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Recently, the kind people at Berkey Water Filters gave me a Travel Berkey to test out. You can read the full specs and watch the video at the Berkey Filters website.

I still maintain my high rating on Berkey Water Filter products and think they are a good choice for water filtration. Read below to learn about my experience with the Travel Berkey.

The unit comes very nicely packed in a space-efficient configuration. I was kind of amazed that all of the parts could fit inside the relatively small box.

After opening the instructions, I started to put the filter together. Although you would think a semi-intelligent person would have no problem figuring out the assembly, I have to admit I struggled. The tough part was knowing how to get the Berkey Filter elements to start working.

To get the filter elements to work, you have to prime them. This means hooking up the rubber adapter to a sink faucet and “forcing” water into the filter elements. It’s not as easy as it sounds. After taking a few shots at it, I was finally able to force water into the elements until they started to “sweat” little droplets of water.

It’s important you do this correctly; otherwise, the elements won’t filter water very quickly. It’s kind of like priming the pump.

An amazing thing about Berkey filters is they remove 100% of pathogens and 99.999% of everything else including viruses and other harmful material. The filters remove 95% of heavy metals including lead and mercury. Basically, the unit exceeds the EPA standards.

The Berkey website says, “The  Berkey filter element had extensive testing at state- and EPA-accredited laboratories and far exceed EPA and ANSI/NSF (Std. 53) protocol. The  Berkey filters have been tested by the University of Phoenix, Spectrum Labs, and the Department of Toxicology and Environmental Science at Louisiana University.”

Once I got the filter elements working, the rest of the setup was a piece of cake. Basically the top part of the unit holds the unfiltered water, and gravity runs the water through the filter elements to the lower part of the unit. There is an easy spigot at the bottom for extracting the purified water.

Each Berkey filter element can filter 3,000 gallons of water. Therefore, this unit has a 6,000 gallon capacity.

Pros:

• The assembled Travel Berkey Water Filter looks good and doesn’t take up too much space
• What you really get with Berkey is unsurpassed filtration quality
• The stainless steel design, ease of use, and durability make it a quality product

Cons:

• The unit is gravity fed, so it took me a few minutes to get a filtered glass of water
• It’s probably not something you want to put in a backpack and go into the back country

I would highly recommend Berkey filters to anyone needing a good filter for emergency preparations purposes. It costs $228 dollars at berkey.com and that comes with two filters.

Remember, humans can’t survive very long without clean water, and it’s almost impossible to eat dehydrated or freeze-dried meals without water. So make sure you have a water filter as part of your overall preparedness plan.

Next time, we will review Katadyn water filtration products.

Disclosure: Affiliate links are contained within this post.