The LifeStraw is a brilliant invention, designed to let you safely purify contaminated water completely, so you could happily drink from rivers or other suspect water sources on your foreign travels. It also comes with a nicely humanitarian feature, in that every purchase funds a year’s clean drinking water in Africa for a child. Now the company is branching out, or rather in, to our kitchens.

The LifeStraw Home contains the same award winning purification system – namely a series of ultrafine filters and activated carbon – but this time it’s in a desktop model which holds 18 liters of water. We’re kind of struggling to think who would have such grubby water in their kitchen that they’d need a powerful filtering system like this, but maybe we’re being too unimaginative.

The replaceable filter cartridge has a lifespan of around 4500 liters, which is a lot of water even in a busy household, and of course because the whole thing is gravity powered, there’s no need for any electricity or batteries to keep it going. Which is nice. The blurb says it can be used for humanitarian purposes as well as domestic, so we’re assuming that means urban kitchens in less developed parts of the world.

It’s a nice idea in any event, and at a price of €134.95 it’s suitably competitive with other less worthy products on the market.