If you are the type of person who spends a lot of time camping or hiking, you may be interested in having portable water filters packed in with all of your camping gear. Whether walking along trails on the mountainside, riding a bike of camping out in the woods, you will want to have plenty of fresh, clean water available and portable water filters can provide it without the need to carry heavy gallons of water around with you. Water can take up a lot of space and be bulky to take along on a hike and not all water from lakes and streams will be free of bacteria and other sediment, making it unhealthy to drink.

Some sources of water may look and smell clean and healthy, but if viewed under a microscope the existence of bacteria that leave you writhing in pain will become evident. While some portable water filters only filter out larger sediment in the water, there are some that are designed to remove some of the smallest microbial bacteria that is swimming around.

Water purification methods may also be desired to insure that any living critters in the water are destroyed before the water is consumed, but even with purifiers, portable water filters will remove many of the larger particles allowing the purifiers to work more efficiently. In areas where the water is questionable, portable water filters alone may not do the job.

Filters Can Also Be Used At Home

Some homes have water drawn from a well that may not be as free of sediment as the homeowner would like. There are portable water filters designed to remove some of the floating deposits that affect taste and odor of the water that filter them out inside a serving pitcher.

These types of portable water filters usually hold less than a gallon of water, passing it through a filter before it is poured into a glass. They are not designed to remove many of the smallest bacteria-sized particles in the water and should not be counted on to provide safe drinking water for the entire household. In order to insure the water is safe to drink, portable water purification systems should also be considered.

Pressurize portable water filters will allow for the use of smaller filters that can also remove many of the bacteria from the water. These type of portable water filters usually require the user to operate a manual hand pump that forces the water through several layers of membrane filters, removing all large and small sediment, depending on the size of the filter being used.