Using a millbank bag

Description

This video takes a look at how to Filter and purify water using a millbank bag. The bag used in this video is a 'brown bag' made by Browns Bushcraft and can be purchased at woodland ways. They are a great bit of kit if used properly and provide a really decent amount of water when out in the the bush!

http://www.woodland-ways.co.uk/buy-online-the-brown-filter-bag-group-size-1026.html

Tags: Bushcraft,survival,ray mears,bear grylls,camping,how to,Millbank Bag,Survival Skills (TV Genre),Water Purification (Condition Prevention Factors),sterilization,water,woodland,EDC,SHFT

Video Transcription

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hi everyone we're going to be looking at today is what I believe to be one of the most simple and elegant forms of filtering water and the piece of equipment to be used for this is this which is an old military style milbank bag well strictly it's not an old mill back bag it's not strictly a lil bank bag at all what this is is a faithfully reproduced by Browns bushcraft calm brown filter bag and all it is effectively is a canvas bag with a special type of weave in the canvas which makes it brilliant for filtering out particulate matter from water so let's have a bit of a closer look at this bag itself so as I've said the bag itself is constructed from this faithfully reproduced canvas which has been reproduced to the original Ministry of Defence specification for the original milbank bags on the tag here are six instructions and one little tip on how to use it which will go through at each stage as I show you how to use this bag and it comes with really really nice paracord cut them exactly how long the power cord is but it's a sufficient amount for to hang the bag I can't see any reason why I'll be taking that off so the length is really irrelevant any piece of cord will do and it's got these little brass eyelets on it to stop it frae not which i think is really nice that or touch the whole bag is really really nicely sticks together really durable stitching can't can't can't go wrong with it at all you know and that isn't going to call part for you just fill in water but it also has this marker line on it here which again is something we'll talk about in just a minute and that that basically just marks at what point the bag starts been effective at filtering and that's all there is to say about it really it's a canvas bag you know there's not much say about it does have a couple of advantages over the original Ministry of Defence ones for one you can buy it in you a little bit more expensive but totally worth the money for effectively if you're near a water source you've got an unlimited supply of drinkable water which is a great advantage and to spending that little bit of extra money but it also the fabric even though it is still rot resistance doesn't have the same chemical treatments the old Ministry of Defence ones have I can't exactly what chemicals but they have in later years been found to be potentially quite harmful so this is just a rot resistant canvas as far as my worry is untreated but I will double check that and put it in the description but you know really really great bit of kit and you know it folds down to practically nothing you know really folds down to nothing ways very very little not only you know amount of weight worth even mentioning really it's tiny it's so much more than modern-day filtration systems or talk a little bit about the pros and cons of this as we go through the process so let's have a look at how we use this bag so here are my water source a really important thing to note before we even start looking at how to use the bag is you need to examine your water source this bag will not filter out chemical components in the water so we view next to agricultural land you need to be worried that a lot of agricultural places a lot of wood you know intensive farming areas you use chemical fertilizers and chemical pesticides which can get into the water table and be very very harmful to you the only way to filter that stuff out is by using quite sophisticated modern water filtration system this bag won't help you in that situation but to be honest even with a modern modern water Norton I'd still be wearing it also some of those chemicals out it can be really harmful it's not nice you know so this is a very small spring fed water or system for check I got to where the screen comes actually Bobby up there and this is standing water standing water again you have to be a little bit more worried of it because it's more likely to harbor harmful bacteria and you know various nasty microbes and things but we'll get to help how we deal with that later on so as per the first instructor on the bag you have to soak the bag on the water thoroughly and squeeze it under the water so just go roll my sleeves up because I don't wanna get my clothes wet doing this and is a bit but to get down some of these water sources and I've driven a little stake into the ground here which means i can leave the bag kind of soaking for a few minutes of the water just using the power cord that's attached to it and i'm just going to get into the water here and just give that so i'm just getting this this in giving it a good squeeze through roughing it up a bit to loosen those fibers in the bag you know it's a new bag so i have to make sure that it's actually gonna filter water sufficiently you know it these things if you if you don't do this process correctly actually getting the water to filter through can be really time-consuming then once I've done that I'm just going to soak it thoroughly for a couple of minutes in the water before filling it up and once it does that I'm just going to quickly show you how murky this water is so we can do a kind of before and after so what this bag does is it filters out the turbidity of the water you see there's quite murky water with the light even the light shining through it there and there's all bits and piece in there think there's a couple of little little water bomb bugs in there there's going to be bacteria and all kinds of stuff in there the bag doesn't as I've said the bag doesn't filter out the bacteria what the bag does is it filters out the turbidity I word that i really like a turban material Toby water is murky water it's got particulate matter in it bits of mud grit just general dirt pizza you know there's leaf litter strewn along the bottom of this along the bottom of this little pond here and what this