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The biggest design failure of CamelBak Bottles for cycling (the Sport line) is the difficulty of cleaning the burst valve in the cap. The above photo shows the black mold / mildew that I found after removing the mouthpiece and plastic retaining ring which holds the burst valve in place. This portion of the assembly can only be flushed and can’t be mechanically cleaned without this (slightly difficult, and not designed into the bottle’s use) disassembly.
Note that the burst valve (seen on the right) is made of a rich blue color rubber (seen around the edges) and the inside of the valve assembly (seen on the left) should be a solid silver color. I was able to clean this with a toothbrush and some soap, but it surely won’t be long before this has to be done again.
Even after this I’ll continue to use some of these bottles, but I definitely won’t buy any. (I happened to get this one and an insulated one for free. They are nice, but at ~$10/ea and with this cleaning difficulty I don’t think they are worth buying.)
I’ve got a Camelback and they’re not as good as Platypus. OK so Platypus have a nasty habit of bursting where the screw cap is welded to the baggy bit, but at least the bite valve can be dismantled and cleaned. They also withstand boiling which the camelback I own doesn’t – which makes the Camelback kind of useless when trying to purify water at a camp site.
Oh yeah, you should install the RunKeeper app for your phone.