I bought this a long time ago, and I have used it on many backpacking trips. It has always provided clean water that hasn’t made me sick. There was one time where I didn’t use it in Chile, and I ended up projecting liquids out of either end of my body. What a mistake… Since that hasn’t happened whenever I did use it, I have to say that it’s done a fine job.

Filter, tubes, and travel bag

It does require a little bit of setup and takedown. There are two separate tubes you have to attach to it, so it isn’t as easy as whipping it out and starting to pump, but it isn’t that bad. It takes a little bit of effort to pump, but I can manage to pump more than 2.5 liters in just a couple minutes, which is perfectly acceptable. When I am hiking, I typically end up pumping water once a day, unless it’s really hot out and I’m sweating a lot.

All set up. The tube at the bottom would float in the water source and get pumped through to the bottle.

It did break once. There is an inlet and outlet nipple that the hoses connect to, and once when I was pulling off the inlet hose, it completely ripped out the inlet nipple. It seems that the base is a little thin and it just sheared right off. It luckily still works without the hose, and one just has to dunk the bottom part of the filter in the water. I later fixed it with a bit of superglue, and it has been fine since.

Superglue around the inlet

In order to prevent that in the future, I always lubricate the inlet and outlet with a little bit of saliva before attaching the hoses. It’s a little gross (particularly for someone else if I am hiking with company who needs to use it), but if we don’t want the filter to break, it’s got to be done. I hope future versions of the Hiker Pro have reinforced this area.

After having used this for the better part of a decade, I decided to get a new filter. Replacing the filter is super easy, as you only need to unscrew the old one and throw the new one in. Although the old one still seemed to be working fine, as I had yet to get sick while using it, I am going to go on a big trip in the near future, and I figured it would be best to start with a new filter. Regardless, you can clearly see the difference in usage.

Other than one break, which was fixed with some superglue, this has proven to be a very reliable and effective water filter that I will continue using for many years to come.

Pros:

Light

Effective

Cons:

Inlet seems structurally weak since it broke once

Replacement filters are almost the cost of the entire unit itself