In effect stale water is useless. The biological makeup of the hydrogen and oxygen atoms have begun to break down.

Water is water is water. It doesn't become old and not-water, no longer wet, hydrating, or useful, suddenly incapable of being absorbed and utilized by your body, slipping untouched through your system like a silver snake.

It's not as tasty when stale, that's all.

I'll see about finding a pool supply place around here for test strips (might not be easy). Or, I know a guy with a pool, maybe I can get some strips from him.

It hadn't occurred to me to use bleach for general purpose cleaning. I'm still wondering whether it goes stale. Yeah I can obviously buy more if needed.

I just missed out on a good Walgreen's sale, 1/2 liter bottles in 15-packs, three packs (45 bottles) for $8. The 12- and 15-packs are a really nice size, more manageable than 24-packs but fewer packages scattered around than 6-packs. Oh well, no big deal.

I believe the shelf life is 1.5-3 years.

I recently bought the 2.5 gallon plastic boxes of water with a spout sold by many supermarkets. I bought the cheapest water I could find. The _jugs_ failed in a week or two. They weren't stiff enough, and they wrinkled and cracked at the wrinkle. Two jugs out of five broke and leaked in a month.

If you're storing water, check it occasionally for leaks. We've had the spouts leak before, so we store with the spouts up instead of in the down position you'd use them in. But this was the first time we had the actual container spring a leak.

Do you mean the big water jugs, installed bottom up on offices' "fountains" (with "room temp" and "cool" faucets/taps) ??

I checked at work today :
- the limit date is stamped "sept 2006", that's a good year from now
- the recommandation, once open, is to use it within 15 days.

Those dispenser jugs are intended to be reusable and they're very tough. I think Philip is describing the flimsy 2.5 gallon rectangular containers that you can get at grocery stores. Just the same, I don't see how they could fail that easily, unless Philip was stacking them.