User Review: Katadyn Mini

Bought the filter, not really needing it, a few years ago. Water here in Norway is drinkable almost everywhere, and after 40 years I've never been sick from it once. I stay away from small pools of standing water though, and I also pass on water that smell too badly of sheep droppings. Water from marshes do taste a bit funny, but is drinkable... If the taste is too bad, add some ice tea. It even camouflages the colour.

So, I brought the filter along on a hike, only out of curiosity, and have decided to never use it again. Tried it in one of those pools of stagnant water, but after filling my 0.5 liter bottle I just packet the filter away and walked off to a small stream a few kilometers away. Pretty sure it took at least 3 minutes to filter a bottle of water, and if you add the time it took to get the filter out of my bag etc. five-six minutes had passed.

I really have no filter to compare the Mini to, but I feel pretty confident there has to be better filters out there.

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Filters are pretty hard to come by over here, and only in the last couple of years a few sporting goods stores have started selling them. The selection is poor, so I ended up with the Mini. I don't think the surface water has gotten any worse, but we do tend to get influenced by tv-shows like Ultimate Survival that tells us to always boil/filter water before drinking it, otherwise we'll probably end up dead.

So, I guess that in a few years everyone will be using filters here as well, even though we don't really need them. Hopefully something better than the Katadyn Mini will come our way by then. As for me, I'll stick with drinking water the way I have since my first trip into the forrest when I was 3.