Portable Water Filters & Why We Need Them!

As many of you know I am a fan of Portable Water Filters and I am passionate about finding the right ones and helping educate people on ones I feel they might want to stay away from. I started researching them due to my past in Natural Disaster work here in the USA and saw how natural disasters can affect people in different ways and also how the human nature of things causes people to step outside their comfort zones and either do things they shouldn't or rise to the occasion to help others. I also saw the worst in people as was the case during Hurricane Katrina in the South in 2005 when people from surrounding states were charging upwards of $75 / bag of ice and people were without clean drinking water. People didn't have portable water filters like they do today. From that, I have been waiting and watching as well as investigating companies thru the years to do my own research on to see who is viable to help others and who is not as is the case of Sawyer, the maker of the Sawyer mini filter, water filter. While they got a huge boost and early rise in the portable water filter market, they used to public interest and got product reviewers and YouTubers to do Product Reviews for them until they signed major contracts with large box stores and now the grassroots people are left in the dust and Sawyer could care less about Mom & Pops and the Grassroots folks that got Sawyer into the public eye to start with. My concept of why every person should have a water filter, most recently I have seen the general public go crazy over what people have already called a pandemic over Coronavirus and this is not officially a pandemic at this date. People in cities all over the country are stripping shelves of water, cleaning and emergency supplies for no reason and to be honest this is another reason everyone needs to be better prepared themselves and stop blaming the Government. Is it their fault you do not have your own stock piles of supplies? If you live in a disaster prone area which I guarantee you most Americans do for some type of yearly natural disaster, you should have extra bleach, toilet paper, life's basic essentials.Just imagine if you will, every person in America had a portable water filter and you could use it to get filtered, clean water from creeks, rivers, lakes and other areas and you would not be dependent on bottle water. There are some municipal water systems i.e. like I had in Southern California where I needed a water filter better than what the complex I lived in offered. I was in a situation last year in Mississippi where the water out of the sinks were brown and smelled, but the locals said it was safe. This is where a portable water filter would have been great and saved me on drinking so much bottle water. Think about how this would affect our landfills. On a side note: be careful who you purchase from and make sure you check out the company. When I first started looking at portable water filters one of the most popular was the Sawyer Min & Sawyer Squeeze. I was personally informed Sawyer only want to deal with Big Box Stores & Brick & Mortar stores and do not want to deal with small based business like mine. This fact alone much less their poor reviews in 2018 - 2020 show their company is having issues with their filters and I do not want to invest my money in a company that does not support Grassroots and Small Based Business or that by all accounts is having issues and lying to their customer base about the issues they are having is not good business Other companies similar to them followed their business model and we will see their sustainability when these big box store sales drop off and they push them to the curb like they do other products being sold at the big box stores over the past few years. Sawyer needs to learn, no one is brand loyal any more like it used to be several years ago and companies like Sawyer & other companies following their business model will find out soon enough that the customer controls their companies growth and so does "Product Reviewers".

Example: Have you ever found that perfect item you like from a big box store and you have been using it for six months and then all of a sudden it is gone from the shelves? Many of these type stores have incredible tracking programs that track sales per item and although that item may be your favorite, you may be one of only 100 buying it per week and this is not good enough to justify that shelf space. When I worked for a grocery company 25 years ago, we did the same analysis every 6 months and if an item didn't sell like we thought, it was replaced. Shelf space in Grocery and I imagine Big Box is expensive to maintain. Sawyer Mini & Sawyer Squeeze has also been getting a lot of negative reviews about their product and based on my research their own customer service representatives have done nothing but lie to their customers and now their customers are going on to YouTube and other social media outlets and telling the world; as they should in my opinion! I am not hear to bash Sawyer but rather to prove a point. Many people look at these portable water filters from a Hiking & Camping point of view, I look at them as a emergency need that every homeowner should have in their emergency kits for their home & vehicles and something you should have nearby all the time. Last year, we did an article on Renovo MUV adaptable water filter which I felt was one of the best on the market and filters out more contaminants than any other filter on the market at that time, but the price point was obviously too high to sustain the company and it was sold and / or merged with another company, HydroBlu Winter in Fall of 2019. HydroBlu has gone the extra mile and accoulated several designs and several companies all under one roof so that the general public has an option. HydroBlu is forwarding me several of their new concepts and one is supposed to blow away the Sawyer Mini / Squeeze and I am excited to see it and test it. They also have what they call a 3 Stage Straw that by all accounts is the size of a Sharpie Pen and really anxious to see this too as it is smaller, more portable and actually does more than the other well known Life Straw or Sawyer combined. EveryDay Preppers USA was also contacted by an Ireland based company and were recently shipped several of their water filters and their article will most likely come out first of next week. There's is somewhat portable but not the concept the USA Consumers are used to seeing and I feel this is not going to be a easy sell for them. Presently they only have one location in the USA where these are use and most are in third world countries EveryDay Preppers USA looks forward to testing more water filters in the weeks / months to come and seeing who has the best as I know someone will have good point over others and you may not like the ones I like but it puts it in the forefront of people in a time where we need to start thinking about preparedness items. Stay tuned for more coming to you soon on several great portable water filters on the market that are better than ones you may have seen at Big Box Stores. Remember with things like Coronavirus out there now, people need to be more prepared than every in their daily lives and this is just one aspect of what you need to carry on you daily or at least carry in your vehicles. Do not be caught without one when you travel. EDP