bag will do is it will filter all of that stuff out so my bottle obviously now is kind of contaminated I ever see it's plastic so I can't boil in this but we will do a kind of before and after shot of this and once the water is filtered through so I'm going to give that another couple of minutes of just soaking whilst I warm my hands up and then we'll fill it up and get it back to the campsite where I'm going to light fire to boil this water ok so my bags been soaking for a good four or five minutes now and that should in theory be enough there is one little instruction on the bottom which I'm going to come to you now well it's the kind of a little hint is it says if filling is slow repeat soaking and squeezing of bag on the water and what that means is if the water is leaving this bag really slow and it's just drip dripping away you know slower than you'd like enter the bag get it onto the water give it another squeeze and soak and it should speed that process up a little bit it doesn't affect the way it filters but what it does is it means that it takes literally ages 22 this bag if you know if the filling is slow as it calls it so if that's happening you're going to save yourself time by just redoing the process rather than wait for the whole thing to go again so I'm going to give it one last little squeeze under the water loosen in those five is up and again you can see it's really kicking up a lot that mud in the water there my next days is I'm going to fill this up i'll use my water bottle to fill this up as i said it's already contaminated and i've got another Dana with me obviously I wouldn't have done that you know filling up with a dirty water if I wasn't filming but I'm going to fill this bag right to the top now write as much as I can fill it so past that that watermark line the sky rinse the outside a little bit there as well so we've Merc your water going in so I get so much slightly clearer stuff further away from what I've been working and I'm keeping the bottom of the bag just in the water for the time being just to stop some of that water empty out whilst I go through this particular part of the process so my next step is I need to get this water container she's now fallen probably gonna lose a bit of that yeah I need to get this now to my camp area so we'll get that up there and whilst it's filtering will get a fire going to really really clean this water out so my next stage here is I'm just hanging the bag from a tree which I've are pre-selected a quick tip for this is you know work out where you're going to hang the bag before you thought it in water there's few things more annoying with this bag then filling it up getting ready to go and then kind of realize it on no I just got you were to hang this up and then you trying to work out somewhere with one hand while your water starts to drain away so I've pretty selected this early to hang it all just whilst it was soaking and I've now placed it to hang and what's happening is the runoff is coming off really quite quickly at the moment and I have to wait for this water to get down to this line here it's just about an inch above that at the moment and what that does is it cleans the kind of particulate matter from the outside of the bag and once it's been from fall down to this line the outside the bag is that effectively clean and you can collect the water underneath it it's just about reaching that line now no and you can see I've got a steady flow of water there so what I need to do is I need to place a container beneath this in order to gather the water so i will just clear the area a little bit some brambles shifted out the road and yeah it's just get down to that line so give it a little couple of minutes what I'm going to do is the first little bit comes out I'm just going to collect up in this bottle because it's clear and I can show you what it is however a little tip you want to grab my bowl is actually to gather the water in something with a wide open top like this it's a bit of a breezy day today I don't know whether you can see on the camera but it's actually borrowing that water a little bit to one side and if this was an hour narrow container and I'll just trying to collect it in this one the container does have a tendency to fall over and two it's got a narrower top so the water could actually blown you know away from the side away from the lip of that container actually start missing it so I'm you know you lose out on water there so something about this bowl with a nice open top is more likely to collect the water for you just be worried that some bits of debris on a breezy day like today can fall into that water which means that your purification process can be a little bit sort of pointless in that regard but the oddly forever fall in there you know it's nothing to worry about alright so the water levels drop below that line now I'm just going to gather up a little bit this water to show you how much clearer it is skip sort up all stuff at the bottle then you can see it's not it's not the fastest filtration system in the world but you know you can get all the stuff done while you wait if you water to to actually empty out of this so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to set my pan to start filling up in a moment and then as that's happening I'm going to fire going ready to buy all this so you can see the the difference in the in the clearness the water that's pretty clear it seems a little bit cloudy here but that's actually a result of the bottle that this bot was a little dirty on the outside but that's the clarity of water yet so we'll get the rest of that filtered out and what's that's happening I'm going to get a fire going ok so my fire has been crackling away now and has really got going for about five or ten minutes and my bag I think I haven't just checked it has filled pretty much the entire pan of water and still has quite a lot to go too much but I don't need that much water today I'm only making a cup of cup of coffee to demonstrate what I'm going to be doing so I'm just going to grab that pan now and we'll get it on the fire and we'll get it onto a rolling ball and i'll show you all that means in just a moment so here's a pail of water you can see I've got roughly half a pan worth water more than love them gonna need but you know more is is better than not a lot and you can see that it's really that is really really clear water of course there might still be microbes of stuff in there so let's get this board you

