cyccommute 

Chemical treatment works and is cheap but they take time and can have an off taste. They are also limited. 10 tablets may treat 60 L but are you going to treat 6 L (1.5 gallons, about 200 oz) at a time? More likely you are going to treat 1 to 2 liters at a time so, realistically, you are going to be able to treat about 10to 20 L. And since the concentration is going to be rather high, the chemical taste may be harder to get rid of.

I’m not a fan. I had the Squeeze. I used it once and had an immediate problem with filling the bags for the Squeeze. You can’t submerge them to fill them. They just collapse when pushed down into a pool. I found a small fall and was able to fill them to about half full. That’s about 500 mL. That’s a lot of work to fill a 3L Camelbak (100 oz).

The next time I used it (about a year later), I decided to carry a water bottle that I would fill with untreated water and pour that into the bag. It worked well and I could fill the bag with almost a full liter of untreated water. Work really well. The problem...and it was a very large problem indeed...was that the filter itself didn’t work. It took two hours of squeezing to get about 500 mL of water. I finally decided to get a big rock and put it on the bag. Overnight I got about a liter total of water. I had two more days of travel to get back to my truck and very little water to get there. On the second day, I managed to get water at the only store within 100 miles. I threw the filter in the trash and never carried it over the next pass.

Now, people have told me that I should have tested the filter before I took it out. They are wrong. I only used the filter once, a year before, and had only filter about 1.5L of water from a stream that was above 11,500 feet in granite mountains so it had zero dissolved solids. I’ve been told I should have back flushed the filter with vinegar. That works at home but if there is only one store within 100 miles doesn’t have vinegar as well as not knowing that that might help, it’s not really an option.

I have had some professional experience with hollow filters before and they don’t like to be dried out. If you are using the filter every day or more frequently than once a year, the filter wouldn’t dry out and wouldn’t have the problem. But I don’t use filters every day nor all that often. The filter has to be able to sit and dry over time yet be able to work when I need it. Storing it wet isn’t that much of an option either since that can promote mold growth.

Car camping maybe (I’d carry a 5 gallon water jug instead). But not for bicycle touring. It might fit in a backpack or pannier but not much else will fit in there.

My preference is a ceramic filter like the MSR Microfilter. It works after extended storage. It pumps water so that I don’t have endure hand cramps or put a rock on the bag. It will filter around a liter per minute which is much faster than the Sawyer. It weighs more but if the filter doesn’t work, it doesn’t matter how light the filter is.