55 Gallon Water Storage: Part 1 - Barrels

after you buy your um 55 gallon water barrels it's a good idea to go ahead and rinse them out before you start putting on all your fittings i've got mine just situated on a sink here i've got a food grade water hose hooked to my water faucet and you can find these types of adapters at any hardware store that just adapts your faucet onto your water hose basically the little strainer on your faucet screws off the adapter screws on and then you put your hose on after that the hose is food grade it's the same type of thing you'll use on like a camper or an rv regular water hoses are made out of chemicals that contain lead and other things and if you ever look at a water hose it will tell you not to drink from it if it's just your standard green yard garden hose these are made of a special material i guess they're just food grade that won't hurt you to and it won't hurt the water that runs through it so um i picked this up at walmart i think it was like 14 bucks it's real cheap so what i'm going to do now is just spray the inside of the um container out and let it drain back into the sink and i'll do that a couple of times just to make sure that i wash out anything that might be in there that could be plastic shavings just about anything so it's a good idea to take care of it if you finish uh washing the inside of your can out uh your container you just want to go ahead and maybe use a paper towel to dry it all off it's a good idea to do that so that you can clean off any dust you've already got some wetness because of rinsing it out so i might as well take care of getting the top cleaned up and i try to do a little cleaning around the long holes here so that there's any things that washed out that i don't wash it back in when i fill the barrel or put on the bung caps after that's done um it's just a good time to go ahead and start putting on your different fittings your barrels you're going to have two um bung plugs bun caps in each barrel but while they look a little bit the same they're really different first thing that's different are the threads you'll notice that this one has the three coarse threads and it has a threaded inside that can be i guess you can put like a three quarter inch adapter any type of a fitting in there it'll have a cap at the bottom that seals it off i'll show you how to get that out in a second the other one has nine tight threads and i guess they call this an npt cap it has you know the tighter thread so it won't fit over here also it does not have a threaded insert since i'll be placing my uh water containers on their sides i'm going to need to use a different type of cap these caps i ordered online and they have the npt threads but they also have a threaded insert just like the coarse one so that's what you need and this is easy to get out too one thing i have learned to do is when you remove these caps it will have a rubber gasket that looks like this around it i went ahead and removed the rubber gasket from the npt that i'm not going to use and i'm going to install it on the npt with the threaded inside that i am going to use in a little while um i ordered this bun wrench from the same company that i got the npt with the threaded insides from and i use it to knock out the um the little cap that's on the inside this one that's right here um i will be honest i used a few different methods before i figured out how to do this one of the things was i used a chisel but i found out that i was starting to damage the threads on the inside when i punch through and after a little bit of thought i figured out that it you can take the cap and place it on top of the bung wrench and it will fit inside the threads so you're not going to damage the outer threads and it gives you a little bit of room for that bung to punch through these are the quarter inch uh bolts that i was going to that i'm using to put together the rack and they just happen to have just the right side head to fit down inside there and then you just use the hammer to tap away and after a few good taps the inside pops out and you're left with clean threads that haven't been damaged that you can use all i'm doing here is just using a pair of um i think these are called conduit pliers they're actually holding like electrical connections but they're got a rubber insert which keeps you from tearing up your plastic if and still gives you better grip than just using your hands just to make sure that i got it tight i think i've noticed about these things they're really easy to kind of cross thread go easy on them that little rubber that little rubber gasket helps i also noticed on here that it says that you need to torque it to uh 20 foot-pounds i have a torque wrench so i'm just doing it that's good and tight i protect these after tightening them up that way and found that um i don't have any leaks so just give them a good tight so they don't really turn very much anymore um seems to be perfect this is the basic setup that i'm using for the middle barrel this would be the on a three tier rack this would be the one that's in the middle and um what i have here is i've got the of course uh threaded bung here and i went ahead and installed a a male adapter that's three quarter inch and i've got the same set up here using the mpt bunk holes that i got our bun caps and the same thing a little bit of advice i would go ahead and spend the extra dollar to buy some of this tape to wrap around the threads i found that it really did a good job of sealing it speaking of sealing before you build your rack you want to make sure that your tanks aren't going to leak so go ahead and assemble them as much as you can i went ahead and assembled this one and then i went ahead and put my hose on one end of it this is one of the hose that's going to run water from one tank to the other so i went ahead and installed that and i tightened down the band the other end i left off brought it over here to the sink and i went ahead and filled it with some water and made sure that i didn't have any leakage at these threads or these threads or these right here and it's a good you can probably adjust these right here after it's been put on but once this thing is full of water and sitting on your rack if you've got a leak even a small leak you're going to be in trouble because you're going to have to take off the hose in order to get your bung wrench to fit over the fitting and if you take off the hose the water is going to come out so you'd have a mess on your hands go ahead and make sure that you don't have any leaks before you fill all your tanks up and connect them together this will be my bottom tank it's going to have a same setup for the water inlet for the water discharge since this will be my lowest tank i went ahead and put just a a valve on here that i can turn on and off and i've left a adapter on here so i can put a short piece of tubing that i can angle into a bucket or whatever i want to use and have some flexibility there another nice thing about this setup is i can also install one of my i'll find it around here somewhere this is a neat little adapter that you can use for a garden hose so when it's time to fill up my tanks i'll and i'll take this off i'll put this on then i'll thread my hose from my sink into it and i can start filling the the barrels and as this barrel fills up it'll force the water through this one into the second tank and so on once it's all set up i'll give you a good demonstration on how that works i wanted to show you this so that you can see the setup and that you can remember to go ahead and check it for leaks here here and here before you actually get it on the rack so as it fills up with water it's going to get to that level that would have forced water against the seal there at the bottom once it reaches that amount i'll go ahead and get real close to it and check for any little leaks okay i can tell that the water has reached that level because i can see water starting to flow through the plastic on the inside there and what i'm going to do now is just uh put my finger over the end of this thing keep water from pouring out and then angle the barrel so it's got a lot of water against that bung cap and a good idea before you do any of that is to make sure you take a paper towel and clean off any water that might be on there so that you won't mistake water from maybe uh filling this thing up with a leak all right i've got it in here at a pretty good angle just to make sure that there's no leaks and i'm just going around and checking for any types of water drops and there are none so i know that this fitting is good this one at the top i'm not really going to worry a bunch about i'm going to i've got a different idea for this it's going to be the uppermost cap so it's not going to have any water against it and i'm going to have to be able to loosen this cap so that i can uh not create a a vacuum when i'm draining the tanks or or getting water out so i'm thinking about putting a um a valve just like the one over there at the top of that this one so that i can turn it on and off and let the water or air either exit or the tanks you know when i'm filling it up or i can allow air to be sucked in when water is draining out okay now that i've checked for leaks i'm going to go ahead and remove this clamp so that i can get the water to drain out best way to get this thing off i found it just to give it a little pull as soon as this finishes draining i can start to assemble the rack

Channel: unchainedgun

Views: 19,019

Keywords: 55 gal water barrel, cleaning, testing for leaks, Water Storage, how to build, rack, prepper, emergency, Rigid Tools

Id: rcKjIaFBIhA

Length: 12min 31sec (751 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 20 2013