How to Store and Clean a Sawyer Water Filter for the Off Season

Over the years, I’ve used the Sawyer Squeeze Filter and the Sawyer Mini (Reviews: Sawyer Squeeze, Mini and the Kataydn BeFree). Usually during the first year they do great. The flow is good for the most part, and they work fine. Then winter comes, and they get stored. After storage, they never seem to work like they did the first year. This is especially true for the BeFree, which I’ve given up on completely after having a trip where it would take 5 to 10 minutes per liter. The Sawyer filters seem to do better after storage, but never get back to the flow rates I’d expect.

This fall, I decided to do a little more maintenance than previous years.

Maintenance for Storing Your Sawyer Water Filters

Sawyer recommends the following maintenance to store and clean a sawyer water filter. They recommend that you backwash the filter like you normally would. Backwashing is using the syringe with clean water and vigorously squirting water from the syringe back through the clean water output of the filter. You do this several times until flow rates are restored.

After backwashing, they recommend filling a 64 ounce bladder with water and adding a cap full of bleach. Then you run some of the bleach water through the filter. After that, put the cap back on or close the filter cap and let the filter sit for an hour. When the hour is over, you drain the bag and allow everything to dry out.

Store it in a place that stays above freezing because after the filters are wet, freezing destroys them.

Modified Maintenance for Storing and Cleaning Sawyer Water Filters

After buying a gallon bladder to create a gravity system with the Sawyer Squeeze, I noticed new advice about cleaning the filter. Not only did the advice state that you should backflush the filter, but it also stated that soaking the filter in hot water (not too hot to touch) for two hours would help with the backwashing.

So, before doing the cleaning for storing the filters, I put them in hot water for two hours. Then I did the flushing with the syringe. It seemed like the soaking combined with the backwashing increased the flow of the filters significantly. It changed our oldest filter from barely being able to pass water without kneeling on the bladder to being able to gravity filter water. Then I soaked them again with an improvement showing again.

After that, I repeated the normal maintenance you do for storing your Sawyer water filters and called it good. It was surprising how good the older one was working again. They currently are drying out in storage and the test of time will tell if this made a difference. Before using them next year, I plan on doing the soaking and backwashing again to prime them for our first trip of the year. I’m crossing my fingers that this new method will work.

Have you had any problems getting the flow rate to come back after a winter of storage? If so, what did you do that make the filter usable again?