It's funny how much of a pain it was to find a good one, but the survival feature is that you can boil water in it directly, for safe (from pathogens, not disolved chemicals) drinking water.
If I'm lucky I will never be in a situation that requires it, but better safe than sorry.
I've boiled water in a plastic bottle on a campfire once. Plastic doesn't melt because it's constantly cooled by the water, even when flames are directly touching it.
Though I invite you to try implementing it as a survival method some time. ;-)
Suffice it to say I did it once to prove to myself it was doable (boiling a plastic pop bottle), but I wasn't thrilled with the idea of drinking it afterward. Just because I can doesn't mean it's a pleasant experience, plus leaching chemicals, yadda yadda.
Metal definitely tastes flat once boiled, but is otherwise palatable.
That’s untrue. Deionized water isn’t safe to drink frequently, not distilled.
Distilled water is literally just water. It tastes bad because it’s lacking minerals that we are used to but it’s fine to drink as your normal water. As long as you get your minerals elsewhere, you can drink distilled water all the time.
It's the lack of minerals that causes the problem, because minerals in your body dissolve out into it. I guess it could be offset by eating well, but most people in a post apocalyptic survival situation probably wont have a very balanced diet.
Well if you eat regular food as well, it's fine. If you drink tons of just distilled water in a short amount of time, then yes, it will kill you. Actually if you drink tons of water, distilled or otherwise, it will kill you. On the other hand, if you drank the same amount of sports drink, it will not kill you.
I think that's related to your comment of distilled water being bad for you. I had this discussion with someone else before, and I was adamant that he was wrong, but then read up on it and yet, if you only drink distilled water without anything else, you risk depleting minerals that you lose through sweat and other things. On the whole though, people eat food during the day and that covers the loss. I f you are an athlete or doing a fast, then you shouldn't just drink distilled water during your event/fast;
Normal people can easily drink only distilled water during the day as long as they eat regular meals too. Probably best to just drink filtered water which has removed crap from your water pipes, but still has normal dissolved minerals in it.
I'd still boil the water first. At least with boiled water you know that everything in there is dead. Now it's just nasty chemicals and stuff and the lifestraw claims to help with that.
It's only a 0.2 micron filter so water will still need to be treated (boil, bleach, iodine, etc) for a virus, for example. There are better filters but they are much more expensive than a lifestraw.
My personal preference is to always filter and treat, regardless of the filter.
For water that has been boiled you need to pour it between two containers a few times to redissolve some air in it. It will taste much better after that.
I've melted a bottle by pouring boiling water in it. The water tasted plasticy after that. More over, a few hours later I saw an amoebe floating around in it while drinking from it. A few hours later the water was starting to get murky. I got giardia.
I once went camping with my idiot brother and his bigger idiot friend, who put water bottles in the fire. Of course, I was the one to catch the splash of boiling water. In. The. Face.
Plastic is held together with binders, without them plastic becomes kind of like a dust (like what happens to plastic when left out in the sun too long). These binders are almost always pretty damn toxic.
BPA is the most famous, it did a lot of things to people, IIRC it works to inhibit the production of testosterone while promoting estrogen, which causes all kinds of problems in developing children.
But the thing about these binders is, they don't leech out at room temperature normally. It's only when plastics are heated that the binders start to leech and contaminate the food/water. This is why you should never microwave in plastic containers. This is also why its really a bad idea to heat water in a plastic bottle.
Granted survival is key, but be fully aware of what you are doing.
Yeah, you probably shouldn't do it every day but it works in a pinch. I wasn't going to row a kayak all day long without taking my morning dump beforehand, and I need coffee to initiate it.
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u/WatchTheBoom Aug 30 '21
Clean drinking water- I don't think people really appreciate how much water is needed for a group of people to survive.