Community Blog

In the past 10 days we’ve highlighted stainless steel water bottles, aluminum water bottles and glass water bottles. Today let’s review the incredibly exciting topic of hydration bladders.

Hydration bladders when empty are extremely lightweight and minimal in size to carry in your backpack. These characteristics coupled with the expandability of the material, hydration bladders can  hold larger volumes of water that hard containers such as stainless steel and plastic just can’t hold. In terms of water volume storage is concerned, hydration bladders rock!

Can hydration bladders be used with SteriPEN water purifiers? The short answer is “Yes.”

We receive daily emails, live chats, live support questions on our interactive FAQ, and phone support calls from customers wanting to know if hydration bladders work with SteriPEN water purifiers.

In the past, Hydro-Photon, the makers of SteriPEN water purifiers, has been  very reluctant to endorse hydration bladders as a whole for use with SteriPEN water purifiers, and here’s why:

1. Often hold more than 1 liter when full – As mentioned earlier, because of the minimum size/weight footprint and expandability of the material, many popular hydration bladder models often store more than 1 liter of water when full. Remember SteriPEN only recommends treatments of 1 liter or less at  time with SteriPEN water purifiers.
   
2. Lack of seal between bag and tube – Many hydration bladder bags do not have a seal that closes off water from entering the hydration drinking tube. With no seal, the microbes, virus, & bacteria can float back and forth between the hydration bladder and the hydration tube. There’s just no way we can confidently assure you water in the tube is being properly treated. Most likely it’s not.

Some good news…

While attending the Outdoor Retailer Show in Salt Lake City, Utah in August 2011, we connected with David from Hydrapak and he provided us a sample of the Hydrapak Elite 1 Liter Reservoir which will launch for the upcoming 2012 season. Our CEO and inventor of SteriPEN, Miles Maiden, reviewed the form and function of HydrPak 32oz. reservoir, and we think this hydration bladder should be okay to use with your SteriPEN water purifier.

The HydraPak has the following features that are fantastic!:

1. Sealed-end on the bladder that stops free flow of water to tube during purification and seal allows removal & cleansing of hydration tube
2. Reversible bladder that allows for easy cleaning!
3. High grade plastic material that creates a strong form shape when filled with water

Here are some tips if you decide to use the Hydrapak 1 Liter reservoir:

1. Run purified water through tube – Make sure you run a small amount of purified water (following treatment) from the  bladder through the hydration tube before next consumption of water. This should push trace amounts of microbes out the tube.
2. 1 Liter treatments or less only. Hydrapak offers many larger size hydration bladder/reservoirs that we cannot recommend for use with SteriPEN water purifiers. DO NOT use them with SteriPEN.
3. Single chamber model only! Hydrapak has recently launched “Shape Shift” which has multiple chambers and we cannot recommend this new model for use with SteriPEN water purifiers.

If you know of any other brands & models with similar characteristics to the HydraPak Elite 1 Liter Reservoir, please let us know. We’ll contact the manufacturer, ask for a sample, review it,  and potentially post it right here to share.

Next week we’ll cover the numerous options of plastic water bottles that are compatible with SteriPEN water purifiers.

Our apologies for the length of this post, this is not an easy topic! Our social media marketing team suggests my blog posts are a bit dry. Kind of ironic since we are talking water here. I’ll work on it.

Thanks for your time! We greatly appreciate it.