Sawyer Squeeze Water Filter System with Cnoc Premium 2-liter Bladder

This upgrade to Sawyer's widely-used squeeze system comes with an easy-fill and tougher reservoir than the original, and a coupler for gravity filtering directly into a bottle or reservoir with standard soda bottle threads. Well worth $20 more.

Last I checked, gravity was still free. That makes it the easiest and cheapest way to move water downhill—or through a filter. In contrast to boiling, pumping, or squeezing, the upgraded Sawyer Squeeze System with its Cnoc reservoir is a great way to let gravity do the work of filtering water.

The Sawyer Squeeze filter with Sawyer's own welded-seam mylar water pouches has long been a good choice for treating water, but the pouches have only a 28 mm opening, which can be hard to fill and squeezing while aiming the stream into a water bottle or other receptacle can be a three-handed operation. It can potentially be used as a gravity feed system but isn’t well set-up for that either.

Now Sawyer has partnered with Cnoc Outdoors to produce an updated system that is much easier to use, for both filling up the feed reservoir and for gravity filtering.

The 0.1 micron hollow-fiber membrane filter is the same as in the original Sawyer Squeeze system. It will filter out bacteria, Giardia cysts and other cellular nasties, but not viruses. For that you need chemical or maybe UV light treatment.

The Cnoc Vecto X reservoir is made of tough, BPA-free, slightly stretchy TPU (thermoplastic polyurethane). It is welded along one side and  to the plastic parts on both ends—a wide mouth end for filling and a soda-bottle (28 mm) threaded outlet for the filter. It has volume markings in both 0.5 L and 8 oz increments. It weighs 92 g / 3.25 oz empty and dry.

The wide mouth of the Cnoc reservoir is held open by semi-rigid plastic edges, one of which has an edge made for channeling or scooping, making it easy to partially or completely fill even in shallow water sources. That’s a big improvement over trying to get water to flow into the 28 mm opening on the old Sawyer pouches. The top folds over and is sealed by a sliding plastic bar that is tethered to the reservoir so you can’t lose it.

In my experience it is 100% leakproof even when squeeze-filtering. With the old pouches I managed to squeeze hard enough to open up some leaks on the welded seams. That hasn’t happened with the Cnoc, but I am more careful about squeezing now and use the system almost exclusively in gravity mode anyway.

Unlike its predecessor, the Cnoc version comes with the coupler needed to connect the filter to another Cnoc reservoir (not included) or any other reservoir or bottle with soda bottle threads. I use some 2 L Evernew bladders I bought a while back. I’ve also seen a lot of people filtering directly into Smart or other semi-rigid water bottles, in which case you need to leave the attachment to the receiver a little loose to let air out as water flows in. It takes a little juggling to hook up the full Cnoc to the filter and then the filter to the receiver. Some sort if shut-off valve would make this easier, but I suppose also adds weight and expense. But once that’s done, I just find a place to hang it and go do something else while gravity does all the work.

Here's an exciting video of my gravity system in action:

It takes about 10 minutes to filter 2 L of water. The Cnoc has only a 12 mm  (0.5”) opening on the bar to hang from, so sometimes I’ve had to search for small branches sturdy enough to handle the weight, often the little pegs left behind by dead branches of fir saplings. Since then I’ve dug up a mini bungee cord that I can use to hang it from bigger branches or maybe other situations. It would be nice if the system came with some kind of cord or strap for hanging the reservoir in different ways.

To backflush I often just squeeze some clean water from the receiver back through the filter. This may not generate as much pressure as the syringe but seems to be good enough to keep the flow rate up, especially as I do it routinely on the trail rather than waiting until I get home. The syringe cracked early on anyway.

With some residual water in the system (which is how you’d carry it on the trail), the filter with the coupler weighs about 100 g / 3.5 oz and my 2l Evernew receiver weighs 42 g / 1.5 oz, so my complete gravity-ready system (with a little bungee for hanging) adds up to 250 g / 8.8 oz.

Altogether this as a massive improvement on the Sawyer’s original, mylar perch squeeze system, and well worth the extra ca. $20 in price.

Background

I’ve used boiling, iodine, and other chemical treatments, the MSR pump system, a Steripen, and the original Sawyer Squeeze system for treating water in the US and abroad. I used the Cnoc-squeeze system for about 6 weeks on the NH-ME AT.