Water filter or purification

The planner writes this from the ride you describe, so there is no version of it that is true for everybody. Here it is worked against one ride, named below, with a single answer changed at a time to show what moves.

2 nights · wild camping · cold but not freezing (8 °C) · gravel and tracks · towns daily

Off-road water is a stream or a trough often enough that treatment is worth its weight. You said gravel and tracks, which means some of what you fill from will have silt in it, or stock standing in it. Strain it through cloth and let it settle before it ever reaches the filter — the grit you take out that way is the grit that would otherwise stop it, and it gives you no warning before it does. What that costs you is minutes at every fill, standing at the source when what you want is to drink and get going.

On that ride the planner marks it optional. It becomes essential if you answer “How often do you pass a shop?” with “Rarely, or not at all”.

The same requirement, reasoned again from a different answer. One answer moves at a time, so what each one adds is attributable to it and to nothing else.

• Resupply · Rarely, or not at all

  You said remote. Somewhere in there you will be drinking from something that was not a tap, and out there nothing replaces a filter that has stopped — so carry two ways of treating it rather than one, and make them fail differently: one you can drink from the moment you fill, and one with nothing in it to break. What the pair costs you is a little more to carry and one more thing to keep clean.

These add up rather than rule each other out — carrying two is the ordinary practice here. Every one carries what it costs you as well as what it gets you.

• Squeeze filter

  Drink straight away, and it takes the grit and the taste out too.

  but Clogs, and not slowly in water carrying silt or stock — that can kill the flow in a couple of litres.

  Night low · Below freezing

  but Clogs, and not slowly in water carrying silt or stock — that can kill the flow in a couple of litres. And one hard freeze splits the fibres inside without marking the outside: it pours the same as ever, it has stopped filtering, and there is nothing for you to see. So below freezing it never spends the night on the bike — blow it clear, seal it in a bag of its own so the wet stays off the sleep kit, and keep it in against you overnight, where the only heat out there is.

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• Chemical tablets

  Weighs nothing, never breaks, and works as a backup to anything else.

  but Half an hour of waiting, and it tastes of it.

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• UV pen

  Fast, and leaves no taste behind.

  but Batteries, and it does nothing about water you cannot see through.

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