User Review: Aquamira Water Treatment Drops

Aquamira Water Treatment Drops
Above: The current Water Treatment Drops, which may differ slightly from the version reviewed.

Reviewed January 18, 2005 by Pianodirt

Rating:
Price Paid: $10.99

What's it for: Treating clear water with suspected pathogens like giardia, lyptosporosis, crypto; winter-time water treatment

Pros: lightweight, compact, usable in freezing weather, no pumping, no batteries required

Cons: not good for water with lots of silt/dirt (unless you like drinking that stuff even though it's sterilized) or water with man-made chemicals (such as being downstream from a farming area)--use a filter for these situations; small 5-minute wait time for chemicals to react before dumping into water, slight chlorine taste

I've messed with a variety of filters from hand-pumped to gravity fed and I'm happy to say I'm done with that for the most part. I am a picky person when it comes to the taste of my water. I detest the pool-like smell of most tap water and use a countertop water filter at home to deal with that. I also don't like the iodine taste of iodine tablets (not to mention that long-term use of high doses of iodine is not good for the thyroid and I suspect that short-term use is probably not all that great). Aquamira is the exact same chemicals (chlorine dioxide--NOT the same as household bleach) that many city municipal water supplies use to treat our drinking water. The taste and smell of Aquamira-treated water to me is a slightly chlorine, but it's far from the strong pool-like smell of my home unfiltered tap water.

How it works: The Aquamira system is two bottles of chemicals and a mixing cap. I suggest you keep the little plastic box they come packaged in as over 2 years the bottles I had never leaked or got punctured, but they did look a bit beat up. If you need to treat several containers of water at once, plastic caps from drink bottles work fine. You mix equal drops from each bottle into the mixing cap, wait 5 minutes, then pour the solution into the water you want to treat. Wait 30 minutes before drinking or 4 hours if you suspect crypto. Note: I've been told that although it takes 4 hours to kill ALL of the cryptosporidium, most of it is killed within the first 30-60 minutes. Crypto is not that common in many parts of the states, check with the locals or local authorities to see if anyone knows of its presence in the area you plan to travel.

If travelling to an area where I suspect or know the water will be rather dirty, such as a spring trip to a lake in a rural farming community, I'll take the filter. The water at this lake was full of silt and it was downstream from all the cows' runoff and also the runoff of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and probably some gasoline and oil. I'm not sure if my filter can even really get ALL that stuff out, but it sure can get more than any chemical treatment will.

I've been eyeing the MSR Miox, which is basically an electronic device that creates the same compound (chlorine dioxide) as Aquamira. The biggest downside to me of the Miox (besides it being an electronic device that could fail at the worse possible time) is that you can only create measured solutions for 1, 2, 3 or 4 liters. With aquamira and what I take a risk on being relatively clean water (meaning few if no pathogens) I will often create a lower dosage for the amount of water I am treating than what the directions on the Aquamira bottle suggest. That is, instead of 7 drops of each bottle to create a solution to treat 1 liter of water, I will only use 5 drops each. I'll wait a few extra minutes before drinking just to be sure. The benefit of this is less chlorine taste. In two years using this method, I've never gotten sick. But in areas I know the water is infected, I always use the full strength solution.

Where to buy it: Campmor is my favorite source. REI doesn't sell it, although they do sell the Katadyn Micropur tablets which is a similar product but much more expensive per use.

http://www.campmor.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?productId=7637979