Okay, so lots of miscellaneous references over the years have led me to a train of thought. If I am stuck relying on a municipal water supply, is there any reason why I can't store some of that water? I mean, here's the deal: People use jugs, barrels, tanks, to store municipal supplied water at home. They run water from their faucet to fill these containers, then let them sit out in the garage for a time, then if they don't use the water they just toss it out, rinse the container, and refill it for another cycle. Seems a bit wasteful and inefficient to me.

So why not try this instead: Get 3 or 4 clean hot water tanks and hook them up so they are in-line with the supply. Then you can let them fill and when the tanks are topped off the water supply will flow through them, keeping the contents relatively fresh, yet still allow for the storage in the event service is lost. Seems to me that way you could have a spare couple hundred gallons sitting in the garage and have it ready to go if something happens.

Many of us have probably dreamed about this exact same set up, too.

The one possible drawback to this arrangement is that your entire water supply could be contaminated before you had any warning. Remember Milwaukee and their crypto debacle? Took a while for authorities to notice the higher than expected number of people getting GI problems, then longer to focus on the water supply and finally to test it.

With this continuously re-filling arrangement, all the tanks could be contaminated by the time a warning went out. Or remember that chemical spill into a major river in China that was heading towards Russia? They had warning, but say there was no warning. Again, could contaminate your supply before you knew there was a problem.

That's the only major weakness to this arrangement that I could think of in the past.

Edit: Oh, what I forgot to add yesterday--so one modification I had considered in the past to this kind of water storage arrangement is to add some way to close off or bypass the tanks. Then refresh/refill them only periodically from the municipal supply, and not expose them constantly.

That does remind me of one tidbit I heard mentioned at my CEPA class--after a large earthquake, turn off the water supply to your house.

Two reasons given: 1) Prevents contaminated water (e.g. broken sewer and water mains) from entering your home's water supply. 2) Prevents a drop in pressure in the municipal system, e.g. a water main break down the street, from siphoning the water out of your house's pipes. Although both might apply to your proposed system, benjammin, I'm curious if #2 could happen.

Ha! Wouldn't that really be a shocker--you have all this stored water when the Big One hits, and the morning after the Big One, you find that it all got sucked out of your tanks!

My thoughts as well. From the in-line tank start, you could add an in-line filter/treatment system, a bypass/shut off, a pump, a check valve (so the water you collected can't backflow), and a monitoring station of your own. I wanted to stimulate some thought processes with the initial idea.

This brings to mind another issue. Everyone using a municipal water supply puts a lot of faith in the maintenance of that system by someone else. If we don't exercise a little due diligence on our own part, aren't we as much to blame if something happens and we are adversely affected? I've seen enough "bad" and "very bad" practices in municipal water treatment systems maintenance to know I am ALWAYS suspicious of the end product.

A really paranoid person would plumb separate tanks in parallel and set up a schedule to flush/fill them at staggered times. That way you could have fresh water, water two weeks old, water four weeks old, etc... Kind of like making backup of your computer files.

-Blast

Well, the idea was to keep the water as fresh as possible using as little effort/planning as necessary. I guess it depends on how AR a person is and how much time they have on their hands. I prefer the Ron Popeil approach to emergency preparedness such as this; "set it, and forget it", at least until the filter needs to be changed.

You bring up a good point. I am wondering what type of due dilligence to undertake. Ideally, someting not too expensive or time consuming. Periodic water test with a commercially available kit? Do those kits test for chemicals as well as bacteria?

I would think some type of industrial or agricultural chemical contamination would be as likely as biological contamination, which can be taken care of a lot easier than chemical contamination.

A acquaintance of mine had 3 55-gallon drums in series between the watermain and his house. So when he ran water, it all ran through the drums into his house, maintaining a fresh supply of whatever 3 times 55 gallons is.

The usual issues of contamination arise, but as you note, he didn't worry about his water getting old sitting in a jug in his garage.

I don't know what the water dept. does that keeps water from flowing back into the mains. I assume there's some valve so that if the water in the drums gets contaminated it won't get back into everyone else's water. shrug - Everything's a compromise. We just have to fit them into our style.

I'd be concerned that water would sit in the tanks long enough for the chlorides etc to evaporate, and then bugs could grow in it. Even if the water is flowing through it, I'd expect some parts to get flushed slowly enough for things to grow. I could be wrong and what you propose may be no different to how water sits in the mains on its way to your house, but it's something to check on.

This is more in response to Brangdon's question, but the filtering could be set up on the output end, rather than the input. So contaminants from outside, or anything growing inside your tank, would get filtered as you used the water.

In general, I think it's a good idea to purify stored water at the time of use anyway, although it's probably not necessary in the majority of cases if you've taken some care in storing the water initially.

If the containers are closed, how would the contents evaporate? And if the water is clean going in, where would the bugs be coming from?

Filtering going in would make more sense than filtering going out, wouldn't it? Why contaminate the containers when you might need them most?

Sue