Wild Things: SteriPEN Adventurer

Water Purification on the Run

January 23, 2007

SteriPEN Adventurer
www.steripen.com; $130

With so much effort and expense devoted to "light and fast," trail runners think twice about traipsing into the backcountry with almost a gallon of water on their waist or back. The SteriPEN handheld Adventurer makes any water that passes your path potable, making it possible to run with merely a single bottle’s weight, assuming you aren’t in the desert.

At only four ounces and the size of a small hand-held flashlight, the Adventurer is like a magic wand that will purify more than 100 separate 16-ounce doses of water. With speed that would make Harry Potter proud, the device uses ultraviolet light to destroy the DNA of otherwise harmful microbes. Without DNA, the microbes are unable to reproduce to cause illness. The SteriPEN meets U.S. EPA standards and is effective against viruses, bacteria, giardia, and cryptosporidium while also killing household germs like E. coli, staph, bird flu, and influenza. It even works against cholera, botulism, and typhoid, bugs that filters and chemical treatments can’t always destroy.

To use, you simply push one button, dunk into your bottle and stir until the light turns off. It doesn’t require pumping, mixing, long waits (less than a minute for a standard 20-ounce bottle), or testing. Moreover, there is no chemical aftertaste or smell and you can mix the treated water to make sports drinks without disturbing the effectiveness of the purification. The SteriPEN doesn’t remove sediment, so if you anticipate using it with murky or silty water, first filter through cloth, a coffee filter, or a SteriPEN Pre-Filter that fits on most wide-mouth bottles.