Stored water questions, aeration and bleach?

A few questions about stored water. I seem to remembering reading that water loses oxygen and you can aerate it to mix oxygen back in to make it taste better. How true is this and does anyone have technical details on the best way to aerate? Like do you fill a gallon jug half way and shake for 5 minutes, whats needed to do it right?

I also read that some people say if you use tap water you don't need to treat with bleach because it is already chlorinated? What do you guys think about that and would it hurt to put 4 drop per gallon instead of 8 just to be safe or is it really not needed at all with tap water?

 

In the winter storm of 2K I gave my neighbors some stored water. They said it tasted like Chlorine and would not drink it. I said fine and picked up the unused water. Did not bother me one bit. I saw one out in their yard with a fire going to melt snow. We sat by a warm cozy fire drinking hot chocolate/coffee and eating freshly cooked meals--off the wood stove. An old "country boy can survive".

 

I was taught to add a cap load of bleach to a 2 gallon jug for long term storage, capped tight. Nothing will grow in it. Open and let stand overnight before drinking. Chlorine will dissipate, that is why you must keep adding Chlorine to pools.

 

First: Water can't lose it's oxygen. By its' very chemical composition it is part oxygen. So you are referring to a culinary expression not a storage expression. Second: Water is water. If you got the water from a public tap then it is already treated with chlorine. Put it in a clean 55 gallon drum or something OTHER than a milkjug and forget about it. The bullshit about rotating water is exactly what it is... bullshit. Water doesn't spoil or go bad or turn rotten if it is treated when stored. Make sure the jug is clean don't use gallon milk jugs as they are not BPE free. This means that when the temperature hits 80 degrees the jug releases toxins that can make you retarded. As a rule of thumb before you drink someone else's "treated" water put a couple drops on your jeans and wait about 15 minutes... if you see any lightening in color then there is too much chlorine in it and it could kill you. Use common sense, if is smells bad don't drink it, if it tastes bad spit it out.... treat it yourself by boiling it for 3 minutes.

 

Unless there are fish involved, the dissolved oxygen (DO) in water is irrelevant. Plastic containers don't corrode so the DO level doesn't matter. A high DO level in a community water supply is good because it makes drinking water taste better.

 

correct. but if it was the water was treated prior to storage and stored away from direct sunlight it would be perfectly fine to drink.

 

The water coming from the city tap is supposed to test a min of .5 ppm for free chlorine residual. Or at least it is for Texas, I have no idea what requirements other states have. That means your water is free of ickies and there's still a little chlorine floating around to kill anything that might be in your glass or faucet or whatever. Yes the residual will eventually dissipate but in a sealed container that's out of the sunlight that's ok because sterile in/sterile out.

The only time I use bleach is to clean the container out. Mix up some water and bleach, 50/50 is good, and swish that around in the container making sure to cover all sides and the cap. Dump that out, rinse with tap water, and then fill n seal.

If the water tastes flat then just pour it back and forth between two containers a few times and it'll perk up.

 

interestin... this maybe off the subject a little but has anyone used any of them berkley water filters are hey any good?

 

ok thanks my friend...

 

Ok good to know, so no need to look like a rabid killer going into spasms shaking a water bottle for 20 minutes to aerate it.

 

A bit off subject but still on purifying water. Get a pound or so of pool shock(granulated Chlorine) and store it. You can make hundreds of gallons of "Clorox" with the powder which will then purify thousands of gallons of water. Easy to store and has an indefinite shelf life--cheap too.

 

At the end of summer WalMart and other stores will put their backyard swimming pool supplies on clearance. For just a few buck you can pick up the most basic test kit that will allow you to actually measure the chlorine level so you know if you got enough. The Shock and other chlorine treatments will be on clearance too.

AT

 

In Africa with Drs. without Borders, we had a Berkey. They are great! You can put pretty bad looking liquid in the top and drink good water out of the spigot. All gravity fed. We had the white ceramic filters and if the mineral content was high.....it did not remove those. I hear they have newer "black" filters that help remove more minerals from hard water.

 

You can purchase just the filter elements themselves for 25-50 bucks each (depending on the filter type) and use your own buckets or containers to roll a DIY Berkey copy for a lot less.

There is a filter system called the Doulton Rio 2000 that employs 6 of the Berkey style filter elements in a housing that can be fed with a pump. I have heard these have the silver coatings to kill the micro bugs but I haven't been able to corroborate that. Anyway, it can handle a through put up to a several gallons per minutes instead of gallons per hour. I've seen it for 189 bucks. Pick up a 2 gpm 12 volt sprayer diaphram pump at the farm store for 75-80 bucks and a deep discharge battery. A conventional filter housing for 10 inch filter cartridges is like 20 bucks and with a .5 micron and carbon cartridge, you can put all this together into a nice system. Hook this to a garden hose faucet on your house and backfeed into your home plumbing, just be sure to shut the main from the water company so you don't backfeed their whole water system.

With this system you can have clean water when the situation isn't a total teotwawki, but say just the water main down the street broke or the power to the treatment plant is out or your well pump just died. If there is a stream or pond with ample water you can live almost like normal. This is actually a far more probable situation. My philosophy, maybe wrongly, is prepping should deal well with these situations preserving maybe a more inconvenient but comfortable lifestyle during times that aren't total SHTF/WROL situations. And the beauty of this approach is if the sh*t does totally hits the fan, you can purify water for lots of people earning much goodwill and you can barter with it. And if your 12 volt power quits you can always just pop the filter 6 elements out of the main housing and put them in 5 gal buckets and make 3 homebrew Berkeys. Nothing wrong with buying a Berkey but I'm thinkin I'd rather spend 325 bucks on this (assuming the elements have silver in them to kill the microbiologicals, anyone know for certain?) than 250 for one Big Berkey...

but that's just me thinkin.

AT