The very first thing I noticed when I received this bottle from the team at Lyon Cycles, the distributor of Hydrapak was the “removes 99.99% of ecoli and parasitic cysts” boast on the pack. Who knew there were cysts lurking out there to make your day less fun?
I will be the first to admit that I am not the worlds most prolific bike packer, I tend to like to ride between B&Bs and hotels with a clean water source rather than wild camp in a tent, bivi or bush and use streams to replenish my water supply.
Luckily I ride with people who do love that sort of riding so I was able to give them the Breakaway + bottle to try out in the environment it was designed for.
Tim is a veteran of the Tour Divide and numerous Silk road races and will be using the Breakaway + bottle in next years Atlas mountain race. He along with Maria spent a weekend in the Elan Valley in Wales on a route that even though was not far from civilisation can get pretty remote and definately doesn’t include shops to top up your water supply. they also had an over night stop in a bothy so wouldn’t be carrying enough liquid for drinking and cooking with them. Ideal then to try out the bottle filter system.
here’s the message I got from Tim
A picture paints a thousand words so they say…how about a picture of some words? Anyway I’m sure you get the gist but lets have a look at the bottle in action. This was filmed on that Welsh trip with the Breakaway+ being used with water from a stream
I can confirm that Tim and Maria are very much still alive and well and have had no side effects from using the filter bottle and Tim has continued to use the system on his ultra rides ever since.
The filter will filter 1 litre of water per minute and is good for 1500 litres before its recommended to be replaced. Spare filters are readily available. The bottle itself is very squeezeable making the whole operation very easy even with freezing cold hands or big thick gloves. The cap also includes a cover to stop the drinking nozzle from being covered in spray (the hydrapak website does describe it as a dust cover…..dust! how i laughed!) the whole system, bottle and filter weighs just 114g.
To quote Tim again “I’ve used a few (filter bottles) and this is the best one I’ve ever used” you can’t say fairer than that.
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