How to REALLY Clean Your Sawyer Filter

hey everyone hungrycat here and today we're going to talk about how to really backflush your sawyer squeeze now i don't know the exact percentage but i would say that most long distance backpackers that i run into anyway are using the sawyer squeeze as their primary method for filtering water on the trail it's easy it's quick it's efficient it's lightweight if you're not using one yet or don't have a water filtration system that you're happy with there's a link in the video description where you can pick one of these up on amazon and they're pretty cheap the key to making one of these filters last is keeping it clean and you do that through a process called back flushing when you do this you're essentially taking clean water and forcing it through the filter against the direction of the normal flow that'll help get out various particles and dirt that have been trapped on the inside of the filter if you do this regularly one of these can last a long time when you buy one of these filters it comes with the tools you need to back flush it both on trail and at home the first thing you would notice is that it comes with this giant plastic syringe this is a pretty convenient way to do it but most people don't carry these on trail with the plastic syringe you simply fill it with clean water and then you'll hold up your sort of squeeze and you'll put the end where the water normally comes out up to the syringe and force the water through a number of times until it runs clean the other piece of gear that they now give you that you can use to flush on trail is this little sport cap for the filter itself sorya didn't used to provide these so a lot of us hikers would just take the sport caps off of smart water or life water bottles and use those because they're all threaded the same now sort of provides this so you can take this on trail simply put it on your own water bottle and use that to backflush your sawyer while you're out in the field now everything i've said to you so far is pretty much old news sawyer provides directions for back flush in the filter and you can see probably a million videos out there on doing that but over the years i've found that the flow rate still gets pretty low over time and i thought i was doing the best i could to backflush the filter until recently when i finished this through hike of the benton makai trail the reason i wanted to make a video about this is because i just don't feel like it's commonly discussed out there and at least for me i had no idea that there was a better way to start cleaning my filter i'm sure there will be people out there that already know this or have figured it out through their own trial and error i've just never seen a video that suggested what i'm about to tell you and so i wanted to go ahead and share this information because now i'm really excited i feel like my filter is getting a lot more clean so what i do is i go through the normal process of back flushing until the water runs clean out the bottom end and then the key is to tap the filter on the sink you don't want to tap it so hard that you break it but just give it a good tap in the sink or whatever you're back flushing it over and you'll notice that the next time you force water through there's going to be more dirt so what's basically happening is that tapping on the edge of the sink is knocking particles free they're still lodged inside the filter and then the next back flush pushes those through i did this for about 20 minutes until it finally ran clean and there was so much dirt that this process got loose that a normal back flush didn't i've been doing that ever since i've been doing it after each of my hikes if you haven't done this before i definitely recommend you to give it a try i think you'll be amazed by how much dirt actually comes out while this little tip seems small i know all of us hate that moment when we're on trail and we just find that our filter's flow rate is so slow it's painful or that it ends up just sort of crapping out on us so i really hope that this tip helps you keep your soil filter clean and working for you for a longer period of time hey we all want backpacking to be cheaper right that's it folks short and sweet if you enjoyed this video or found any value in it please do hit that like button subscribe to my channel and share it with your friends or on social media thanks as always for watching and i will see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Unfettered Footsteps

Views: 21,778

Keywords: back flushing a sawyer filter, sawyer squeeze backflushing

Id: GPdHZQ3Toy8

Length: 3min 59sec (239 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 14 2021