If you like to take the odd family camping trip, water is never really an issue. You either walk the short distance to the communal tap in the camp site, or you drive to the shops to buy a few bottles, right? But what if you are miles from civilisation and have run out of the water that you brought with you? Easy, just drink from a puddle. Sounds crazy, but you can now, thanks to the LifeStraw Go.
You might have heard about LifeStraw, the clever bit of kit that allows you to slurp up water from pretty much any source (river, stream, waterfall, puddle) directly into you mouth to drink. The straw itself is something of an emergency accessory, to allow you to drink what may be dirty water when you need some fluid the most. However, it didn't let you take that water with you. Enter the LifeStraw Go.
The LifeStraw Go includes the same filtering technology of the LifeStraw but then encases it in a BPA-free plastic bottle. You scoop up some water from the river or stream as you pass it, then suck it up through the filter when you want to. The filter removes 99.9999% of waterborne bacteria, as well as 99.9% of waterborne protozoa. That's a lot of nines.
It can't be used to drink sea water, however, and is only really intended for hikers and trekkers. With that in mind the LifeStraw Go features a flip-down straw to keep the bottle sealed, and also a nice and chunky carabiner to clip it onto you backpack. It is also very solid and seems that it would never be crushed or cracked easily.
So... what does the water taste like? We tried it out by scooping up a bottle-full from the stream that runs a short distance from Test Pit Towers (by the Top Secret drone testing area). Although it may take you a few goes to pluck up the courage (and confidence in the product) to actually start sucking, the filtered water tastes quite like cold tap water. Despite the fact that the water had, erm... 'bits' in it, the LifeStraw Go did a fantastic job of keeping all that away from the water that we drank. If anything, it tasted cleaner and fresher than water straight from the tap.
Like we said, it takes a bit of courage to finally take a drink, but thinking about all those nines certainly helped. However, we wouldn't recommend that you use this every day, to scoop up water from the disused canal on the walk to work. This is a camping tool, and a very important one at that, to be used in an emergency so you can safely make it back to somewhere where you know the water is 100% clean.
£25
Visit lifestraw.com