Bleach as water purifier.

[asterion]

@Reply

Is this because of the vessel you boil it in?

It can be, but normally it’s because you’ve removed a lot of the dissolved gas. The taste of boiled water can be improved by pouring it between two pans to get air back into solution.

Anyway, solid pool chlorine is calcium hypochlorite.

[PlainJain]

@Reply

Is this because of the vessel you boil it in?

What asterion said.

[Daylate]

I keep the data for a small water system in the Washington San Juan islands that makes potable water out of salt water using two reverse osmosis machines. We inject it with a precisely controlled amount of plain old bleach to keep the chlorine content up to health standards. Pretty cheap solution to the problem.

For the record, the two machines, if both are operating at capacity, can turn out slightly over 700 gallons of pure water each hour. That’s if they are working properly. Bastards are tempermental as hell.

[Folacin]

@TXCowboy

When I was a kid, my Dad took care of a small rural water system (about 800-900 customers) and he used regular bleach. It was a deep well system and it had a deal in the pump station that was a 30 gallon barrel with a injection pump that fed into the main line going to the storage tank. Every morning he would go by and fill the barrel with 6 gallons of bleach and rest water and over 24 hours it would inject that into however many thousands of gallons of water coming out of the well. He had a little test kit that was 3 test tubes you would fill with water and add a drop of some kind of dye to and compare it to a chart to see if the mix was right. He had a deal worked out for a discount from the local Safeway and once a month we would go pick up a pallet load of Clorox bleach.

Toured the ‘water plant’ in my small MN hometown for a school trip (maybe Cub Scouts?), ca 1970. The guy could have been pulling our leg, but he claimed that he dumped a gallon of bleach into the well every so often as a disenfectant (don’t think it was daily). I do remember seeing the bleach bottle, though.

Scare quotes because I do recall that the system was a well, with a pump that filled up a water tower, next to the combination firehouse/city maintenance garage.

[Bosstrain]

I would never recommend playing around with bleach, it can actually kill you if your not careful, plus I doubt anyone’s ever tested what the long term effects are (after 60 years of drinking bleached water, what will your health be like? :smack: ). Me personally, I’d either boil it, or take a tip from the French who have dealt with this problem for a lot longer than any of us: mix it with a little alcohol, it’s quick, safe, and plus you might get a small buzz . That’s why they drink wine BTW, their water sucks, and I doubt they want to wait for the water to boil and cool just to get a drink

[Interconnected_Series_of_Tubes]

@Bosstrain

I would never recommend playing around with bleach, it can actually kill you if your not careful, plus I doubt anyone’s ever tested what the long term effects are (after 60 years of drinking bleached water, what will your health be like? :smack: ). Me personally, I’d either boil it, or take a tip from the French who have dealt with this problem for a lot longer than any of us: mix it with a little alcohol, it’s quick, safe, and plus you might get a small buzz . That’s why they drink wine BTW, their water sucks, and I doubt they want to wait for the water to boil and cool just to get a drink

Alcohol isn’t going to do squat. There are other reasons why fermentation can reduce pathogen counts.

Anyways, WRT long term stuff: I doubt hypochlorite is going to last long in the acidic environment of your stomach, and lots of municipalities have been using various chlorine compounds for about ever now. So actually, lots and lots and lots of people have been drinking essentially ‘bleached water’ for 60 years. The biggest problem with chlorine actually isn’t the chlorine itself, but rather the various products that form when it reacts with the organics in the water. Obviously nobody wants to be adding 8 drops of bleach to every gallon of water, every day, forever. But I wouldn’t worry about it on an occasional basis.

Personally, I’d rather boil than chlorinate, since you might have a shot of driving off any volatile ickies that way.

[asterion]

I’d rather buy myself a decent pump purifier, though of course it does add more weight and takes up space in the backpack.

[sweeteviljesus]

I don’t believe chlorine bleach kills cryptosporidium cysts. Not sure of its effectiveness on giardia either. Aquamira and Potable Aqua both sell ClO2 tablets that purify a quart of water, but take four hours to work. You can pick up a filter for filtering biodiesel that has 1 micron pores that will filter out those oocysts, but it doesn’t do shit for bacteria and viruses. Combine that with bleach and I think you might have something.

I am still working on the perfect method for purifying water in the field. I think you would boil it for a while to drive off VOCs and kill biological contaminants and then distill it to leave behind other impurities. Shake the resulting liquid in a paint shaker to aerate it to taste.

FWIW,
Rob

[asterion]

Sounds like a bit much. How about we just carry around one of these and a vacuum source?

[user_hostile]

@sweeteviljesus

I don’t believe chlorine bleach kills cryptosporidium cysts. Not sure of its effectiveness on giardia either. Aquamira and Potable Aqua both sell ClO2 tablets that purify a quart of water, but take four hours to work. You can pick up a filter for filtering biodiesel that has 1 micron pores that will filter out those oocysts, but it doesn’t do shit for bacteria and viruses. Combine that with bleach and I think you might have something.

I am still working on the perfect method for purifying water in the field. I think you would boil it for a while to drive off VOCs and kill biological contaminants and then distill it to leave behind other impurities. Shake the resulting liquid in a paint shaker to aerate it to taste.

FWIW,
Rob

Iodine is my preference; WHO and various other health organizations recommended it over chlorination. I use a ceramic water filter and then a couple of drops of iodine per quart and leave overnight (usually in my sleeping bag overnight if the water isn’t too cold). The taste is barely apparent the next morning, and is effectively masked when you mix the water in a powdered drink or in your food. Downside is weight of the filter, and the fact the iodine is carried in a glass bottle. Worth the hassle, IMO.

[WarmNPrickly]

@Bosstrain

I would never recommend playing around with bleach, it can actually kill you if your not careful, plus I doubt anyone’s ever tested what the long term effects are (after 60 years of drinking bleached water, what will your health be like? :smack: ). Me personally, I’d either boil it, or take a tip from the French who have dealt with this problem for a lot longer than any of us: mix it with a little alcohol, it’s quick, safe, and plus you might get a small buzz . That’s why they drink wine BTW, their water sucks, and I doubt they want to wait for the water to boil and cool just to get a drink

You have with almost no doubt, already been drinking bleached water for a very long time. Granted, some communities are switching to chloramines and ozone, but when they use chlorine, they are effectively using bleach. Chlorine gas hydrolyzes to hypochlorite in water instantly unless he pH I well below something you would drink.