Sawyer Squeeze Filter for AT Thru-Hike

Hum… My flow rate is much higher. With the "dirty" bag on my shoulder and the clean bottle waist high I filtered 1 liter in 1 minute 30 seconds.

I agree with Larry that you can obtain faster flow rates.

Part of this has to do with how much tubing you have between the dirty water source and the filter.

Static head pressure?

Not sure, but someeone much smarter than me posted up the science of how this works.

But I walked away from the discussion thinking that more tubing on both the dirty and clean side makes the gravity filter work faster.

-Tony

What about just having one 2L platy with the squeeze filter and drinking right from the other end of the filter? Filter as needed kinda deal. I would prob put a prefilter on the platy too.

-The Padawan

That would work and probably the lightest. Not sure about the flow rate though.

That's one way you can use a geigerrig.
Cut in a filter into the outlet line and use it as a filtered bladder.

Troy-
Is the bladder on the Geigerrig much easier to fill and close than the Platy Big Zip?
I have the same setup as yours with the larger Sawyer filter and find it difficult to fill the 2L Big Zip and to close it, especially in colder weather. Have you used the Platy Big Zip? The Platy collapses on itself when filling.

With the geigerrig you fold over the top and slide the clamp on. Its pretty easy if its out of your pack.

Sawyer bladders leaked right away…I use SmartWater Bottles (various sizes)…Tougher and cheaper than Platys, etc. These bottles are squeezable…No leaks.

I might start with platys but I could see me getting lazy with even the first replacement of them. Not to mention I can always switch to AM. I feel like I'm gona be pretty lazy on my thru.

-The Padawan

My daughter and I just got back from 2 weeks on the A.T. in Vt. and N.H. with the Sawyer Squeeze. I love this filter as a new convert from Aqumira. The bags were blowing out under ‘squeeze pressure’ after only a few days so we were forced to find an alternate method.

Because we use 1 liter seltzer bottles as our LW pack water bottles, we dedicated one of them as the ‘dirty water’ container. It is much easier to fill in a stream than the flexible bags and it screw fits into the Sawyer filter perfectly. The 1 liter soda bottle is also more comfortable to squeeze than the bags.

The disadvantages as I see them are: you periodically need to flip the filter over and crack the joint to burp/add air to the ‘dirty water’ bottle. This make it so you don’t need to crush the bottle as much to push out the contents. We usually did this twice for each liter we filtered. I worried about forming a crack in the dirty water bottle from all the squeezing so every 3-4 days when we walked through the next resupply town I tossed the old one into the recycle bin and bought a new bottle of soda.

We could pull up to a stream, filter 2 liters of water and be walking again in under 5 minutes with this method although I think I will also get a platypus bag as a backup.