Bottom line
Katadyn Micropur Tabs are highly packable and ultralight. Plus, they can be relied upon to give you safe, purified water. Unlike a regular water filter, they’ll eliminate all the harmful things in your water – but you’ll have to give them some time to be completely effective. We recommend Micropur Tabs for trips where saving every ounce matters or for use as a backup in areas where you’re likely to encounter water with agricultural runoff or other harder-to-kill contaminants. See our list of best backpacking water filters for more of our favorite filters and purifiers.
Quick Specs
Katadyn Micropur
Best Chemical Water Purification
Price: $16
Weight: .9 oz.(30 tablets)
Flow Rate: N/A
Filter Pore Size: N/A
Lifetime Volume: 30 L
Pros
- Ultralight
- Compact
- Easy to use
- Affordable
- Kills viruses
- Can't break
Cons
- Wait time necessary
- Affects taste of water
Water Quality
Micropur tablets are the lightest weight option to lean on when getting sick would end an epic adventure. These tabs eliminate most protozoa and fungi as well as bacteria and viruses.
They leave a very slight chlorine taste in your water. It’s not like drinking full-on pool water, but most folks will notice it. To counteract the taste, we carry flavored electrolyte powder with us.
Because Micropur Tabs are a chemical treatment, they won’t remove silt, leaves, or other floaties that a water filter would. You can certainly bring a filter to get rid of any organic matter. Otherwise if you haul water from clear sources, the tablets should be sufficient. If you find yourself limited to some turbid or debried water, use a bandana or packtowl placed over the mouth of your bottle to pre-filter debris.
Ease of Use
You can get purified water by cutting the package open, dropping the tab in your water, and waiting. No pumping or squeezing is required. It’s easy peasy.
Micropur tabs come in thin tear strips of 10 that will fit anywhere. You can stash them in your pocket, belt, wallet—anywhere! We like to hike with a fanny pack and keep them tucked in there for convenient access on the go. Maybe the only thing not easy is remembering where you stashed them!
Treatment Time
The results aren’t immediate with Micropur tabs. Depending on the situation and what you want to remove, you’ll have to wait up to four hours for clean water. Cryptosporidium will take the full four-hour incubation time before it’s completely removed, but crypto isn’t very common in most backcountry water you’ll encounter.
Unless we’re in an area where livestock feces have tainted water, we typically only wait about 15 minutes before considering our water safe to drink since that’s the contact time required to eliminate the most common harmful stuff. We’ve never had any issues, but we recommend you use your best judgment to decide how long you want to wait, as it’s a matter of health. Colder water requires more time, and of course, if you want to be 100% certain that your water is completely pure, you should wait the recommended four hours.
Carrying a bladder for treating water while you hike will allow you to keep walking while your water treats. Teating tomorrow morning’s water the night before is another easy way to burn those 4 hours of treatment time.
Weight
One tab (in its wrapper) barely registers on our scale at .04 ounces, and they come in sets of 30. Each tab is good for purifying one liter of water, so that’s just about 1.2 ounces for 30 liters of clean water.
Maintenance & Longevity
The tablets have a shelf life of five years from the manufacturer’s date and are individually wrapped in a waterproof sealed sleeve. Even if you don’t use these as a primary treatment system, keeping some in your first aid kit is a great practice.
We mentioned this a little earlier, but seeing as the tabs aren’t reusable like a dedicated filter or purifier, they’ll end up costing you more in the long run if you backpack a lot. That said, a filter will eventually wear out and need to be replaced, so we think the cost difference ends up being pretty small in the end.
Should You Buy the Katadyn Micropur Tablets?
We probably won’t leave the house without them. However, they aren’t the most economical choice for a water purifying system in the backcountry. Micropur tabs are affordable in the short term, but they’ll cost more than a filter or other purifiers in the long run.
What Other Purifiers Should You Consider?
Aquamira Review: Works similarly to Micropur tablets, but we find they leave less chlorine taste behind. Like other chemical treatments, you’ll have to wait a bit for Aquamira to do its job.
SteriPEN Review: Like tablets, a UV light pen is easy to use, works fast, kills all the bad stuff (protozoa, bacteria, and viruses), and best of all, it doesn’t require any pumping, squeezing, backflushing. The big difference is no chemical treatment.
