*** Check Your Water Jugs ***

I use 8 water jugs and get water from the town, only since it is treated and we have a well.

The jugs I have, have an expiration date of 2-6-2020, so I decided to get rid of them. I cut the bottoms out, just so they fit in the recycle bin downtown.

Every one of the 8 jugs had a grit on the bottom. I scraped some out and looked at them with a magnifying glass. It looks like the frosted color of the jugs.

The grit is smaller than a grain of sand. I think it is the jug starting to fall apart.

Dump the water out of one of your jugs and see if you're having the same problem, just to be on the safe side.

rick1 wrote:I use 8 water jugs and get water from the town, ...

What exactly do you mean by 'water jugs'? Are they like the camping water containers? Jugs you purchase water in? Just wondering

ReadyMom wrote:

rick1 wrote:I use 8 water jugs and get water from the town, ...

What exactly do you mean by 'water jugs'? Are they like the camping water containers? Jugs you purchase water in? Just wondering

The one gallon jugs of water that you buy from the store. Sorry, had a brain fart.

rick1 wrote:

ReadyMom wrote:

rick1 wrote:I use 8 water jugs and get water from the town, ...

What exactly do you mean by 'water jugs'? Are they like the camping water containers? Jugs you purchase water in? Just wondering

The one gallon jugs of water that you buy from the store. Sorry, had a brain fart.

Thanks! Those store-bought gallons are notorious for breaking down. I stopped buying them for any  storage use. I had stored mine in storage totes and was so glad I did, because they popped pin-hole leaks and lost all their water.  Now I use the camping 7-gallon jugs to store water long-term.

Edited to add:  For some reason, a couple of my camping jugs also leaked. I'm thinking maybe I didn't leave enough head room for expansion. I keep the jugs in the garage and in the winter it gets REALLY cold out there. So, they cracked slightly. I'm fixing them with the flexi-seal spray. We'll see if that works as good as they say on TV!

Never sit a plastic water container on a hard surface, such as concrete (even the inside of a tote, for the cheap 1 gal jugs). There is a common, but relatively unknown problem of contact point pressure, and it will cause leaks. A quarter inch (or more) layer of styrofoam, bubble wrap, or other padding can prevent this.  

I have seen a lot of articles on water storage, many of them show water barrels on wood pads or pallets, one even said the rain barrel instructions said not to sit on concrete, but he didn't know why. I haven't seen one yet that addresses the reason.

No plastic container is perfect (the cheap one gallon jugs even have a weld across the bottom) so when set on a hard surface, they create a few contact points under them (sometimes visible when empty) that generate a lot of strain in the material around the contact point, and eventually (usually in a few months) this will cause a leak.

(None of this will help with freezing, of course.)