What are people’s thoughts on them. Are you using them, or drinking from the hill without them or just carrying loads of fluids. Summer is on its way & how much fluid to carry against the amount of energy expent to carry it is always a difficult equation.

Regards David.

I tend to drink straight from the hill unless the water looks particuarly iffy - then I use chlorine tablets. I was drinking about 2 litres in a day walking last summer and then more in the evening/morning before leaving camp.

katadyn do a £40 watr purifier that looks like a bike bottle. very effective purifier, definatley reccomend as weighs very little and doesnt taste nasty unlike chlorine tablets. have drunk unpurified water from streams and probably will do again, but only when i know the area well and am pretty confident its clean and there are no decaying sheep just up from me :)

I always have a MSR Miniworks with me on Multidays. I don't always use it.

I believe that water filters are a must to carry even if you dont intend to use it. I like the MSR because it has a hose which helps to distance the unlcean water from your filtered water. It's possible to contaminate filtered water with just one drop of untreated. The 'all in one' filter and bottle type strike me as inviting this to happen, as do the military types which fit water bottles.

There are some 'nasties' which filters wont catch, so a secondary cleaning is a good idea. I dont't like iodine, and I'm a bit wary of its health risks, I also dislike the taste of chlorine, so I boil the water after filtering. I know that many will think this is overkill, but i prefer not to take risks.

As I said before, I dont often filter water, but when I do, I do the whole works!

I'm sure there are lots of threads like this in the archive with good advice if you do a search....
I put in 'purifier' and there were 22 threads.

Anyhoo.
I drink from carefully-selected streams. If I need a lot of water to drink cold - say when wild camping - I use chlorine and then neutralise it to kill the nasty taste - result nice water. If I'm boiling it up I don't bother with the tabs. I am very wary of iodine.

Chlorinehydroxide tablets are supposed to not taste as nasty as chlorine but still be as effective. Im going to India and water might be a problem so what sort of filters are good?

The Juky issue of trail has a feature on drinking from mountain streams and lists the pros and cons of the different purification methods and the possible risks. Personally when on day walks I've always drunk direct from streams, if I'm camping I tend to boil it as I usually have a stove with me so it's no real hardship.

Check this out:

http://www.msrcorp.com/filters/miox.as
(also their are great reviews of it on google)

It's a Revolution!

(sorry, I meant 'there'....too much time drinking iodine....)