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I bought a few 7 gallon sanitary water containers that I’d like to store some of our well water in.
Our well has nice water but I think it needs a few drops of chlorine per gallon for storage.
This water would mainly be for a temporary flush but I would like to safety drink it if necessary as well.
What is the correct ratio per gallon to make this safe during storage?
Do I need to possibly add a few drops every few months or so?
Thanks.
A lot will depend on the temperature, as higher temps will promote the growth of a lot of things you won't want to drink. At least test your well water for PH so how know how its doing on that. Home Depot has test kits that will give you a heads up as to the safety and quality of your well water for around $30. Personally, I wouldn't drink any well water w/o testing it first, and randomly after that because you never know what could leach into it over time.
Water that is safe to drink today may not be safe to drink tomorrow, regardless of the chlorine you add. Any water that you store for more than a couple weeks needs to be filtered. Most of us store water for the long term, but consider rotating it out every 6 months or so, if you still have clean water to replace it with. Older water can be used for the lawn, garden, or trees. I would not give it to livestock if it has been heavily chlorinated.
I now kind of frown on using chlorine for water storage. Sure, it kills pathogens, but enough of it will sicken you, also. Water is kept fresh by continual movement, and in a static/stagnant environment, all manner of microbes will begin to grow. It's the nature of the water beast. That's why you will need to filter it right before drinking.
This applies to potable water. Bathing, flushing, and cleaning water can be treated with chlorine. If you have livestock, give them potable water only.
We're on rain catchment and even though our water is filtered and sterilized with UV, we only store municipal water, mainly because of mineral content and taste. We get it from public spigots. If you don't know where yours are, call the fire department and ask.
You can use a dromedary water filter like a MSR filter. You can take stale, nasty, microbe laden water and filter it for larger scale consumption (meaning personal consumption for multiple people). We used them on group backpacking trips all the time, no need for chlorine tabs or any of that BS.
Edit- personally I would and have consumed my own well water, stored, no problems. No chlorine, no filtering. We kept 15-20 gallons in milk jugs in our basement back in WV for power outages. No one died in the making of that film.,
Worth noting that a 150-gallon "well pressure tank" is at least 50% air (see drawdown capacity).
If you also need non-potable water, talk to your local fire department.
I had an offer from the local fire district to cover some of the costs of preparing and maintaining an above-ground cistern in exchange for allowing them a couple of fire hose hookups for emergencies.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Threerun
personally I would and have consumed my own well water, stored, no problems. No chlorine, no filtering. We kept 15-20 gallons in milk jugs in our basement back in WV for power outages. No one died in the making of that film.,
It is not uncommon for well systems to include significant water storage at the house side, both in the pressure tank, or gravity fed.
We put just a teaspoon in our 55 gallon storage barrels that we keep potable water in... we try to refresh that every year, but it's been fine even when we've forgotten and let them go longer.
I think to scale it down there are guidelines online for how much to add per gallon.... just a little dab will do ya. :-)
We keep a few different kinds of water.... some potable, which we add a bit of bleach to for long term storage... some non-potable in big garbage cans outside for use in toilet flushing. Some in the big jugs liquid laundry soap comes in, with the tap on it. I refill these with water and keep them under each sink. You can set them right on the edge of the sink and use them for hand washing. :-)
We have a well. We also have a lot of water stored, though mostly for flushing.
I do not anticipate anything happening that is going to cause our well water to no longer be potable. So I see no need to store water for drinking purposes.
We're in the worst drought we have ever seen and I checked our catchment tank and there is only a few thousand gallons in it. There is some rain forecast but I don't like counting on it. We have a second water tank about 1000 feet from the house and for the first time ever we realize we might have to tap into it and now that I'm 12 years older than when we acquired this property the idea of hauling water isn't as comforting as having the water, so I ordered 1000 feet of irrigation tubing and the appropriate adapters. Fortunately it's uphill so gravity can do most of the work.
I'm also using this drought as an opportunity to water the livestock with water we have stored in 5 gallon containers. It was past due for rotation and we will refill them at the public spigots.
I'm going to move a livestock shelter to the back tank to increase the amount of roofing we have catching water.
We can get water delivered, but that is a last resort we've never had to consider.
We've also started rationing water. We've never been wasteful but now it's "if it's yellow, let it mellow" and running the shower water into a bucket until it gets hot instead of watching it go down the drain. And switching to paper plates until we get some rain.
Anybody have other good water rationing tips that aren't necessarily common sense? Our clothes and dishwasher are both high efficiency models that don't use much water.
When we first moved here we bought something like this. It was more about adding a sink to a 1/2 bath that didn't have one, but its also good for conserving water:
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Worth noting that a 150-gallon "well pressure tank" is at least 50% air (see drawdown capacity).
