Microbiological Water Purifiers – A big word for something most of use everyday.
If you have a filtered water bottle, backpack bladder, filter straw or any of the hundreds of small portable filter applications on the market today, you probably own a device using a micro water filter.
The product packaging probably claims to remove bacteria, virus and various protozoan, most commonly cryptosporidium and giardia. You may have purchased this product to provide you with safe, filtered water while camping, hiking, backpacking, traveling to other countries, or for emergency preparedness purposes. Some people use their filtered water bottles everyday – to improve the quality and taste of undesirable tap water.
Chances are good your micro water filter is not doing what it says it does.
The Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) published their *standards of how these microbiological water purifiers should be tested; what the removal standard should be of the contaminants, as evidenced by the log reduction; and what rate of removal was required in order to make the claim for the device to be called a “microbiological water purifier”.
However, the EPA does not enforce these standards for microbiological water purifiers.
This situation became a tremendous concern for many of us in the water filtration and emergency preparedness fields. We hope setting the new standard of “End of Life” testing, and providing a free platform for companies to display their test results will encourage manufacturers of Microbiological Water Purifiers be responsible in their claims.
Aqua Veritas LLC was formed to provide the consumer with information on the microbiological water purification products in the marketplace, to assist them in making informed choices.
Click to view the EPA document:
*Guide Standard and Protocol For Testing Microbiological Water Purifiers
Published: April 1986 Revised: April 1987