What kind of material are water towers made from? The kind that look like this File:Olcott water tower.jpg - Wikipedia
Metal. Usually steel. I have also seen towers made of concrete and brick.
Wouldent steel rust?
No more than the pipes carrying that water to your house would.
Eventually. They just use thicker steel. Ships are made of steel too. It takes a very long time for steel to rust through.
The underground tanks I’ve used for irrigation systems are epoxy lined, I’d expect the water towers are the same.
So are the water towers made from stainless steel or just carbon steel, and is it galvanized?
Stainless steel ones tend to be left unpainted.
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Do they have a sacrificial anode, like water heaters.
Around the English countryside, concrete from the samples I’ve seen.
And I just saw one.
[ Unrelated, but a sincere wonder: these are I suppose water storage tanks for when there’s a drought; but they don’t look as if they’d hold more than a few field’s worth, and there aren’t that many about — so what’s the use ? ]
Water tanks are what creates the water pressure that is seen at the tap. You can pump water up to the tanks anytime and then it will provide water pressure for an extended period of time, even if there’s a power failure.
They’re for creating pressure, not storage. That’s why they’re up high.
A lot of the water tanks on top of buildings in New York City are made of wood.
Thanks.
I did think this morning that they might be places one could dump a weighted body in the tank — assuming one was into that sort of thing — cos I doubt they are inspected very frequently. On the other hand one would have to lure the victim up there since carrying a dead 200lb man up there would be a bitch, and very few people are going to accept an invitation to look at the view from up there in the middle of the night.
It’s easier to get the victim up there if the tank is located on the roof of a hotel:
Woman’s body found in water tank of skid row hotel
I’ve overseen the construction of several water storage tanks (i.e. water towers).
They are typically ordinary carbon steel (not stainless or galvanized), and are carefully spray-painted inside and out. On every project that I’ve worked on, we hired a specialized inspector who inspected the spray painting, and made the painting contractor go back and correct every painting defect.
A water storage tank is typically inspected and cleaned every 5 years, and repainted every 20 years.
Here is a pic of the water tower in a village located about 5 miles from us.
I was talking with a village council member one day, and he said they have to pay someone to wax the inside of the water tower every 6 months. (Or maybe it was every 12 months – I forget.) He said it was a big expense.
Peachoid in Gaffney, SC.
Some have something like that. They’re usually insulated now, and the inner surface would be something that that doesn’t corrode easily.
One of the mysteries I found an answer to long ago was how they kept the water from freezing in cold climates. The answer is mostly that they don’t. Water towers can’t be used above a certain latitude because the cost of preventing freezing would be too high. Otherwise they keep ground water circulating in the tank to prevent it from freezing entirely. It will freeze mostly at the top. Valves, ports and other structures at the bottom will be protected by a steel cage to prevent an ‘ice fall’ as the water level lowers and ice remains at the top of the tank. Sometimes enough of the water freezes that pumps have to be used to maintain pressure.
One of my favorite episodes of Dirty Jobs had Mike Rowe helping with the construction of a wood water tower in NYC. These are made by one or two companies that have been around for something like 100+ years. [
Wax? Every six months?!
IMHO, an epoxy coating would be cheaper, in the long run.