Three years ago I purchased this water filter setup that only weighs 1 ounce. What I did was took a Aquamira Frontier Pro (GRN Line III bacteria rated) water filter and used only the filter and the pre-filter. The rest is just a giant fancy plastic mouthpiece, in a way. I don’t cook and don’t need to use large volumes of water in short periods of time, so the flow rate has been fine for me, just drinking water.

The Frontier Pro Filter kit comes with felt pre-filters that squeeze into the pre-filter screw-on section. I find this system to be a lot more robust and less leak prone than the Sawyer Squeeze systems I have. I also carry one used filter and a backup, fresh new one. Since the pre-filter can be swapped, the total weight of two filters in less than 2 ounces.

They screw onto Smartwater and Essentia bottles perfectly. I just crack it open a bit to burp the air.

Now, I can’t possibly be the first person to do this exact same thing, so why hasn’t it caught on at all? Is it because this filter had a bad reputation of lower filtering quality back in the day? Isn’t this addressed with the new filters? I would think UL backpackers would be all over such a light and compact system.
I can get new filter cartridges for around $15 each.

