User Review: SteriPEN Adventurer Opti

Summary

Awesome technology, and extremely popular I found while I thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail in 2012.

This is what I went to after dropping my water filter. This is a very cool piece of technology.

Basically what it does is emits a UV light that sterilizes all the gnarly junk in the water, such as Giardia (you really don’t wanna mess with that stuff). Let me say again, it sterilizes the bacteria, doesn’t get rid of it. So essentially it’s still floating around in there. But as long as you can get past that fact, the technology totally works and a lot of the time you’re pulling from some pretty clean water sources anyway (that's what I found on the A.T., anyways).

These were really popular pieces of technology on the trail and for good reason. The particular model I had used CR123 batteries, which are obscenely expensive (~$13 for 2 batteries), but if I’d known I would have purchased another model called the Classic which uses AA Lithium batteries. Still somewhat expensive, but nothing like the CR123′s.

With the Classic model, the pen fits snug into the mouth of a bottle so that you’re able to hold it upside down. Something I dealt with with the Adventurer model was the pen not being able to fit far enough down the mouth of the Powerade bottles for it to work, but I found that by filling the bottle literally to the very top, you could make it work.

I had a funny story dealing with the customer service of this company, but all in all a very good product and one that I would definitely use on a thru-hike. Consider carrying AquaMira drops as a backup just in case you run out of battery though.