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Picked a $180 Sawyer filter over a $350 Berkey for a 10 day Grand Canyon trip, here's how it went
My buddy swore by his Berkey for car camping but I needed something I could actually carry 14 miles down Bright Angel Trail. The Sawyer squeeze bag blew out on day 2 at the Cottonwood campground, but the filter itself never quit and I pumped straight from the creek the whole rest of the trip. Back home I swapped the bag for a $6 Smartwater bottle setup and it's still my go-to for every hike. Anyone else run into the bag issue, or did I just get a bad one?
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the_david7d ago
Filter's rated for way more than 2 days, the bag just sucks.
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sam5307d ago
My experience has been the total opposite. I ran the same filter for almost two weeks and it barely did anything by day three because the bag kept coming loose and letting junk bypass it. A filter can be rated for six months all day long, but that number means nothing if the seal around it is garbage. The rating assumes a good fit and clean airflow, which you do not get when the bag is flopping around. So blaming the filter spec feels backwards to me. The bag is what controls whether the filter ever gets a fair shot, your mileage may vary though.
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