Gravity System

Great product, easy to use. Just finished a 23 mile through hike on the Pine Mountain Trail, GA. Filtered the water perfectly, 1gal took less than five minutes, taste was perfect. Between the four of us, no one ever got sick or felt sick from drinking the purified water, no other treatment was needed. After the water bottles were filled each night at camp, we would fill it up for cooking water and cleaning dishes. Kept it hung on a 550 cord clothes line we setup and had no issues with the handle or the bag the entire time. If you are looking for a system for more than two people that is effective and easy to use then this is the right fit for you.

Took this recently on a 6 day river trip in Utah. Worked just as I had hoped. I used it a little different than the standard method. I settled the silt in a 5 gal bucket of river water (using alum-there's YouTube videos how to do this), then used the tubing to make a siphon, with siphon running plugged the tubing into the filter which was screwed directly in to the bladder. That way the bladder stayed clean, filtered water. With filter and bladder sitting on the ground next to the bucket, took about an hour to fill the one gallon bladder. An extra 6 inches of tubing would have made this method a little less fussy, but it worked just fine. Product comes with a good assortment of fittings to make a lot of things possible. In the pictures, the green thing on the bucket is a homemade deal (made from a pill bottle) to keep the tubing from pinching at the edge of the bucket, with rubber band to keep it in place

Used this for three days this past weekend, and overall I’m pretty happy with it. It was awesome and easy to fill when I was access to fast moving water, but slow moving water forced me to try and either submerge it or sort of use a scooping motion to get it even halfway filled. There HAS to be a better place for the inlet on a bag like this. The filtering itself was plenty fast for me (a good excuse to drop pack for ten minutes) and the water tasted great. It was nice to fill up at camp and know you had water on tap for cooking, cleaning, drinking, whatever. I took a pic of how I rigged it up most of the time. I would loop the leash of my pole through it and back onto the pole to hold it, then attach the other poles leash and lean them against something with a wide stance, made it super quick and easy. Much better than pumping and is pretty light. Definitely happy with it overall!

To start off, you don't need a water filter to make tap water drinkable - these things are for backpacking. When you're doing that, a couple of things happen. First, no matter what you do, you're going to get silt in your dirty bag, at least a bit. Second, you know that dirty bag has "unsafe" water in it - and every little droplet on the bag, the fitting, the hose, etc. is just waiting to spoil your night by contaminating your clean water. I don't know where other users backpack, but I don't backpack where I have a flat table to lay this thing on. I need to hang it, and the only reasonable way to do that is with a thong through the carrying handle and around a tree trunk or branch. That works great, and even leaves the output hose "port" a little higher than the filler port, which gives silt a place to settle. (If you're using the Sawyer Mini filter you should always let dirty water sit 5-10min or more, trust me, your filter throughput will thank you!) I really wish they sold a pre-filter for this - it would be SO easy at their manufacturing scale to include a high-flow cone-type filter that stuck up into the dirty bag, held in place by the outlet hose attachment. As it was, I put a bandanna over the hole before screwing on the cap. It worked, but wasn't ideal. But now you have this bag hanging down with a hose to the filter itself. Dripping dirty water down onto itself. Hopefully you read the instructions and aren't completely out of water, because you need to save some clean water each "cycle" to rinse off the components before using them. The output of the filter goes to a water-bottle-style pull-to-open drinking valve. This isn't ideal. It's really hard to "aim" into things and the filter is heavy, so it flops around on the end of the hose. Meanwhile precious filtered water is getting tossed around wasted. And especially if you're sharing this system you don't want to be using your dirty mouth to open the valve, but takes a lot more force to open than any bottle I've owned. Once you get it open, water starts flowing and you have to use a dirty mouth/hand to close it again, or lift it up above the dirty bag to stop the gravity flow - potentially letting a few drops you didn't notice hanging on the system fall into your cup, bottle, or whatever. Fortunately, these things are all really easy to fix, I just wish Sawyer did it themselves. Four cheap items dramatically improve the experience: 1. A second Sawyer "hydration pack adapter" set, $6 here on Amazon. This gives you another blue and grey screw-on adapter. 2. A short length of 1/4" ID silicone hose. Attach the adapters above to the output side of the filter, and then attach the hose. Carry the blue "bottle coupler" with you that comes with this kit as well. 3. A pair of tube "pinch clamps", the small plastic kinds that you squeeze to close off a water tube. They're often sold for aquariums and are only a dollar or two apiece (although I bought a 6-pack). Put one apiece on the hoses, about an inch from the filter itself. 4. A small plastic "hose clip" designed for holding aquarium air hoses to the tank walls. Clip this to the very end of the new output hose. Here's how this work. When you fill the dirty bag, close the hose clamps above and below the filter. This stops the filter from "losing its prime" (getting air bubbles into it, which cuts the flow in half). You can set it down any which way without worrying about the output side getting dirty or dripped on because it's long enough to set/hang out of the way. When you start filtering, you can set up your output side before opening anything and wasting any water. If you want to filter into a bottle, attach the bottle coupler to the last/unused screw fitting and put it on the end of the hose. Set your bottle so it's stable and angled well, and you can take your time. When you're good, open the pinch clamps and filter away. For one last trick, if you want to filter directly into a pot, hydration bladder, or other vessel, you can use the hose clip to attach the output hose right to the top lip of your pot and it won't flop out and get dirty or waste water. Again, you can do all this with the flow "off" and turn it on when you're ready. These things together only add about $10 (I bet Sawyer could do it for $2) and 4oz to your setup. But they turn the whole experience of filtering water from "sort of touch and go, be careful" to "no sweat, this is easy."

