It’s often easy to find water and hard to find safe water, so a water purifier might be a useful supplement or substitute. In the States, you can get one for about $30 at REI or other outdoor stores. Purification tablets also exist but I don’t know how well they work.
I’m not a big fan of commercial first-aid kits; they seem heavy on stuff that’ll make you slightly more comfortable in situations where you don’t really need first aid, and light on stuff that’ll actually help prevent or manage serious illness or injury. Probably better to skip these and go with a more targeted approach, unless you expect to be dealing with people that insist on treatment for minor trauma.
I am a big fan of gel bandages for blisters; they won’t save your life but they will save your mobility, especially if you’re not used to walking long distances or are stuck in the wrong shoes. I try to keep them anywhere I might find myself doing a lot of unexpected walking from, like my car, and they’re an essential piece of backpacking kit.
A multitool (Leatherman or competitor) is almost never the right thing to be using, but it’s very often good enough if you don’t mind a little extra labor. I keep one in my car’s glovebox.
Information about how to use things can be as important as things. A book on field medicine would probably be a good thing to keep around. One on survival skills would probably take up more room in your luggage than it’s really worth, if you’re planning to go somewhere you might need it; but loading one onto an e-reader app on your phone doesn’t have that problem. It does have the compensating problem of battery life.
“Calcium Hypochlorite: Calcium hypochlorite is a cheap and shelf stable chemical available at any pool and spa store and many hardware stores. When mixed with water, calcium hypochlorite becomes chlorine bleach. In fact, when you buy a jug of bleach at the store, you’re getting calcium hypochlorite mixed with water in a 5.25% solution. By storing calcium hypochlorite you are basically storing super concentrated bleach without the shelf life problems. To make a bleach solution, mix 1⁄8 ounce (just under a teaspoon) of high-test granular calcium hypochlorite with one gallon of water. Use this at one part mixture to one hundred parts water to make your water potable. Just let it sit for a half hour before drinking.
Liquid bleach is better than iodine because it becomes chemically inactive after it treats the water, breaking down into salt and water, and our bodies handle it quite well (even drinking straight household bleach is rarely fatal)”
Calcium chloride. Same stuff that gets dumped on the roads in winter in some places. Salt = general term for ionic compounds especially stable ones.
And yes some chlorine does gas off especially when interacting with other ions. In my current research I generate 0.6 litres of growth media full of yeast per hour for weeks on end and I need to get rid of it, and we aren’t allowed to dump living organisms down the drain into the municipal sewer system, so I have to bleach it first. Enough chlorine comes from the reaction of the bleach with the media that I have to bleach my buckets in a chemical fume hood whenever I’m dealing with more than a litre or two. Learned that the hard way when I did it in the sink the first time. Quite a burning sensation deep down into the lungs...
I’m not a big fan of commercial first-aid kits; they seem heavy on stuff that’ll make you slightly more comfortable in situations where you don’t really need first aid, and light on stuff that’ll actually help prevent or manage serious illness or injury. Probably better to skip these and go with a more targeted approach …
That really depends what you plan to be doing, since the kind of care you’d need to provide can be very different across different situations. The first-aid kit in my car doesn’t look much like the one I take hiking: I’ve got the former kitted out for major trauma (and for minor issues I might encounter away from home) but I don’t expect to be using it for long- or even medium-term care of any kind, while the latter spends more space on quality-of-life issues but needs to provide support for the time it takes to hike out.
A few disorganized thoughts:
It’s often easy to find water and hard to find safe water, so a water purifier might be a useful supplement or substitute. In the States, you can get one for about $30 at REI or other outdoor stores. Purification tablets also exist but I don’t know how well they work.
I’m not a big fan of commercial first-aid kits; they seem heavy on stuff that’ll make you slightly more comfortable in situations where you don’t really need first aid, and light on stuff that’ll actually help prevent or manage serious illness or injury. Probably better to skip these and go with a more targeted approach, unless you expect to be dealing with people that insist on treatment for minor trauma.
I am a big fan of gel bandages for blisters; they won’t save your life but they will save your mobility, especially if you’re not used to walking long distances or are stuck in the wrong shoes. I try to keep them anywhere I might find myself doing a lot of unexpected walking from, like my car, and they’re an essential piece of backpacking kit.
A multitool (Leatherman or competitor) is almost never the right thing to be using, but it’s very often good enough if you don’t mind a little extra labor. I keep one in my car’s glovebox.
Information about how to use things can be as important as things. A book on field medicine would probably be a good thing to keep around. One on survival skills would probably take up more room in your luggage than it’s really worth, if you’re planning to go somewhere you might need it; but loading one onto an e-reader app on your phone doesn’t have that problem. It does have the compensating problem of battery life.
“Calcium Hypochlorite: Calcium hypochlorite is a cheap and shelf stable chemical available at any pool and spa store and many hardware stores. When mixed with water, calcium hypochlorite becomes chlorine bleach. In fact, when you buy a jug of bleach at the store, you’re getting calcium hypochlorite mixed with water in a 5.25% solution. By storing calcium hypochlorite you are basically storing super concentrated bleach without the shelf life problems. To make a bleach solution, mix 1⁄8 ounce (just under a teaspoon) of high-test granular calcium hypochlorite with one gallon of water. Use this at one part mixture to one hundred parts water to make your water potable. Just let it sit for a half hour before drinking.
Liquid bleach is better than iodine because it becomes chemically inactive after it treats the water, breaking down into salt and water, and our bodies handle it quite well (even drinking straight household bleach is rarely fatal)”
How can it break down into salt? There’s no sodium in there. I would expect the chlorine to gas off instead.
Calcium chloride. Same stuff that gets dumped on the roads in winter in some places. Salt = general term for ionic compounds especially stable ones.
And yes some chlorine does gas off especially when interacting with other ions. In my current research I generate 0.6 litres of growth media full of yeast per hour for weeks on end and I need to get rid of it, and we aren’t allowed to dump living organisms down the drain into the municipal sewer system, so I have to bleach it first. Enough chlorine comes from the reaction of the bleach with the media that I have to bleach my buckets in a chemical fume hood whenever I’m dealing with more than a litre or two. Learned that the hard way when I did it in the sink the first time. Quite a burning sensation deep down into the lungs...
Could you provide some concrete suggestions?
That really depends what you plan to be doing, since the kind of care you’d need to provide can be very different across different situations. The first-aid kit in my car doesn’t look much like the one I take hiking: I’ve got the former kitted out for major trauma (and for minor issues I might encounter away from home) but I don’t expect to be using it for long- or even medium-term care of any kind, while the latter spends more space on quality-of-life issues but needs to provide support for the time it takes to hike out.
Your hot water heater is often a good place to find 20-40 gallons of potable water and most have a valve at the bottom for draining the water out.