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Best water disinfectant? Polar Pure has a place in your emergency gear
Pure drinking water is a necessity anywhere. This product is an efficient way to quickly disinfect questionable drinking sources.
by Leon Pantenburg
Polar Pure is lightweight, compact and effective.
The water in the northern Minnesota lakes looked pure enough to drink without any treatment whatsoever.
But you never knew if a flock of waterfowl just vacated the area. Or if there was a dead beaver in the creek or if a moose had pooped upstream in that sparkling brook. So we treated all the water.
Our Boy Scout troop was on a nine-day canoe trip in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, a 1,090,000-acre wilderness area in northeastern Minnesota.
The Boy Scout Northern Tier High Adventure Center supplied everything. The standard water purification system for all the crews was handled by two bottles of Polar Pure.
Using Polar Pure was simple: We mixed a cap full of the solution with a quart of water, let it set for 30 minutes, and the water was safe to drink. There was never a problem keeping everyone supplied with drinking water
Back home, I got my own bottle and it was frequently used on hiking and hunting trips. I never got any nasty bugs from drinking water treated with it.
Edge of a wild rice/aquatic weed bed in the Minnesota Boundar Waters. (Bob Patterson photo)
But Polar Pure went off the market for a while around 2010 because some meth cookers reportedly used the iodine crystals to manufacture methamphetamine. This resulted in more stringent – and expensive – laws regarding iodine crystals.
Retired metallurgist Bob Wallace and his partner, Marjorie Ottenberg, came up with the Polar Pure idea about 30 years ago as they planned to scale the Popocatépetl volcano in Mexico.
Ottenberg, a chemist, read an article in Backpacker magazine about two doctors who had been infected with Giardia and recommended treating water with crystalline iodine.
“We knew the water was questionable down there, so we stole their idea,” Wallace said in a 2011 article in the San Jose mercury news (Read the entire San Jose Mercury News story here.
So in 1983, the couple began selling their brown bottles with a small sprinkling of iodine crystals — about a quarter of an ounce — in the bottom.
Polar Pure was a hit among backpackers and world travelers. It was effective, light and never expired, unlike many other products. One bottle can disinfect about 2,000 quarts of water. I frequently took my bottle of Polar Pure along on hikes and outings as a backup, because if another water filter failed the Polar Pure wouldn’t
Now Polar Pure is back. Here are some of the strong points, according to the product website:
- Portable water disinfectant ideal for camping, backpacking, or traveling
- Unique bottle design deploys pure crystallized iodine into water
- Destroys waterborne pathogens, including Giardia and microorganisms
- Treats up to 2,000 quarts of water per bottle; indefinite shelf life
- Bottle cap measures and decants solution–no other tools required
I used and appreciated this product long before I ever considered doing a review. I think PolarPure is a good addition to any emergency or survival kit.
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Source: http://www.survivalcommonsense.com/best-water-disinfectant-polar-pure-has-a-place-in-your-emergency-gearfeed/
FYI, Iodine is NOT a good water biological agent neutralizer, and here’s why. Iodine is not only temperature sensitive to the ‘sit duration’ required to work, but it is also UV sensitive. Too hot, too cold, too much UVA or UVB, or strangely, on the rare occassion, for no reason at all, Iodine fails to properly sterilize water quantities sufficiently.
Doubt this? Ask yourself when Iodine is very prevalent in nature, why would your local civic water operations choose to use, arguably, the deadliest gas in the world (Chlorine), instead of Iodine? Chlorine is harder on metal pipes and fixtures, more deadly to work with, and is just as reactive as Iodine to most other elements. WHY CHOOSE CHLORINE? Because it does NOT have the fickle tendencies that Iodine does relative to possible lack of sterilization.
Secondly, if this were a real ‘survival situation’ (or a Boy Scout trip), why did they not just boil their water for 10-minutes, like the American Red Cross recommends? Boiling water is FOOLPROOF against most biological agents. Only Reverse Osmosis works against chemicals AND Biologicals, while distillation comes in a close second (but you must have a thermometer to remove heavy metals and various chemicals using distillation).
The best ‘filtration’ you can build for ‘survival’ is a pack of automatic drip coffeemaker filters, and a lighter. First, use TWO coffee filters, doubled, to filter your water. This will, believe it or not, get your water filtered down to about 50-microns. That’s dirt, cysts, little bugs, larvae, etc. Now, take that filtered water and BOIL IT (using that lighter to start the fire). Boil FOR 10-MINUTES. This kills most all viruses, bacteria, etc. that makes people sick.
If you are concerned about brackish water, or if the water you have filtered and boiled has a ‘distinguished smell’ (most would throw this away and find another water source), you can still filter and boil to drink, if hard-pressed – but if you carry a small aspirin bottle full of activated charcoal (or learn how to make your own), you can filter the boiled water through a modified ‘charcoal filter’ to help remove smells and improve taste, too.
There – cheap and sure water filtration guaranteed to prevent you from biological induced sickness, all for about $5.