Filter Your Water

I took a 12 day trip a couple states over as part of a work thing; these work things have  reimbursed expenses, so I’m living in a hotel instead of the camper. The nature of the work required eight business days, so I invariably was stuck over a weekend. However, due to the hotel availability, I was required to stay over two weekends, thus hotel living from Friday to the second Tuesday.

I try to be frugal when travel/working, so I take most of my meals in the hotel room from things I bring or fresh foods I procure locally. I packed a water boiler and a Zero Water Filter pitcher and used filtered water for my morning coffee and evening tea, to brush my teeth, meal preparation, and so on. I also like the Mountain House dehydrated meals, so I ended up filtering, what seemed to me, to be a lot of water.

Zero Water Filter, like many other filters, is a gravity fed device, meaning the water is pulled through the multistage filter by gravity alone. When you’re jonesing for a cup of coffee, it seems to take forever.

Our tiny house and camper both have a Culligan inline filter system, and we still use the Zero Water pitcher. Why? Well, I’m glad you asked.

Once upon a long time ago, while stationed in Korea and living off base, I was ordered to boil water (which, by the way, has happened stateside) and to soak any produce in a sink full of water with a measure of chlorine bleach. You were also advised to not eat food from the local street vendors or restaurants due to the possible contamination. So, if you bought some carrots or a head of lettuce, you had to soak them in bleach water before making a nice salad. Nasty.

Our local municipality occasionally sends out a letter arguing how the water they produce is safe. They use wonderfully descriptive terms like “parts per million” and “below the threshold”, but what does this really mean? If today’s government is telling you something is good for you, then you would be well advised to consider the source, the message, and the bias. A smarter move would be to get your family a water filtration system, test and maintain the system, and only consume filtered water, regardless of how much flowery language the water department provides.

I highly recommend you filter your water, regardless of its source. Many decent quality filtering devices are on the market, but do you own research. Zero Water, Berkey, Alexpure are some names to consider. Will a charcoal or layered filter work or do you need a Ultraviolet (UV) light component? It depends on your water source. For the RV dweller, we move around a lot, so having an inline filter in the camper and a pitcher on the counter top gives us the best combination of protection.