Community Blog

Chuck La Tournous, camping and tech geek extraordinaire, praised SteriPEN’s UV water purification in his talk, “The Great (Geek) Outdoors” at Macworld | iWorld in San Francisco this year.  Highlighting its innovation over traditional methods of ensuring safe drinking water, La Tournous recommends SteriPEN as a lightweight, quick, easy-to-use method that doesn’t leave a bad taste.

Traditionally, there have been three ways to ensure water is safe to drink: boil it, treat it chemically or filter it. All have their downsides: boiling water takes a long time and leaves you with hot, often flat-tasting water; iodine pills and other chemical treatments leave a bad taste; and pumping can be slow, labor-intensive and subject to clogging.

A company called SteriPEN added a fourth method: purifying by ultraviolet light. It looks like something straight out of Star Trek: a small device about the size of a travel tube of toothpaste, with a glass rod on the end. Immerse the rod in water and it lights up. Less than a minute later, you have water that’s safe to drink, with over 99.9% of bacteria, viruses and protozoa eliminated, seemingly by magic.

Read Chuck’s full post here.