Water Storage

[Mr.Pliskin]

What is everyone in the West TX area doing for water storage? I'm always hearing about these great deals on 55 gallon drums and 250 gallon tanks, but do we have anything locally (within a 2 hour drive) that anyone knows about? My ideal hope is to have around 500 gallons on hand in bulk, plus all the gallon and drinking bottles in my reserves. As of right now my water is using up allot of possible food storage space.

[GunsUp]

I am personally looking 15-30 gallon barrels, something that can be moved by one person with a dolly. Currently I have a 50 gallon hot water heater and 30 gallons in 5 gallon bottles. Not nearly enough.

I have heard that the coke bottling plants in other places sell their syrup drums, but have not investigated this as those are bigger than what I want.

[JohnTheGoon]

I know this thread is ancient, but I thought I'd share what I've found locally.

Bowers Plastics (a mom and pop industrial plastics recycler/supplier) has a big old pile of (probably) hundreds of "used-once" food grade 55gal blue poly barrels, for $8 each. This dude who looks like Uncle Jesse from the Dukes took me back to the pile in his truck and he let me pick the ones I wanted. I wound up with two that held Raisin juice concentrate and one that held molasses. Both came with bungs and cleaned out easily. Compared to internet prices nearing/cresting $120/barrel plus $50 shipping, eight bucks ain't bad.

They're on the southbound access road of I-27, just south of the north loop.

[dkhoward]

John,
Glad to have you aboard the forum!

Are these the opaque blue barrels? For long term water storage the container needs to be opaque. I am currently looking for a REALLY good deal on something in the 500 gallon range, that is potable water grade and opaque to serve as the catchment for a rain harvesting setup.

[JohnTheGoon]

Yes, these are the standard opaque blue HDPE barrels with closed heads. They have two bungs in the head, one fine thread, and one coarse buttress thread. All 3 still had the original labels on them and the remnants of their contents smelled correct, so I feel safe in the assumption that they were only single-use before me. In searching for these, I found that Gebo's has some enormous poly potable water tanks (500 gal was the smallest they had) but wasn't interested enough in it to find out their price.

For these, I filled them up half-way with fresh water, sloshed around a bit and dumped out the loose solute. Then I filled and capped them, let them sit for 3 days to loosen up the syrup on the bottom. Dumped half, sloshed vigorously, dumped the rest. Then took a pressure washer and blasted all the inside surfaces thoroughly. Refilled half-way with a mixture of dish-soap and fresh water, then tipped on it's side and rolled around the yard to make suds (and be sure the inside lid got washed too). Dumped and pressure washed again. Refilled half again with plain water, rolled around to rinse everything including lid. Dumped, then filled completely with bleach water (forget the exact ratio, but more than would be used for simple purification), capped and sat for 2-3 weeks. Dumped, rinsed and filled for real with lesser bleach solution for storage - We are on a private well out here, no chlorination in our water supply.

I have 3 barrels currently, with a schedule set up to dump and freshen one every 4 months - no water will be more than 1 year old. I'll take samples from each batch, and adjust the schedule as needed to keep water good. We also have a few 55gal rain barrels around the yard, but it's been so long since it's rained that they're nearly dry (been using them to water plants too)

[dkhoward]

Sounds like a hell of a good plan. We have three wells on our place but they are shallow and the water tends to be highly mineralized (gyppy as my great grandmother would say) and has a tendency to flush out your system if you drink to much. I want to add a rain harvesting system to our house in town and also at least one on our ranch. Of course, they would'nt have done much good the last few months.

[JohnTheGoon]

That actually brings up a very good point that I need to look into. Our well produces extremely hard water - about twice as hard as lubbock's municipal supply (which is already off the hardness scale). Our house is equipped with a whole-system sodium exchange softener to protect the plumbing, appliances, our teeth, etc. I need to see if I can find the answer to whether it's better to store artificially softened water vs straight-from-the-ground water. We also have a reverse osmosis system (in theory near-perfect filtration and softening without sodium) but it produces too slowly - would take about a day to fill the barrel.


Edit: the more I think about that last item, the more it might be worth it. If distilled water keeps longer and safer than other supplies, it might be worth the day it takes to fill the barrel. Shrug.

[GunsUp]

Thanks for the hint on the barrels. The problem with storing hard water as I see it is that the minerals will precipitate out and the bottom few inches of water in the barrel will look like somebody dropped a whole box of alka-seltzer in it. When we had well water I could even see it if I left a glass of water out on the counter for a few days...

There is a place out on south university (just past KJTV) that sells bulk RO water to mobile car washes (for spot free rinses). It's pretty cheap as I remember, and if it is truly RO water should be perfectly potable... Just one idea, as filling 400 gallons from a home RO system might be pretty expensive.

[JohnTheGoon]

All my interior plumbing runs through the water softener, but anything I can hook a hose up to supplies plain well water (to keep the sodium from burning the grass)

I spent an hour wandering around Home Depot looking for a way to convert the threads on my laundry room sink to hook a (drinking grade) hose to run out and fill the barrels in the garage. Everyone I talked to in plumbing, bathroom, kitchen, garden (even one girl in paint, by accident) looked at me as though I was trying to build a rocket ship.

Luckily it forced me to come up with a much better plan B - my water heater has a hose hook-up to drain the tank, and it gets softened water. I shut off the gas about half-way thru my kids showers the other night, then ran the rest of the hot water out and just used the softened cold water out of the heater.. which is already in the garage.. went quick.

[TxMedic645]

I spent an hour wandering around Home Depot looking for a way to convert the threads on my laundry room sink to hook a (drinking grade) hose to run out and fill the barrels in the garage. Everyone I talked to in plumbing, bathroom, kitchen, garden (even one girl in paint, by accident) looked at me as though I was trying to build a rocket ship.

I hate going to home depot. The other day I was standing next to a "Tile Demonstration." The guy that was doing the demonstration kept looking at a paper behind the counter and asking. " Is this right? "

On topic, I'm going to pick up 4-5 barrels tomorrow (if they are open on memorial day.) I'm at a loss at what to do about filtering the water.

[Mr.Pliskin]

John,
Glad to have you aboard the forum!

Are these the opaque blue barrels? For long term water storage the container needs to be opaque. I am currently looking for a REALLY good deal on something in the 500 gallon range, that is potable water grade and opaque to serve as the catchment for a rain harvesting setup.

Keep an eye on craigslist, I've found a few ads over the past 6 months for 1K up to 3K gallon RO tanks, all for under 200 a piece.
They go real fast though

And thanks for the heads up Johnthegoon, I'll be giving them a visit this week as well.

[dkhoward]

Ok, I have found a solution to the water filtration problem that doesn't need power and has a really long use life. If you aren't familiar with Berkey water filters go to their website and read a little about them. Gravity fed system. Ceramic filter media. Cleanable and reuseable. THe smallest one will do about 2.5 gallons per hour. The largest, with the upgrades will do about 26 gallons per hour.

We are now a dealer for these units and will have some in the store in Lubbock in a week or so.

[Mr.Pliskin]

I just hit up the plastics supply (I know, a few months later) and now am getting 7 55 gallon drums for a total of 700 gallons stored. Now I just need to clean them out and put some spigots on them.

They also have 30 gallon barrels for 8 as well

[dkhoward]

If anyone is interested, I was browsing through the government auctions last night and saw a number of brand new 10,000 gallon fabric liquid tanks complete with berm liners at the San Antonio depot. The opening bids on these us $150.00. So, if you need some additional water storage, this might be your ticket!!!