Long-Term Water Storage with 55 Gallon Barrels

in this Great Lakes prepping video I want to talk about long-term water storage it's often said that on average a person needs a minimum of one gallon of fresh water every day and this is supposed to account for drinking cooking and cleaning so if we're talking about storing water for emergency or disaster purposes that means every person in your household will need at the bare minimum one of these every single day well I don't know about you but I sure don't think it makes much sense to try and store a few hundred or thousand of these things never mind that the containers aren't intended for real long-term storage you can't stack them and you can't move them around in any reasonably easy way now some people use these which you know don't get me wrong I love these water jugs and I use them for camping and hunting all the time they're super durable and and they just work great but again how many would you need to buy and stack somewhere in your house to take care of all of your long-term water needs so that's why I happen to go with the 55-gallon drum effect I got a few of them in here right now now you can get containers that are much bigger than this but this is about the biggest container you're gonna have any chance of being able to move around if you need to I keep my barrels on these heavy-duty casters and it still takes a little bit of effort to roll them around now I ultimately want to have about probably about 8 of these things down here and I got a couple more coming right now and but for right now I have these three that's 165 gallons of fresh clean water for drinking cooking and cleaning and anything else now if you're if you're looking at 55 gallon barrels you're gonna come across a couple of different types open-top barrels have a separate lid that completely removes and clamps down over the barrel closed top barrels which is what I have they have an enclosed top that's completely you know constructed into the end of the structure of the thing and there's these two small openings and yes the technical term for these is bunghole I like to close top barrels because they seem more structurally rigid and they're all seems like there's less chance of something contaminating the water when I need to open it up to access the barrel now some people are able to find barrels like this secondhand that have been used for some kind of food product in the past by a company they're a bit cheaper but I personally don't like the idea of these because I don't want to worry about what may have been stored in them previously will I ever be able to get every last drop a residue out of there you know if it was used for pickles is my water gonna be a little pickly forever you know if it was something sweet and sticky in there that's just gonna getting the bacteria out of that especially since it's closed top and there's not any real great way to get something down in there to scrub it so I went with brand new now I got these for about I can't remember exactly I think I got these three for about sixty-five dollars each with maybe about five dollars shipping I got them from Walmart calm you can get these from anywhere between fifty and a hundred bucks I usually find them somewhere right in the middle of that but for having them shipped for five dollars a piece from Walmart calm I don't know how they can ship in that cheap but it was cheaper than the gas I would expect to go and pick some up myself from the nearest physical store that sells them I'll talk about these metal casters a little more I really like these casters they make cheaper ones including cheaper ones that are made of plastic and they make more expensive these are sort of right in the middle these casters are rated to handle a thousand pounds of weight and a full drum of water weighs a bit less than 500 pounds now these casters cost me around $60 each although like the barrels the price kind of fluctuates a bit on these all in was that these drums would be absolutely impossible for me to move around if they weren't on casters so I consider them a must have a couple other accessories you're going to need if you go the closed top 55-gallon barrel route first of all this is called the Bunga wrench and it's used to open up the caps on these barrels you can see there's a that the shape of the indentations on this cap and this wrench is designed to fit perfectly in there so you don't damage anything when you're screwing or unscrewing it you got to screw these things down pretty tight if you do it right so you really want to use the proper tool to remove it I think this wrench cost me about twelve dollars it's made out of aluminum I don't have any reason to suspect that that won't last me forever the other thing the other gadget you're gonna need if you go with 55-gallon barrels is this thing we try to get it all in the shot here this is the siphon pump you got you got 55 gallons of fresh water how do you get it out of there without making a terrible mess well you gotta somehow get it out of the barrel and put it into a smaller container to then use for something so what you do with this is you put this whole thing down into the barrel I'm not gonna actually open my barrels right now because they're good and sealed you put that the pipe all the way down in the barrel and then loosen this the little cap here a bit and you just get get a few pumps going and it'll fill it up with water and start your safe and going and then it'll come out of this ridged tube right here you just put that tube and or whatever container you want and when you want the water to stop flowing all you got to do is either tighten this cap and it'll kill the it'll kill the siphon or you can just pull the whole thing right out of the barrel altogether the last thing I want to talk about with regards to storing water for long term is well I see a lot of questions from people online about how to store water and specifically with regards to treating the water prior to storing it so here's video you can buy water treatment stuff that's specially specifically labeled for long term storage lots of companies sell that sort of product that'll do the trick just fine in my opinion it cost too much alternatively you can add four to five drops of unscented liquid chlorine bleach and the each gallon of water you're storing one tablespoon excuse me one teaspoon of bleach will treat about five gallons of water according to what I've read at this concentration it's it's a perfectly safe amount of bleach to add to your drinking water now however still if you have municipal tap water that comes chlorinated you can skip all of it you don't have to add anything my city has really good tap water and it's sufficiently chlorinated right out of the faucet if I had well water I'd filter every last drop through a good filter and and then add bleach to it but I don't need to bother with that here I just hooked up a hose to the laundry sink and and filled them up until they were so they were overflowing a little bit and I put the caps on um so there you have it like everything we do there's a hundred different ways to do it and this is how I do long-term water storage until next time this is Great Lakes prepping

Channel: Great Lakes Prepping

Views: 24,438

Rating: 4.8325124 out of 5

Keywords: water storage, prepping, long-term, water barrells, water drums, survival, bugging in, preppers, water treatment, plastic, pump

Id: g0SH4ZV5_zg

Length: 8min 40sec (520 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 22 2017