After wearing out my arms pumping water through my buddy's Pur water filter last year, I was thinking of getting one of my own.

I really want one that has a gravity assist option where I hang a bag of unfiltered water up in a tree and it trickles down through the filter into the potable water bag. First Need has a filter like that.
http://www.generalecology.com/portable%20water%20purifiers.html

Does anyone have any experience with these filters or one like it? Is filtering water with a gravity assist purifier just a pipe dream?

Thanks,

Jimbo

I went ahead and bought a First Need filter and it was a huge success.

First of all it was pretty easy to figure out how to use. Since I got it only a couple of days before I left I didn't have much time to test it out.

Gravity assisted pumping was everything I had hoped for. I would fill up a bag with lake water every morning and attach it to the purifier and when I got back from fishing, there would be 3 gallons of purified water in the camp water bag. Pretty cool.

In all honesty, though, the gravity assisted pumping was REALLY SLOW. Don't think you can hang your bag of lake water in the tree and have your clean water 20 minutes later. It is just a trickle coming out. If you want water in any reasonable time you will have to manually pump it. And my buddies Pur filter was a faster pumper than mine.

All said though, if you can live with the waiting the gravity assist is the thing to have. 3 gallons of water with no pumping is a boon when you come back to camp.

While the First Need filter is pretty good, you will have to get a couple of things from the local hardware store to make it work. It comes with only one hose (intake) so you need to get another for the gravity assist. To use gravity assist you will also need to get a bag or something with a spout in the bottom to hang from a tree. I used an old solar shower and that worked pretty well.

Hope this helps anyone interested in water filters. Drop me an email for more details. If you are interested in buying one, I got a pretty good deal on mine from Mike at Just Camping, Inc. (justcamping@aol.com).

Jimbo