason).
It can be hard to find aerobic oxygen: it’s not carried in most shops, and I’ve only found a few online sources for it. Once you find a source, though, it’s relatively inexpensive. For the effectiveness and convenience, it can’t be beat.
If you’re going out for a day hike or an extended camping trip, I highly recommend you use aerobic oxygen for your water purification needs. Once you try it, I doubt you’ll ever go back.
Other news
- How about blaming bad habits, like late-night TV? Work ‘the biggest sleep robber’
- Sounds like we’ll all explode like in the game ‘Lemmings’: World facing ‘arsenic timebomb’
- One more unnecessarily quoted headline phrase, just to make it three: Lung disease rates ‘on the rise’
Healthy thoughts,
Jeff
