I've been reconsidering what to put in my bug out bags lately and was thinking about water. I'd like to store water in a few good lexan water bottles like Nalgene bottles for years and years until it is needed.

So my question is. Can water be canned? If it can be canned, can it be canned in Nalgene bottles? How many times can I get the word 'can' into a sentence <img src="images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> ?

From what I understand of canning, the item to be canned must be boiled for quite a while. Can Nalgene bottles handle being boiled for this amount of time?


Anyone know if there is a way to drink water from a wide mouthed Nalgene bottle without contaminating the rest of the water in the bottle with backwash? I ask this because I don't think all the water in a bottle will be consumed in one sitting. That means there may be times when that water may go for some time without being finished. In that time bacteria from your backwash may have grown and made the water undrinkable. So it would be wise to find a way to drink from a bottle without contaminating the bottle.

I can only think of a few ways of doing this, but they don't seem very convenient.
-Pour an amount of water into a cup or other container and then drink from that container. But that means packing a cup, which takes up more room, adds more weight, and is one more thing to keep clean.
-Pour the water into your mouth without letting your lips touch the rim of the bottle. Harder and messier than it sounds.
-Use a squeeze bottle with a straw that is bent in a downward direction. Like the ones they use in school athletics. Several people can drink from the same water bottle without fear of drinking other peoples' backwash. But this is not a Nalgene bottle.



Thanks
Wayneburg



/edit Ok since writing this post, I've found that Nalgene makes a soft canteen. If fitted with a tube in the lid, turned upside down and squeezed it could function just like that squeeze bottle in school athletics. And I've found that the thing can be boiled too.

I bought a couple of nice compact but wide stainless steel sierra cups with wire handles for drinking from a dispensing container as well as cooking small portions in. I also bought a stainless steel cup with regular finger handle of approximately 8 ounce size for the same tasks.

I happened to find them all at my local Goodwill store for 49 cents each.

Bountyhunter

Water can be canned, and I almost drank some. They were Coast Guard lifeboat stores and carried a date that distilled my thoughts into NO. Opening the can only confirmed my fears. www.majorsurplusnsurvival.com has information and supplies for longterm water storage. Personally, I would just religously rotate my water supply. Periodic checking of all gear is a good idea anyway. So, just drink up while doing your inventory.

When a major earthquake hit Coalinga (CA) back in '83 the city water system was compromised. The military (Lemoore NAS) sent in a lot of water buffalo and Bush Gardens in LA sent truckloads of quart beer bottles and six packs of white painted cans of water. Thinking these would be a handy way to store emergency water, I grabbed on to several cases of those cans of water. Several months (maybe as many as 7-8, I forget) later I noticed that most of the cans were swelling badly, one some even popped open. Not from external heat, musta been something BAD growing inside...

1. I had a 1 qt widemouth Nalgene bottle full of water sitting in my kitchen for about 2 years, and I recently opened, sniffed, and tasted it, and it seemed just fine. I didn't actually drink it though, no point asking for trouble.

2. The preferred water packaging for emergency kits these days seems to be those 4 ounce foil pouches or 8 ounce aqua blox. They are sterile and sealed and have 5 year expiration dates. General advice I've seen about normal containers is rotate out the water every 6 months. Also, I've heard you should put in a drop of clorox per gallon of water (?) when you store it (I didn't do that with the quart I mentioned).

3. I guess if you drink from the bottle and then let it sit for a few weeks, stuff can grow in it, but why would you do that? Normally once you open the bottle you'll finish it within a few hours, or maybe a day. That shouldn't be any problem. It's normal to do that when hiking.

4. Packing a lightweight plastic cup is no big deal. It doesn't weigh much, and you can fit other stuff inside it, so it doesn't use much bag space either. The cup is useful since you may have something other than water to drink (e.g. tea, soup, whatever).

Thanks for the advice on rotating water. I already do that. I was just wondering if I had stashes of water in different locations, if that water could stay drinkable if I don't visit those locations for years.

As for a cup. I was already including a cup and a bowl. I've decided to take out the cup and use the bowl for both cup and bowl duty.

I am conserned about contaminating water bottles because I live in the desert south west. There have been many times when I've consumed half a bottle of water left it outside for a day and then come back to it to find it smelled really bad. So bad that I would never consider finishing off the bottle. I can only assume it smelled that way due to bacteria from my own backwash. And no I don't have an unreasonably dirty mouth.
<img src="images/graemlins/tongue.gif" alt="" />

I think your best bet is aqua blocks or retorts. You can get them from that Major Surplus place that Chris linked to. Nalgene seems kind of silly. Another option is ordinary retail bottled water. A case of 24 0.5 liter bottles is about 6 bucks at Walgreens near here. They might not keep as long as the sealed aquablox, but I've had some in my car for a couple of years and they seem to have held up ok. There's a kind you can get that has a squirt cap, so that would take care of the contamination thing.

If you're talking about stashing water in fixed locations, though, you don't have to worry so much about weight, and in fact maybe you want to fill some 55 gallon drums or something like that. Then have some kind of purification device available in case the water has gotten funky in storage.