Guaranteeing Your Camping Water Is As Clean as What You Drink at Home
February 27th, 2010 | by admin |Twenty-one hundred - that is the number of contaminants identified in drinking water thus far. It’s frightening and, though Americans have greatly improved in cleaning up rivers and lakes, we are still leeching chemicals into the water sources that are causing health issues.
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.
For those who have purchased a gravity feed filter the solution is also obvious. You can pack your water filter in the car and filter all drinking and cooking water, no matter what the source. This would provide an endless supply and would guarantee that the stream or faucet water is safe for the family to drink.
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.
But where should you store it? If you keep it in plastic containers, you could face a problem, especially if the water gets warm during storage. Plastic can leech into the water, contaminating it. This is true of the PET bottles (made of polyethylene terephthalate) used by most bottled water companies. Reusing them is not safe either.
What about the hard plastic bottles for sports drinks or water coolers? The National Institutes of Health recently showed that bisphenol, used to make these bottles, may cause neurological problems in developing babies. They have yet to discover the long range effects on adults. That may be a bit risky to store and transport water in those containers too.
This narrows our choices even more. We want the pure water from home but can’t bring the filter. If we transport it, we are in danger of ingesting substances leeched into the water from the containers that may harm us or our families. Solution- filter extra water at home prior to the vacation and store it in glass containers. This would include jars, bottles, and glass lined thermoses.
This solution answers several problems. First we won’t have the discarded bottle problem, nor the plastic leeching problem of those bottles. We will have the save clean water we filter at home, and when the bottles are empty, they can be washed and reused without danger. The resulting peace of mind will only add to the enjoyment of your vacation.
