Water Storage - Getting Started with 55 Gallon Barrells

hey guys today I want to show you what I'm going to be doing to store water and these two 55-gallon barrels and I hope that it will give you some ideas if you're interested in doing that yourself to get started you first need the materials what we've got here are two barrels fifty five gallons each I've got some bleach unscented bleach that can be used to clean the barrels as well as to decontaminate the water and prep it for long-term storage I'm going to use some paper towels to clean off the surface area of the top of the containers a little bit before I fill them so I don't get contaminants in the water this is a siphon pump and what I mean by siphon pump is that it's got this long tube so this will be used to actually extract the water once you need to extract it so you'll want to have that when you store your water in case you know you need to extract it soon and as long as the outputs of the water level is below the actual water level in the barrel you can pump it a few times and the water will continue to run and flow because of the siphon effect also what we've got here is a bung wrench this is for removing the bungs they can the caps on the water barrels you could use some household tools I mean most people don't have a bung wrench lying around you could probably use some channel channel locks as well and kind of just finagle it a little bit this makes it easy it's like 10 or 12 bucks and then I've got here some water treatments chemicals from Aqua Mira what those are used for is to also sterilize the water for long-term storage it's supposed to help preserve a good water taste another thing you can do if you find that the water doesn't taste very good is that you can extract some and slosh it around between two containers and that will get some more oxygen in the water and bring back the taste so it'll it'll be more enjoyable so that's the materials we need what I want to do first is clean the barrels so in order to do that I'm going to put a little bit of bleach in maybe maybe half a cup or so and in each barrel with maybe a few gallons of water and then I'm going to roll the barrels around outside I'll show you that and let it sit for maybe an hour and roll it around a little more and then clean it out with water get that bleach out of there a little bit and then bring it back in here and fill them up one thing you want to make sure of before you get started is you need to have a good location to store your water barrels you do not want to store them on hot cement or cement that can get hot what I understand is that normal cements okay like in your basement however if you want to be cautious you may want to put them on some wood pallets or two-by-fours or something just in case my understanding though is that if the cement gets warm that is when the chemicals might seep through the cement into the barrels and cause it to be contaminated so keep that in mind and each one of these weighs four hundred and sixty pounds roughly full so you're not moving it if you fill it up and it's not where you want it to be you'd have to take all the water out and move it that's two hundred and seven kilograms as well so make sure you have a storage location identified make sure it's within reach of your hose and another thing that I'm not going to do but if you want to be again extra cautious you can use a special hose I'll put that in the description that is a little bit cleaner than an ordinary garden hose for filling your water barrels all right so let's go clean the barrels and go from there [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] hey guys so I just cleaned the barrels and now I'm filling them up as you can hear and see I'm hoping I can move that one just a few feet to that corner when it's full we shall see four hundred and sixty pounds like I said but I'll let you know if that works out some notes about cleaning the barrels you don't want to put too much water in you want to make sure you can still roll the barrel around and manipulate it and it's not too heavy to dump out that water so I would say just several gallons should be fine I did rinse it out one more time so I put the bleach in with some water dumped all that to put just water back in and rinsed it out again and dump that to make sure there are no more particles left in there okay we're all done with filling these two barrels they're full and it took about fifteen minutes each from the water hose not too long as you could see I was able to finagle them around and push them over here from from my opening here because my hose wasn't quite long enough but I'm about a hundred eight hundred eighty-five pounds so you need to you might want to get someone else to help if you're not able to do that if you need to move them slightly to adjust I'm going to put bleach in this one two tablespoons and the aqua mira solution in this one there's a little sticker that it came with I'll put on here to know that I did that one so let's go ahead and do that it's been sitting the solution of the two chemicals for about five minutes which is what it directed put that in there and we're good to go put the lid on and use my wrench I mean you don't necessarily have to make it too tight here so we'll just put that hand tight and I think we're good here's the solution the aqua mirror solution Part A Part B in Part A and I mean the biggest reason is kill odor causing bacteria and enhance the taste of stored potable water so I really think it's supposed to just help it taste better and disinfect but anyway each one of these is 2 ounces which is the appropriate ratio for a 60 gallon barrel so I have 55 gallons I'm just going to use the full two ounces so we just put each one of these in here and let them react for I think it said five minutes yep and then we put it in the container and then two tablespoons of bleach and we'll be good with this guy as well so I'm just gonna you know give my best guess there it seems about right and again when you when you actually drink it you can always if you need to do a little bit more purification the the hope is that you'll be ready to drink it when you need it though besides that you probably also want some portable besides just these big barrels some portable water storage in case you have to leave your home so that you you have multiple options because if you have to leave your home these aren't coming with you they're not moving let's pop that sticker on there there we go okay one last thing you're supposed to rotate or replace the water in these about once every six months to a year I'm not going to replace it that much it'll probably a few years for me but I am going to after about a year test it I'll get some samples have it tested in a lab each one I'll also taste test it and see if the Aqua Mira tastes better or the bleach one tastes better or if they're the same or if I can't even tell so stay tuned down the road it'll be a while stay tuned for an update video there I'd love to share with you what I find out so that's it guys best of luck with your water storage feel free to add some comments if if you have done something that works for you with water storage or if you'd like to ask questions and we can get the community together and answer those so yeah best of luck and we'll see you next time [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Utter Practicality

Views: 2,723

Rating: 4.7714286 out of 5

Keywords: utter, practicality, water storage, emergency water, shtf, emergency preparedness, natural disaster, 55-gallon, 55, gallon, 55 gallon water barrel, 55 gallon water storage, prepper, prepared, prepping, water container, how to store water, long term, water, water preserver, doomsday, preppers, emergency, economic collapse, shtf water

Id: nFKQmaTUBVY

Length: 11min 30sec (690 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 26 2019