Nothing helps you clean like pressurized water. That’s why professional cleaners all have an electric pressure washer in their truck. Whether you’re showering, cleaning dishes, or washing mud off your shoes, it just lets you clean up so much faster. Problem is, there’s no pressurized water when you’re slumming it in the outdoors, so you make do with washing things on a stream or pouring water out of a bottle. The Portalo wants to change that.
You know those portable showers that give you pressurized water for the outdoors? This is kind of like that, except it’s the size of a regular water bottle. Even better, it doesn’t use any electricity or pressurized cartridges, so you get access to your pressurized water at all times.
The Portalo looks like any normal water bottle at first glance. If you place a standard water bottle cover on it, you can probably use it like one, too. Except, it actually comes with a unique lid that incorporates a hose, a spray nozzle, and a manual pump that transforms it from a water bottle into a pressurized water source that you can use to wash off mud, dirt, and all sorts of grime in the outdoors without the need to do excess scrubbing like you normally would.
How does it do that? First, fill up the bottle with water. Next, screw on the lid and use the pump to pressurize the water inside the container. Once it’s pressurized to your liking (it can go up to three bars), aim the nozzle at whatever you’re cleaning and press the trigger. That’s it. No need to put in fresh batteries, use a pressurized cartridge, or any of that other stuff. Just pump the thing to your liking and spray that pressurized water all you want.
The Portalo’s manual pump means you can control the level of pressurization inside the bottle, so you can go light or go hard, depending on how you want the water to behave. The spray nozzle comes with two settings, too, either direct jet or mist, so you can use the jet for a powerful cleaning spray or use the mist for more relaxed water delivery. You can switch from one to the other by simply rotating the nozzle itself, so you can do the adjustment on the fly. In case you want to use the nozzle hands-free, there’s a magnet on the side that you can snap it to the side of the water bottle cap. Alternatively, you can snap it onto any ferromagnetic objects you have around camp for more placement options.
The bottle, by the way, can take around 410ml of water, so it’s not much. However, when used as spray or mist (instead of just poured), the outfit claims it should be able to do up to five common cleanup tasks around camp. In case the hose gets in the way, by the way you can also retract it to sit inside the bottle. Obviously, you won’t be able to do this if the bottle’s filled to the brim, but it should be available once you’ve used up the water a bit.
A Kickstarter campaign is currently running for the Portalo. You can reserve a unit for pledges starting at €49.
