55 Gal o' Water: How much Chlorine? (Y2K Prep)

[Stoid]

Subject sez it all. Doing my Y2K Prep, want to know how much chloring to add to my barrels to keep the water fresh but not poisonous.

Thanks!

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I know it may LOOk like I'm not doing anything, but at the cellular level, I'm actually quite busy,

[Arken]

Don't add too much because when you pour it all out on January 1st after nothing happens, you'll contaminate the soil.

[Stoid]

If nothing happens, I'll keep it anyway because I live in Earthquake country and it's simply prudent. I'll change it every few months.

I'd much rather look foolish because I prepared and nothing happened than look screwed or even dead because I was arrogant enough to think I knew what no one can know, and didn't.


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I know it may LOOk like I'm not doing anything, but at the cellular level, I'm actually quite busy,

[voguevixen]

I thought you were supposed to leave the cap off so that the chlorine evaporates? (No, I'm not gearing up for Y2K, I have to do this to make sourdough starter.)

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"There's a snake in my boot!"

[Stoid]

You pour some out and let the chlorine avaporate...but that would take an awfull long time if you had way too much chlorine to start with.

I've heard something like "3 drops" per gallon, but that means 150 drops, which seems a bit silly. I'm sure there is a measurable amount for 55 gals.

[Arken]

Okay, I'll be serious now... Couldn't you just buy a water purifier (like a brita pitcher) and pour the water from the drums into that before you used it for drinking purposes?

[APB9999]

Good lord, why are you using chlorine? If you want to chemically treat water to make it potable go to a camping store and buy iodine tablets.
The proper amount to mix is on the label.

[AWB]

Plus with the iodine, you'll be filling your thyroid with non-radioactive iodine. That'll keep the radioactive iodine from the nuclear-missiles-that-will-go-off-because-of-computer-bugs from contaminating your body.

[handy]

How doyou get water from a hot water heater? I got 40 gal, that should be enough, the stuff is probably sterile. I guess I can take it out from the drain on the bottom. What? No one thought of this? :-)

[Doctordec]

On backpacking trips we used to use 2 drops per quart from a little bottle of bleach with an eyedropper in it. You can buy the bottle and dropper from a pharmacy. Iodine tabs are expensive a drop of bleach is nearly free and adds little or no taste. It has to sit for a few hours first before it's safe to drink. 20 years ago the clorox bottle used to recommend the right abount on the label but they stopped putting it on.

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"Hope is not a method"

[Doctordec]

I forgot...Make sure you use the unscented bleach. I think the "fresh springtime scent" might taste worse and be more toxic than the bleach itself

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"Hope is not a method"

[handy]

Lets see, chlorine evaporates from the water too...we used to have a swimming pool & kept adding that stuff.

If I have to drink it, hot water heater water would suffice for me...I don't expect the gas to shut off, however, so I love hot water heater water.

[voguevixen]

So actually, that guy at the fastfood restaurant that put bleach in the ice machine was prepping for Y2K?

::fleeing::

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"There's a snake in my boot!"

[torq]

Depending on the size of the dropper, a good rule of thumb is anywhere from 10-20 drops per ml; a teaspoon is about 5 ml. So 150 drops is somewhere between one and a half and three teaspoons. The people who wrote "3 drops per gallon" are probably expecting you to use a medicine dropper or something similar to that, which will be closer to the 10 drops per ml end of the scale.

Iodine tablets are for cleaning up "found" water in streams or something like that. In theory you could use bleach for the same purposes (that's more or less what your local drinking water treatment plant does), but iodine tablets are more convenient to carry around. However, you have to buy iodine tablets and you probably already HAVE bleach sitting around somewhere, so if you're treating water to preserve it instead of clean it up after the fact, you may as well use bleach.

The water in a water heater is NOT necessarily sterile (there are plenty of bacteria that can live at typical water heater temperatures); it's also likely to have a fairly nasty taste.

