Because Water is Kinda Essential
Platypus GravityWorks Filter System Bottle Kit – 2 Liter
One of my favorite pieces of gear in my pack is by far my water filter. For years the hubby and I had this pump action, top of water bobber system that stank. You would work hard to get the water pumped out and the float would often pop out of the water in the process, while simultaneously moving the water tube enough to stir up sediment from the bottom. We never needed to use this in a trickle of a stream, which is a good thing, because I am not sure we would have had any success.
But now we don’t worry about any of that, we just let gravity do the work. When we were looking at our outdated gear last spring ahead of our 3 day trip along the Lost Coast of Northern California many things were replaced with newer, lighter items. Our sleeping bag volume was halved, the cook pot kit dropped half its weight; but I balked a bit when we got toward the end of the spending spree and my husband kept eyeing a new water filter; after all, we had one that worked couldn’t we keep at least one old item for budgets sake? I sighed and handed over the credit card one more time to the REI gods, and our Platypus GravityWorks Filter arrived. I was stunned. You filled up the bag (clearly marked dirty water, thank you very much) and just sit back and wait for the water to flow down and into your bottle. I was a bit stunned by the simple genius of it.
How it works.
Fill the dirty bag with water. The nice thing is that is can ben dipped in a larger body of water or held under a trickle to be filled. You attached the hose connection that includes the filter with a one snap system, that can be accomplished with one hand while holding the water bag in the other, and put the lower hose into your bottle (it has several options of end pieces to fit different bottle styles) and then hold the bag up or use the strap to attach it to a branch to await your clean water. We did have a problem with slow flow, but a quick read of the instructions included in the carrying bag showed we just needed to backfill the end section of the hose with water from our clean bottle and then it picked right up again. It generally took longer to get the filter out, fill the dirty bag with water and attach the hose to the bottle, than it did for the water to actually filter through the system and into a liter bottle. Pretty quick filtration. The product description states a flow rate of 1.5ZL per minute but it at least seems longer than that in practice.
Potential Drawback.
The extra 2L water carrying capacity came in extremely handy when we needed to fill up 6L per person for a day and a half stretch without any water sources. What we didn’t expect was to wake up from a night of 22degrees with a dirty bag filled with ice water- heavy on the ice. Only after putting it on a branch in the sun and attempting to fill what we could of a water bottle did we notice the warning on the side of the filter saying to not freeze the unit. Does filtering ice water count as freezing the filter? Fortunately, the filter portion had been insulated within my pack inside the rainfly of the tent and didn’t actually freeze, and the filter did perform fine after the ice water filtration, but it does highlight a potential drawback to the system for a girl who lives in the wind-swept frozen tundra.
Overall the Platypus GravityWorks water filter works smashingly well. At the meager weight of 9.5oz and priced right around $100 it is one of the best investments of space and money I have made within my pack.
tamingthemilemonster 