Gear review | Seychelle Fill2Pure travel safe water bottle

What! A $59.99 water bottle, are you mad? Have you not heard of a cup? At first we were a bit skeptical about spending big bucks on something just to drink water out of, especially since at home that stuff just comes out of the tap for free. But as it turns out, this is a pretty useful product. We bought our Seychelle Fill2Pure bottles prior to a seven week trip around SouthEast Asia, where apparently the water that comes out of the tap for free is not always that good for your health. We both drink quite a lot of water on any given day in the cool New Zealand climate, so we figured we’d be needing even more water in the tropical heat of Cambodia.

We gave the bottles a good run for their money, slurping our way through several countries in some rather hot weather. We ended up drinking water of varying degrees of quality from a number of dubious sources.

Aside from the convenience of being able to drink clean water no matter how dicey the source was, it was good to know that we weren’t leaving a trail of empty plastic water bottles every time we stopped for a drink.

The main downside to this product was how hard you actually have to suck to get the water through the filter. Sometimes when it is 40ºC and humid you just want to pour a half litre of water directly down your throat without stopping for air. You just can’t do this with these bottles.

So if free bottles of water were on offer, we still found ourselves accepting them enthusiastically when the thermometer was over 30ºC.

Here’s the bottle with the filter removed. This massive straw dealy-o is where the magic happens.

Pros

• Having one of these means you can drink from pretty much any fresh-water source. There’s no need to be too fussy about where to fill it. It filters out all the nasties, apparently you can drink out of a swimming pool or a muddy pond and it will still be sweet as. (We haven’t tried either of these)
• It makes water taste clean too, but I guess if you would have to question how effective it was at filtering out giardia if it still tasted like dirt.
• You don’t have to carry all your water on a day trip, just clip this to your pack and top up as you walk without being too concerned about the dead sheep upstream when you stop for a drink.
• Lightweight.
• Doesn’t need batteries or charging like a UV purifier.
• No waiting for water to boil.
• Works out cheaper than bottled water (Their website reckons you get 500+ refills so it costs only about 15c per litre of water). We haven’t kept count, but based on our estimated daily water intake, we got our money’s worth over the course of our seven week trip alone.
• Not emptying hundreds of plastic bottles that eventually find their way into the North Pacific Gyre makes you feel slightly less wasteful.
• Reducing exposure to bacteria that can cause an emergency ‘code brown’ is always going to be a pro.
• Handy-dandy to have in your survival kit for after big natural disasters, because yes—they do happen!*

Cons

• Doesn’t purify as many litres of water of as a SteriPEN (about 8,000 uses). You have to buy a new filter for this bottle after about 500 uses—which costs nearly as much as the original bottle.
• If you get the ‘travel safe’ version like we did, the advanced filter it is a whole lot of effort to suck water through the bottle, so you can’t just gulp down mouthfuls of refreshing water (Ben describes the experience as “like sucking a golfball through a garden hose”).
• Not as compact as a filter straw.
• Can’t be used to purify a larger amount of water in one go.
• You have to drink direct from bottle as the action of sucking the water through the filter is what purifies it. As a result it’s no good for purifying water for other uses.
• The water in New Zealand is mostly sweet as, so we really haven’t needed it much at home, how careful do you really need to be?

In conclusion, we would both rate this as a very useful product. It may pose a challenge to your suction power when you are thirsty, but it sure beats a week of driving the porcelain bus.

We are still researching water purification options for our upcoming road trip and will publish updates if we try any other products. We really wanted to test it and see what happened if you drank beer through the filter, but we haven’t been able to bring ourselves to waste a beer yet.

There is another version that contains a fast-flow filter that would be more appropriate for most tramping and camping but does not include the same protection against water-borne bacteria and diseases as the advanced filter.

What water purification products have you tried?

Have they been successful?

Perhaps you think they are all a waste of time and boiling water is the best option.

Maybe you’ve gone a bit ‘Bear Grylls’ and prefer to filter your own urine through an old sock instead…

Have you tried to filter beer through one of these bottles? 

Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

We purchased our bottles from seychelle.co.nz and received great customer service when we contacted them, so they get a big smiley recommendation from us too!

If you are shopping internationally, the Seychelle Fill2Pure bottle is also available here.

*We aren’t ‘preppers’ or anything. We simply recall that after the February 2011 earthquake all the water we had on hand was four cups worth in the kettle. Which we promptly offered to our first guests in the form of a cup of tea and later realised it would be a bit tricky to replace in the aftermath of a major earthquake. Live and learn. We still don’t have a disaster kit, but we do have our filter water bottles and a couple of tins of spaghetti.