[pct-l] Bleach as Water Treatment

[CHUCK CHELIN]

Good morning, Drake,

I have been successful and pleased using 1$/quart Clorox for many years.  For
most water I add two drops of bleach per liter of water.
http://www.trailjournals.com/entry.cfm?id=264360

I don’t know exactly how many 2-drop doses are in the little one-ounce
dropper bottle that I carry, but it’s a lot.  Clorox is available at just
about any little store along the way.

You can learn more about it by doing a net search for something like
“Clorox water purification”.

There’s a continuum of opinion between the folks who don’t treat anything,
all the way to those who do everything possible.  There is no useable
process that I know of that will absolutely guarantee perfect water, not
even boiling for many minutes.  Don’t believe it?  Some places in SoCal
have relatively high levels of uranium in the water.  Will boiling improve
that?

I’ve used Aqua Mira, and it’s OK, but I don’t like the price, the
relatively high dosages, and the need to wait around 5 minutes before I
dump it in the water jug.

Iodine is effective – and inexpensive – but I don’t feel that it’s a good
idea to ingest that much of the stuff over 3-4 months.  It makes the water
taste and look bad, but the addition of about ¼ tablet of vitamin-C, only
after the iodine has acted, completely removes the objectionable taste and
color as if my magic.

We all get to decide for ourselves.

Enjoy your hike,

Steel-Eye

-Hiking the Pct since before it was the PCT – 1965

http://www.trailjournals.com/steel-eye

http://www.trailjournals.com/SteelEye09/


On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 10:52 AM, Matt Parker <zerosignal74 at comcast.net>wrote:

> Hello All,
>
>
>
> There has been a lot of talk about Water Treatment lately on this email
> list. I currently use Aqua Mira as a chemical treatment which works great.
> It's light and easy to use. The only drawback is that it is expensive
> especially when using it for a 4-5 month thru hike. I have seen a lot of
> hikers on the PCT using bleach as a water treatment which was new to me but
> that appears to be the easiest, lightest, and cheapest way to go. Does
> anyone on this list use bleach to treat their water and if so can you
> provide some general guidelines on how to use it (number of drops per
> liter,
> type of bleach, etc.)?
>
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Drake
>
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