Lowes, and others I'm sure, sell 3.5 gallon water jugs for water coolers. These are sealed, but does anyone know what the shelf life is for the water is these jugs?

Until it evaporates, if you have a method of purifying water.

The general wisdom here about stored water has been to rotate it every 6 months. Water in sterile sealed containers (e.g. Aquablox or those little foil packets) supposedly is good for 5 years, but those things are ridiculously expensive in my opinion. See the campfire forum thread about testing water quality, for some more info.

The Homeland Security web site says 6 months for home-bottled water (bottled with a bit of chlorine), 1 year for commercially bottled water, and 1 year for store self-filled bottles so long as they use "ozonation" to kill nasties in the water.

I'd probably home-bottle and rotate every 4-6 months. If home bottling, make sure you clean the containers first by washing in hot soapy water. Sanitize them with a 1 tablespoon chlorine bleach per gallon of water solution (~200 PPM), shake it and let it sit for a few minutes (at least two). Rinse out the container with clean water.

For storage add 5-7 drops of 5.25% chlorine bleach per gallon of water (~5 PPM) and store in a cool dark place.

These water jugs are clear, I think it would be better to block out light for long term storage.

I just dumped out 2-5 gallon jugs I filled last May. They both stunk of chlorine. I'm beginning to think I'm overpurifying. IIRC I put 5 tablespoons in each jug.

Time to get an eyedropper I guess.

Regards, Vince

Edit: I forgot to add that I also washed each jug out with chlorine before I filled it. Maybe that's what stunk things up?

Wow.

Just for fun, I did the math....

1 tbl == 295 drops (using linux's "units" conversion tool)

So, 5 tablespoons is 1475 drops. If we go with the upper end of the 5 to 7 drop recommendation, that's over 40 times the recommended amount of chlorine. <img src="/images/graemlins/shocked.gif" alt="" />

But let's say you were just finding out it was too much in a situation where you couldn't afford to throw the water away. Any pool people out there? How long would it take for the chlorine to dissipate if the water was left in an open bucket? If the bucket were in the sun? Can you reduce the chlorine content by boiling?

Thats a lot of bleach! <img src="/images/graemlins/shocked.gif" alt="" />

Pool chemisty. Sodium hypochlorite degrades the elemental chlorine to the atmosphere. The rest stay behind.

Thanks guys. These bottle were tinted blue and I would keep them in a dark, cool, dry area. I like the idea of their size, etc. so I might grab a couple. I can always rotate them out. Heck, every summer I can dump them into our 500 gallon pool.