It is very versatile and can be backwashed for extended use. The lifetime of the filter is 100k gallons. That will outlive me. I just wish the directions of use were better. I had to spend a hour online to really feel comfortable with the many configurations and safe use. I HIGHLY suggest this product.

The weight of this kit is negligible, but it doesn't pack down neatly into a backpack pocket. But it is just plastic so rolling it up and scrunching it into the pocket works. If you are getting water from a source that can pour into the opening of the bag, or if the water source is deep enough to submerge the entire bag, it works great. Otherwise if you find yourself trying to fill this from a shallow stream, good luck. The plastic is stiff enough that it doesn't expand as water fills the bag. You have to use another container to pour water into the bag to completely fill it. Once filled though, it works exactly as intended and without only one minor gotcha. The bag doesn't naturally hang such that all the water will drain out through the line to the filter. That means you have to hold it and tip it or figure out how to hang it and keep the bag tilted toward the filter tube.

Great product. A real life saver (literally). Bring some twine so that you can hang it up and you'll have an easy source of water for all the random things you want to do while in camp. The one issue I did have with it is the male-to-male adapter part that allows you to directly attach the Sawyer filter to a water bottle. Using this setup, the air in the bottle couldn't get back through the filter into the bag, so the pressure of the air in the bottle prevented the water from flowing down and it looked like the filter had jammed. I had to switch to the rubber tube attachment, so that the air in the bottle could escape around the tube, and everything started working again. I can't really see what this connector would be used for other than a direct connection to a water bottle, so it seems like a somewhat useless part for them to be adding in. They may as well not add it.

This is a lifesaver. I took this on a pack trip in the Gila Wilderness and it provided clean drinking water for the four of us for a week. I filtered over 4 gallons a day and it flows faster than I thought it would. The filter is easy to clean by backflushing and it is so easy to use, just fill the bag, hang it on a tree and it just fills up your water bottles with no pumping. Best of all, no sick campers and the water tastes great!

Very impressed and confident with this filter. We used it for a 3 day camp by a river and it provided clean, clear and odourless drinking water for us.

The large size for filtration. Great product.

まだ使用していませんが、常備して安心です。

Backcountry use. Good filter. Bag is crap. Replace it with something better or Tuck Tape it when it leaks.

Depósito para agua con diferentes conexiones para el filtro de agua de la misma marca, muy útil para cuando acampas por varios días .