Larq Filtered Water Bottle Review

Features

• Nano Zero filter technology
• Easy to use straw
• Cleans up to 40 gallons of water on one filter

What Is the Larq Filtered Water Bottle?

The Larq filtered water bottle is a standard looking, hydro flask style, water bottle that contains a state of the art filtration system in the straw. This way, you can filter tap and drink fountain water wherever you are with a product that’s almost as easy to use as a standard water bottle.

The Larq filtered water bottle should not be confused with Larq’s other bottle, the PureVis, which uses UV light to kill any harmful bacteria in your water allowing you to take it from any source. I made this mistake in my testing process, which I will go more in depth into below.

Larq Water Bottle Unboxing

My Larq filtering water bottle arrived at my house in a standard cardboard box with minimal branding on it. One thing that did confuse me about the box was that it said that “A portion of proceeds benefit water projects worldwide”, though it doesn’t elaborate on which water projects or just how much proceeds go to benefit them. To me, this sort of felt like a lot of empty talk to try and get the customer to feel good about buying this product.

Upon opening the front flap of the packaging, I was met with more puff text telling me to use this product to “Drink brilliantly”. This is a slogan that Larq uses a lot and it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. I assume it’s, once again, trying to make me feel good and smart for buying this product, but it came off to me as rather condescending.

Other than the bottle itself, my package came with a simple set of instructions as well as a clip that you can attach to the bottle so that you can clip it onto a belt loop or a bag. The bottle itself came with a sticker placed near the bottom which contained additional instructions on how to use the product. Thankfully, the sticker didn’t leave a nasty residue after it was removed.

I was pretty impressed with the overall feel of the bottle. It had a matte black finish on the outside that made it both look good and be easy to grip, even with sweaty hands. The filter itself was packaged and wrapped in plastic inside the bottle itself.

Features

The Larq filtered water bottle uses what they call Nano Zero filter technology, which removes lead, heavy metals, chlorine and other harmful particulates as you drink. This filtering system also helps to improve the taste and texture of the water.

Larq claims that the straw on the bottle makes it far easier to sip the water, though I felt that I had to create a lot more suction to get the water through it. Still, the straw is simple to use and self explanatory.

The filter used in the bottle is long lasting, with a single filter able to clean up to 40 gallons (151 liters) of water. Larq estimates that this is the equivalent of 300 single use water bottles.

Larq Water Bottle Test

My experience in testing the Larq filtered water bottle was… interesting to say the least. I decided that I wanted to really go the extra mile in testing this product by seeing how well it filtered water from multiple sources.

For my first test, as a sort of control, I decided to see how well the bottle did with filtering water from a standard single use bottle. This test went very well and I didn’t notice any significant difference in the taste of the quality of the water.

I was a little surprised with how much suction was needed to create to actually get the liquid through the straw, however. I would say that Larq’s claims of seamless sips is a tad overblown, but I was able to drink the water I put in the bottle.

For my next test, I filled the bottle with the water from my sink. I don’t have any sort of reverse osmosis filter on my tap, so this was unfiltered municipal water. This test yielded similar results and that water quality was nearly indistinguishable from the plastic bottle water when drunk through the Larq filtered bottle.

My third test is where things…went wrong. As I mentioned above, Larq actually produces 2 different water bottles. These bottles being the filtered water bottle, which is made to filter out heavy metals, microplastics, and other harmful particulates, and the PureVis, which uses UV light to kill any harmful bacteria and clean the water.

The problem here is that both water bottles look almost identical, and not nearly enough is done to distinguish one bottle from the other. Even in some ads, like these ones I got on Facebook while working on this review, Larq doesn’t even label the PureVis bottle as the PureVis bottle, only as the LARQ Bottle Obsidian Black.

This actually led to me getting one bottle confused for another and had me thinking that the bottle I had could filter out and kill any harmful bacteria from any source…

So I poisoned myself…

In wanting to put the Larq water bottle to the ultimate test, I actually went to Lake Erie and filled the bottle with dirty lake water. I then took 3 tiny sips from the bottle, just enough to get a proper test done but still a small enough amount that I figured I wouldn’t get too sick if something went wrong.

This didn’t work at all, I got really sick a couple days after doing this test. Not so sick that I had to go to the hospital, but I was having an extremely rough time the next few days with a variety of stomach issues.

In hindsight, I really shouldn’t have put my own personal health on the line to test out this product. Things could’ve gone much worse and I’m thankful to say that I’m feeling 100% better right now.

The thing is though, looking at advertisements for these 2 bottles as well as images on the website, they look almost exactly the same, and I feel like other customers may make the same mistake that I did.

Larq says on their website that the PureVis can “eliminate up to 99%* of bio-contaminants such as E. coli from your water”, so I figured that this could handle 3 sips from Lake Erie.

I will of course take most of the blame for this blunder, but I still don’t think enough is done by Larq to distinguish these 2 bottles. Something like different cap colors, or a stripe on one of them, or even just putting text on the PureVis clearly labeling it as the PureVis.

Overly though, when used for its intended purpose, the Larq filtering water bottle did fine, and all other claims about the product, like its insulated walls and solid construction, still ring true. I just think more needs to be done by Larq to improve the overall customer experience.

How Can You Use the Larq Filtered Water Bottle? / Who Is This For?

The Larq filtered water bottle is pretty simple and self explanatory to use. Simply fill the bottle with tap or drink fountain water, put the cap and straw back on, and then sip through the straw. I can’t stress enough how important it is to only use this with tap or fountain water, DO NOT do what I did and think it’ll filter just any water.

I would say that these bottles best serve those who are out and about more and want access to clean drinkable water wherever they are. Public drink fountains can be pretty unpredictable and you never know what’s going on with the municipal plumbing run by the city.

With a Larq filtering bottle, you can get your water from pretty much any tap or fountain and be confident that you’re not ingesting any harmful metals or materials.

Web Infrastructure/ Branding

The official Larq website is alright, though I do have some problems with it. The same problems with the overly pandering branding are apparent on the website and a lot of the use of their “Drink brilliantly” tagline.

Everything on the site functions though and I can’t really complain about it slowing down my computer or annoying me with any promotional pop ups. I still wasn’t able to find anything about the “water projects” that Larq contributes to, so I’m assuming now that this claim is an oversimplification of Larq reducing plastic pollution caused by disposable water bottles.

Branding is where I have some issues with Larq. The logos and colors involved with marketing are really nice and I do like the nice illustrations used for the products, but I feel that a lot of the other marketing materials come off as too patronizing or condescending, the “Drink brilliantly” line in particular.

I also think that a lot more can be done to differentiate the regular filtered water bottle from the PureVis. Both bottles look almost identical and I could imagine other customers who, like myself, confuse one bottle’s features with the other.

Should You Buy It

The Larq filtered water bottle isn’t bad by any means. It does what it sets out to do pretty well, though some minor flaws with the design, and most of all the customer experience, prevent me from recommending this product.

I will admit that I am probably biased here since the bottle left a pretty bad taste in my mouth, both metaphorically and literally. But I still feel that you can get a much better bottle elsewhere for less money. I will go into my personal recommendation below shortly.

Where to Buy

If you read this and are still interested in buying a Larq filtered water bottle, you can buy them and other products like the PureVis from the official website. You can also buy the bottle from Amazon, though it seems like they go on sale more often on the official website.