Filter promises to let you drink from almost any water source — even urine

Outdoors lovers have a new tool for creating drinkable water with the Fixt Nomad, an intriguing water filter device that promises to let you safely drink out of any non-salt water source.

Public toilets? Check. Stagnant ponds? You bet. Your own urine? Whatever floats your boat! In all cases, you don’t need to worry, since the pocket-sized Fixt Nomad claims it will filter out bacteria, viruses, and any other contaminants.

The pocket-sized filter can be used to purify a single glass of water, attached to a Camelbak or water bladder to purify en masse, or — if that’s not enough — screwed onto your hot water tank to provide hundreds of gallons of clean water in the event of a water outage.

“It uses ionic adsorption, combined with an iodinated resin to kill 99.9999 percent of bacteria and viruses,” creator Ian Stanley told Digital Trends. “Plus, it pulls all the other contaminants through a tortuous path that ensures nothing bad gets through, all while increasing the pH up to a 9.5 to ensure your water is alkaline.”

As an outdoors type, Stanley said he came up with the concept as a way of offering people a “self-reliance” tool that could potentially save their life. “I know water is the difference between life and death in a bad situation,” he said. “We had already made a straw but I wanted something more. That’s how the Nomad was born. I wrestled with quite a few different names, but ultimately called it the Nomad because no smart traveler or outdoorsman or woman should ever leave home without it.”

We haven’t yet got our hands on a Fixt Nomad, but it certainly sounds interesting. If you want to find out more about the project, and potentially even pre-order one of your own, you can do so on Indiegogo. Prices start at $56, with a shipping date set for December of this year — just in time for Christmas. Will it work as well as Stanley claims? We’ll answer that question once we’ve gotten to try it for ourselves, but we certainly hope so. Otherwise, he’s ingested a whole lot of unpurified toilet water.

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