[handy]

vog, if you watch some Fox programs about getting caught on the job, there are quite a few other body fluids people put in public food....

[voguevixen]

Is bleach a body fluid?

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"There's a snake in my boot!"

[Sofa King]

I recall it being 3-5 drops per gallon, but I think that figure was for purifying small amounts of water in the absence of a fire to boil it.

My recommendation would be to purify it if you want to, then boil it over the smoking ruins of our civilization. After it cools to approximately 150 degrees, to prevent the biolab-mutated cholera from setting in, pour it into clean jars and store it in the ice-age glacier that's flowing past your hovel.

As for me? I'll be drinking rum punch in the Carribean.

SofaKing was actually close: the amount to use of common laundry bleach is 5 drops to the gallon. As for how much to add for a drum, simply get a small measuring spoon and count the number of drops to fill it, then multiply appropriately. I figure 3 drops to a milliliter.

[Beadalin]

I just found this in a project I am stuck with at work:

Amount of Disinfectant Required for Each 100 Gallons of Water
Laundry Bleach (5.25% Chlorine) = 3 cups*
Hypochloride Granules (70% Chlorine)= 2 ounces**

*1 cup = 8-ounce measuring cup
**1 ounce = 2 heaping tablespoons of granules

Source: Illinois Department of Public Health. Recommendations may vary from state to state.

I hope that's helpful.

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"It says, I choo-choo-choose you. And it's got a picture of a train."
-- Ralph Wiggum

[Diceman]

Let's see... 3 cups for 100 gallons equalls 1.65 cups for 55 gallons. Or 13.2 ounces. or 0.825 pints. or 26.4 tablespoons. or 79.2 teaspoons. (God, I love having a calculator that converts units. If anyone needs a length converted into Fermi's or a temperature expressed on the Rankine scale, I'm your man :))

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"I had a feeling that in Hell there would be mushrooms." -The Secret of Monkey Island

[DW3]

Here is a company that sells water treatment and storage products. They have a how to section that answers your question. Plus other water treatment solutions.

www.watertanks.com (http://www.watertanks.com)

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I before E except after C. We live in a weird society!

[Doctordec]

Gack ! 3 cups for 100 gallons ??? I think that's what you would add if you were making a solution to disinfect a surface. If you drank water with that concentration I think you'd get poisoned.

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"Hope is not a method"

[Beadalin]

I know, three cups sounds like a lot. I promise this was for drinking water, though. The information was with a whole bunch of other stuff about purifying drinking water after a natural disaster (tornadoes and the like). And a hundred gallons is a lot of water.

[ConMan]

Not to knock you guys, but Stoidela, why in the wide, wide world of sports are you putting your trust in the SDMB about how much bleach to add to water to make it potable when you should really get out the phone book and call the county health department?! Hell, if I tell you to add one gallon of bleach per 55 gallon drum, would you do it? Would you belive me?
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For brief time, (I claim insanity!) I used to manage an Applebee's and yes, you add two capfuls of bleach to a 5-gallon bucket for use as a disinfectant. And yes, you could drink this mixture. You might get sick but unless you have a weak constitution, you won't die from it. We also use that same amount to clean the ice machines on a routine basis.

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"Quoth the Raven, 'Nevermore.'"
E A Poe

[tracer]

handy wrote:

Lets see, chlorine evaporates from the water too...we used to have a swimming pool & kept adding that stuff.

A swimming pool has a huge surface area open to the air. Survival water storage jugs/drums do not. Adding the right amount of bleach to clean water, and then storing it in an airtight container, is supposed to keep the water potable for 5 years.

I once made the mistake of paying $16.99 for a one-fluid-ounce bottle of "water preservative." The ad on the label read, "Chlorine bleach has never been proven to preserve water, but this product has!". ... I later read the ingredients on the bottle, and they were identical to Clorox, right down to the percentages used. D'OH!

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The truth, as always, is more complicated than that.