so just about reach that rolling boil now it's only a small amount of water so it's taken about a minute a minute a half to get to this point and i'll just show you that show you what that means so you can see that this water is really really bubbling over just to just the camera so you can see that a little clearer you see that what is really really bubbling away and we need to keep it on this rolling boil for roughly about eight to ten minutes is I think the sort of standard guidelines because it's really clear water actually very very impressed with how clear that's come out with the Milbank bag and all that that's that serves to do is that's going to kill any any of the nasty microbes and things that live in there and of course the longer you boil it for the more likely we're going to be to have killed off does mike curb so we'll leave that going for just a few more minutes and then we will get a cup of coffee on the go so everyone that is the basics of how to use a milbank bag or a brown bag from Browns of bushcraft dead simple piece of kit to use and honestly I think it's really invaluable you know clean on muddy water is really really you know fundamental to get if you're drinking water with lots of sediment in it even if you boiled that water but all those bits of sediment and dirt can be really harmful to your digestive this system it can cause you maybe not in the short term but certainly in the long term real health issues occasionally in the short term as well a couple of little tips for this though one of the things that boiling the water can do is it can leave your water tasting quite flat especially we're drinking just the wort I mean I'm having coffee I don't really like water surprisingly but i'm just drinking coffee and i have to say it's not bad but what you can do to get that get the flavor back into the water is water tends to have some oxygen dissolved into it sort of already and what happens in the boiling process is that the water gets the rather the oxygen gets boiled out of it so what you can do is just put it into a clean into a clean bottle and just give it a shake make sure you're not using the same bottle for doing this as you have used for collecting the water itself because remember you've just sterilized it you don't want to be put in your sterilized water into a contaminated container but give it a bit of a shake get some of its taste back in it if you're on PT land so in a pine forest or quite commonly up in or there's a tree making not a very nice noise over there it's quite breezy today sorry if you up in Scotland it's quite PT land the peat can stay in the water and even through the filtration system of the bag that water can still kind of come out a kind of a brown color that's not too much to be worried about to be quite honest it's just a stain in the water you know and they use the same stuff to get coloration in whiskey I've been in some parts of Scotland whether the water comes out the tap Brown you know it's nothing to worry about if you're

concerned about the water if you're concerned about the cleanliness levels of it don't drink it you know but that does mean you've got to carry an awful lot with you that's one of the reasons I love to carry this bag it's effectively unlimited amount of water without having to carry masses and masses of gallons and liters of water in your bag that can be quite cumbersome and and frustrate and it can put a lot of people off longer term trips as well having to carry that amount of stuff the final thing on these structures of the bag is to clear out any sediment from the inside of the bag before washing and drying and storing I'm not going to do that at Camp today what I'm going to do is I'm going to roll it up and stick it inside a plastic bag I can actually do that at home soon because it's it's still kind of it's late winter it's still cold dry and that piece of cameras out is good a tech firm at a time in the summer months it won't take long at all especially we've got a bit of a warm breeze going on but make sure you do clean it and dry it correctly if you don't do that it's going to get mildewy and molding and horrible i prefer the boiling method as you've seen in this video but it does say on the on the bag you can sterilize it using a chemical treatment I tend to stay away from the chemical treatments personally they especially iodine and chlorine tablets they're really really effective in a bad situation but really they leave everything that with a really horrible aftertaste even the neutralization tablet so you can get the supposedly take the taste out of it I think a really quite ineffective and a buzzard has just landed just over there made me jump when it came down but yeah that's all there is to it a milbank bag excellent piece of kit it's effectively an unlimited amount of water as long as you've got a usable water source and somewhere you can start a fire or use your stove or whatever highly recommended I hope this video has been useful to you as always please like comment subscribe share all that stuff and i'll put the link of where to get this this particular bag and in the in the description box just below me i got mine from woodland ways and jason engels whose company that is was you know more than happy to give me a little bit of advice he said to just throw the bag into a washing machine before using it without any detergent all that just loosens the fibers up and I did that and it did make you know a fair amount of distance that's just one little tip for it so as always thank you all for watching and I look forward to filming some more videos for you all