for use in the Southwest with water/silt ? There are several experienced SW paddlers around…what’s the recommendation off the water ?
Works faster with heavy water.
NE paddler here with two
Green River trips…
With settling, cheesecloth and decanting into the filter it worked fine. MSR gravity filter.
Needed a gallon bottle for the reservoir for settling…
I heard the same, but …
… the person I heard about it from used a 5-gallon bucket for the settling reservoir. He’d set up the settling reservoir right away in camp, and let it settle all night. That way the water would become much clearer than you’d have time for otherwise. Then, there was a spigot installed near the base of the bucket so the filtration could be done without disturbing the bucket or the sediment layer at the bottom. I don’t know how far above the bottom of the bucket (to leave room for the sediment layer) the spigot should be installed. I suppose a person could install rings on the inside of the bucket to allow height adjustment of a siphon tube, and that way you could drain most of the clear water regardless of the thickness of the sediment layer.
we just did not need five gallons
I don’t think a spigot would have been needed. Of course some start with at least one 2.5 gallon water jug from Wally World that does have a spigot.
Time of course is your friend. We didnt need much time as we drew from slot canyons with quiet water and not the main flow of the river.
5 gallons
Yes, I put out that example because it could make sense to prepare that much water for filtering so that every person in a small group could get roughly a 1-gallon allowance for the day without needing to do anything more than once. It’s just an option for group travel that someone might not think of otherwise, though if traveling by kayak it would probably be necessary to use a collapsible water container instead of a bucket.
subject noun
works faster with heavy water ?
OK
but what make of gravity water filters n advice on that…I have a discount coming.
Alum
Look into using Alum to help settle your water. I’ve filtered on two Green River trips. First time, I just let the water settle overnight, then filtered. Second time, used Alum. With alum, the settling is much more complete and only takes an hour or two. Without, the water never really clarifies and pumping my filter was far more difficult each day.
You can find prior p-net threads and other internet sources with specifics on the use of alum to settle the silt out of water. You may also be able to find clearer water sources as KM did. But alum is cheap, small, easy to pack and great insurance if you don’t find those clear sources.
~~Chip
Yukon River silt
– Last Updated: Feb-16-15 8:00 AM EST –
The Yukon river from Whitehorse is beautifully blue and clear, until 85 miles later it is joined by the Teslin River. After the Teslin the silt is so thick that you can't see even a millimeter through it, and it only gets worse further downstream after other silt laden rivers enter. So much that it creates a radio-static-like hissing sound, as if sanding the bottom of the canoe.
During the 1000 mile canoe races in 2009 and 2011, with my voyageur team we used a product by Pur Reliance that both settled the silt and disinfected the water. It tasted terrible, but we had a good supply of clean water each day.
https://www.relianceproducts.com/pur_water.html
I did bring Alum as a backup to the Yukon, bud did not have to use it. But since 2011, I cannot find a US source that still has the Pur chemical packet available. I received no answer from the company either. Next race I will have to resort to using Alum and some other source of disinfectant.
Water filter worked on the Yukon
the same one referred to earlier. After the White we decanted from side canyons due to silt load in the Yukon
Bottom line is that some gravity filters will handle a certain level of silt and others are problematic
While racing
During the Y1K race you don’t have the luxury of using valuable time to stop at small clean water streams entering the Yukon. You only stop at a random gravel shoal as you reach the end of 18 hours of race paddling, for your mandated 6 hours of “rest” time off the water. Gather thick silty water in a 5 gallon bucket and treat with deflocculant and disinfect while we sleep.
However one time when we were lucky enough to happen to stop for a rare quick bio break next to a nice clear stream, one of my crew noticed a flake of gold in her water bottle. I immediately marked that spot on the GPS for later reference :-).
or centrifugal force
they’re not infallible
For example, they don’t handle dogs chewing on them as well as a traditional filter does.
Thank goodness for tent patches.
We used two 6 gal collapisble
buckets on the Green.
Each night among the first things done was to floculate the water with alum. One bucket reserved for filtering drinking water, the other for dipping water out for bird baths. Two small plastic bottles with their tops cut off help with the bathing bucket. One of the cut off top bottles had holes punctured in the bottom to make shower like dispensing. If you do all your soaping out of the bucket, the bathing bucket could be used to filter drinking water, but did not become necessary for us.
Worked great for our group of 5.
MSR
Platypus Gravity filters is what we used. It worked great. Settling out the water prevented any clogging problems.
deuterium water
top the katydyn
with a pocket centrifuge for silt and salt.
line forms to the left please nooooo pushing,…
alum
pickle your tummy ? what are the alum downsides ?