[preparedness] Water Storage in Milk Jugs

From: "Brent" <micronut@xxxxxxx>
To: <preparedness@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2002 22:02:11 -0400
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Folks, we need to store water for drinking, cooking, flushing the toilet,
washing our clothes and for personal hygiene. For drinking water, I
recommend food grade 40-55 gallon containers from commercial
enterprises like Walton Feeds or Emergency Essentials, but some of us
don't have space or we live in an apartment. 

What about using milk or juice gallon jugs? 

Information gathered from a web discussion group: 

With jugs that have had anything other than water, you have to presoak
them in a concentrated solution of at least 10 drops per quart of
bleach with a standard 5 1/4% Sodium Hypochlorite content like Clorox
or some generic or store brands. Whatever brand you use, purity it
important and we use Clorox. Some bleaches also contain soaps which
might be good for laundry but not good for bleaching the contaminants
from a plastic water container. For our use, the soap is itself a
contaminant. This procedure of pre-soaking plastic water containers
is an old campers' trick. Boat and RV owners have used this procedure
forever to get the plastic "taste" out of the water, particularly on
new boat and RV water tanks. (Have you ever taken a drink from a
garden hose on a hot day? YECH!). I have also used container
bleaching with success on 15, 25 and 55 gal. water barrels that had
previously stored Pepsi concentrate. We use the Clorox concentrate to
pre-soak two barrels to economize. We let one barrel soak for about a
week and then transfer the solution to a second barrel. After
flushing the first barrel with clean water, we use a small "squirrel 
cage" fan to completely dry it. We take off both barrel caps and put
the fan on top of one of the two holes. This fan takes very little
electricity and helps insure no residual bacterial process from
moisture trapped in the barrel after cleaning. The container is now
ready for filling with the final fill of water with a much smaller
concentration of bleach. This method of "leaching" the taste and
impurities from any plastic water container is an important tool to
make the water better for drinking and cooking, particularly from
containers with previous liquids other than water. 

A waterbed can also be made safe for water storage by bleach leaching.

Brent Case 

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[preparedness] Water Storage in Milk Jugs

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