H2gO Global
If you don't have a good plan for water, none of your other plans need to work for any longer than 72 hours.
Disclaimer: I have no financial interest in this company and I am not affiliated with them in any way. I just find this device to be very cool and think its a powerful tool to have in your tool box.
Like everything that matters, you should have a PACE plan for water. Water isn’t hard to find in my AO, there are multiple ponds within 1/4 mile of my house and probably close to a hundred within 10 miles. Moving water is almost always findable with a short downhill walk into these woods. I’ve been using the same MSR water filter for over 20 years, and could not think of anything that I would recommend more highly for filtration. I also keep purification tablets in all my kits as a back up, and chlor-floc should I find myself in a situation where I had to drink something on the “sporty” end of the spectrum.
But, what if you need a lot of water? Enough for several people for the day? For my family of 6 we’re talking around 8 gallons! Are you going to filter that? Do you have that kind of time? Will your equipment take that kind of heavy use day in and day out? And nobody carries THAT many purification tablets… Instead, I can use a device the size of small pistol magazine that has built in solar charging to turn any form of salt that’s safe for human consumption into an almost tasteless chlorine disinfectant that will make large amounts of water safe to drink in just 30 minutes. That’s the H2gO Global.
The H2gO can produce disinfectant for 1 liter or up to 20 liters with one shot of salt water in the reservoir. You simply put the ~teaspoon of pre mixed salt water in, select the amount of water you wish to treat, and wait several seconds until the electrolysis reaction is complete. So there’s never a reason not to get as much water as you can. In an unsafe environment this also allows you to spend less time at the water source since you can treat the water in a more secure location.
With a full battery you can sanitize up to 300 liters, but it even has a little built in solar panel on the back that will provide enough power to sanitize 5 liters per hour of sunlight exposure! And the H2gO is rated to produce 124,000 liters worth of disinfectant over its lifetime with no replacement parts. Not bad for the $114 investment!
The H2gO comes with the device itself, a plastic bottle for mixing the salt water, USB charging equipment including some sort of “3rd world adapter”, instructions, and some chlorine test strips so that you can validate that it’s working if desired.
All right, who’s thirsty?
Remember to shake it up well after adding the disinfectant, and then loosen the cap while holding it upside down until some water dribbles out to ensure the threads have disinfectant on them too. The water had the distinct amber hue of tannins imparted by the many tree roots which also drink from these ponds, but after allowing the disinfectant to do its work even that was nearly gone.
As far as downsides go, the only one I have found so far is that the little salt water mixing bottle was prone to leakage when not stored upright. But overall the H2gO is a powerful tool to provide serious amounts of safe water for your family or group.