Guaranteeing Your Camping Water Is As Clean as What You Drink at Home

March 9th, 2010 Posted in Outdoors

If you are like most Americans, you are aware that water supplies are not as dependable as we would like. Over 2100 contaminants have been discovered in drinking water thus far. Our water source may be free of some of these, but who knows which are still present?

Many reading this will have acted on these warnings and stopped drinking faucet or well water. For you only filtered water is worthy of your family or yourself. That means you are either purchasing bottled water, or that you have bought a water filter and are purifying it yourself.

You have the water problem solved at home, but what do you do when you go on vacation or take a camping trip? How can you guarantee you will get the same quality of water you are getting at home? If you are purchasing bottled water, then you can just take a case or two along with you. That is the most expensive option in the long run. In spite of water being abundant and free, drinking water is, in some forms, more expensive than gasoline. Also, you will probably discard the bottles and this just adds to the environmental landfill problem of non-biodegradable plastics.

Some of you have purchased a gravity feed filter. In the long run, you will save money over purchasing bottled water. If you have room, why not pack your water filter in the car and filter all drinking and cooking water on your vacation? This would provide all the water you need and would guarantee it to be as pure as you get at home. Neither will you have the problem of discarding bottles.

If you either have a built in filter, or can’t pack your gravity fed water filter, then what do you do? A good option is for you to plan ahead. Filter more water than you need now and store the extra to take with you on vacation.

The problem is, in what do you store and transport it? You know the water is clean when it leaves the filter. You certainly don’t want it deemed unsafe because of the container. This is a very real concern. The PET bottles (made of polyethylene terephthalate) used by most bottled water companies, are, as far as we know now, safe as long as they are kept in cool places. Water stored in them at higher temperatures for a period of time might become contaminated with chemicals from the bottle. Reusing them is not sanitary either.

Another option is to store your filtered water in the hard plastic bottles used for water coolers, or the smaller ones used for sports drinks. They look safe but the National Institutes of Health recently tested bisphenol used to make these bottles, and found it caused neurological problems in babies before birth. The long range effect on others is still the subject of further study. So that option may be out of the picture for you.

This seems like a dead end road. You don’t want to lose water quality just because you are on vacation but you can’t take your filter. If you store it in unsafe containers, the result could be worse than just drinking that is available. But there is an answer. Store your filtered water in glass containers, including bottles, jars, and thermoses with glass lining.

This choice solves several problems. We will have the clean water we want without the problem of discarded bottles. Further we have the peace of mind that the bottle will not contaminate the water. The bottles can be washed and reused without danger to you or your family.