EDC Water Bottle: Oh so precious water.

Contemplating current events along with the philosophy I often promote about what you have with you sometimes being the only thing available when disaster strikes, the topic of water simply can’t be neglected. I’ll mention water in a following EDC Bag video, but as it happened with the other EDC videos, time just runs up too fast and I sometimes can’t put as much information in it as I would like. There’s benefits and disadvantages to both written blog posts and videos, so I’ll keep using both complimenting their strengths and weaknesses.

In the EDC videos of our previous post you could see redundancy on certain items. Knife, fire, light and basic tool. Some tools and items are simply more important than others and water should be one of your top priorities. Why is that? Because of a very simple fact: No matter who you are or where you are, if you stay still right now and don’t move, don’t interact with your environment, the first thing you’ll be needing will be water. Air is even more important and I’ll cover that a bit in the EDC bag video, but air is often not a problem and is as plentiful as it gets. Not the same case with water. 

In a matter of hours you’ll need a drink, and little after that dehydration starts affecting you. Just a little dehydration will affect your thinking and decisions, and it goes downhill fast after that. You just need water all the time, and if you just had a drink you’ll need it 3 hours from now give or take. We’re so messed up as a specie that people often don’t recognize this, mistaking thirst with hunger with the predictable results.  Maybe we just take water for granted, thinking the faucet will always provide it, that’s you’ll always find a store near by when you start feeling thirsty. When you start feeling thirsty, it usually means that you’ve already been dehydrated for some time now, so that’s not a sign of needing water, It’s a sing of having been needing water for some time already!

Besides the obvious task of keeping you alive, water is needed for other purposes as well. Remember 9/11, people with their eyes full of dirt and grit, their faces, their mouths? A little water is a precious thing to have in such situations. What about cleaning wounds? Using to soak a garment to escape during a fire? What about soaking a bandana and using it to cover your face and mouth so as to breathe better and filter some dust and smoke during an accident or disaster? Its not just plain old feeling thirsty that we’re talking about here.

My solution

The importance of water with you already being established, what can you do about it? For years I just had a regular plastic bottle and just refilled it. That’s sort of plastic is pretty resistant but its not designed for such purpose and it gets scratched and dirty pretty fast. While resistant, its not very durable on the long run and since water is important I wanted a good bottle.

There’s some nice looking plastic bottles that are durable and also light, which sounds like a good combination. After some more research I decided I wanted as little to do with plastic for my daily use bottle as possible. For long term storage at home plastic is ok, but for a bottle that will get thrown around a lot, microscopic pieces of plastic probably getting lose, I preferred something more solid. I can go for plastic taste during an emergency at home and using plastic, but I’d rather have steel for a bottle that will be used daily.

 

Klean Kanteen K18PPL 18oz Kanteen® Classic With Loop Cap Brushed Stainless 

That’s how I ended up with an 18oz Klean Kanteen steel water bottle. I also got a Sigg water bottle, but the steel bottle has a few advantages.

1)Its steel rather than aluminum like most SiGG bottles are. This makes it heavier, but also more resistant.

2) Since its steel, it has no synthetic liner on the inside like the Sigg does.

3)All steel means it can be used for boiling water if it comes to that, even cooking food. Remember, multiplicity of uses is important in a survival situation.

4)The wide mouth allows you to use it as a very uncomfortable cooking pot. Not my idea of fun, but you could cook some noodles in there, eat them with a long stick turned into improvised spoon and clean it up afterwards.

5)The cap itself is simple and straight forward. No weird sporting tip to drink from just unscrew the cap and drink from the wide mouth.

This is what I do, what I’m happy with in terms of having the best possible solution. If its just a used mineral water bottle that you refill, then go with that, the important thing is having at least some water with you.

Some of this will be mentioned in the coming video but I wanted to make this topic a bit more detailed due to its importance.

Take care folks,

FerFAL