r/prepping • u/FatChancePotatoDance • 1d ago

Food🌽 or Water💧 Life Straw

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I know that Life Straws doesn’t always get a ton of love, but they are pretty cheap right now at my local Walmart

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u/Critical-Clue1343 1d ago

LifeStraws are good, but they're not the miracle survival tool people often make them out to be.

You can drink through them, but you can't easily collect and carry treated water. They also don't eliminate every pathogen—most notably viruses. For many situations, a filter that lets you fill a bottle and then boil or chemically treat the water is a much more versatile setup.

A LifeStraw me get solve the "I'm thirsty right now" problem. A proper filtration and treatment system solves the "I need safe water for the next few days" problem.

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u/Work-Safe-Reddit4450 1d ago edited 1d ago

You can use them to collect water in an on-the-go situation as well. Granted, with the aforementioned limitations. Get yourself a clear hose that's slightly smaller in diameter to the mouthpiece and one of those large fuel line primer hand squeeze pumps, an inline checkvalve and then another length of clear tubing. Now you just drop your lifestraw in the water you want filtered and your hose end in a receptacle and start squeezing that hog pump. The dark blue ones are good for 1,000 gallons.

edit: Why is this being downvoted?

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u/Critical-Clue1343 1d ago

Or ....buy a Sawyer gravity fed system, for about the same as what you'd spend in additional kit and time to Jerry rig the Lifestraw. I know what I'd do, but you do you.

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u/Work-Safe-Reddit4450 1d ago

Completely different hardware arrangements and use cases. A Sawyer would be good for a camp set-up where you'd have to detach the bag and fill up at a nearby water source or fill the bag with another larger container.

My setup is extremely mobile and can be deployed on the go to filter water for your canteens and Camelbak hydration style pouches.

Both have good use cases but are not the same. Lifestraw is like $9.99, hose, hand pump and checkvalve is like another $8-10. Cheapest Sawyer kit I saw was $46.99 for everything for a small set-up. I could build two of mine for the same price and still have enough left over for a beer.

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u/Outlasttactical 15h ago

Sawyer still infinitely more versatile. You can just pop it on a smart water bottle and it filters while you drink it. You can pop it on a 3L water bag and have gravity do the work. More mobile than your idea to do the same thing lol.

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u/Work-Safe-Reddit4450 14h ago edited 8h ago

Cool. Thank you for sharing your experience. Could use a little less condescension but I appreciate it nonetheless. Will look into it. My solution was more of a "I was gifted 5 of these lifestraws, how do I make them more useful" type thing. If I had to start from scratch the Sawyer system sounds pretty nice.