You don't say what the barrels originally contained.

Here is a company that sells field test kits for water:

http://www.hach.com/

Trans, what baffled says is very important: what did the drum contain?

Also what do you consider as clean water?

Where do you live?

I shouldn't use it to immediately drink from as long as I have a different opportunity

(there is a lot of water in beer- just for your info, and the monks invented it just to make and keep the water potable)

The air that surrounds us, through rain into your barrels, deposits also not so desirable contaminants in it.

Your steel barrel, unless Stainless will rust away under you and the plastic drum will release solvents till it drops into pieces, if it has organic destabilizers in it for decomposition.

The most simple test for me is comparing 2 clear glasses: first visuality, how clear the water is, and in one I should drop a chlorine tablet and watch again after a while when dispersed.

Nothing for when you're very thirsty. On the other hand, out of a full drum, you have a serious dilution. Diarrhea is what you risk short term. drink the chlorine one if you can stand the taste.

I should use it to wash my hair, it is very soft (the water).. and to water the flowers.

I was thinking of scrounging some barrels that had been used for oil as used around airports for engine lubrication. Some ideas are better than others, and this may not be a good one to pursue.

Rain water capture has become popular around where I live due to a severe drought some couple of years back. Mostly people have been buying the plastic drums made for that purpose. I was actually thinking steel might be better if you are going to drink the water.

It would appear that cleaning drums is not a good idea, either for steel or plastic, and it is better to buy new purpose dedicated drums.

At our mining site we generate a large number of drums that once at oil products in them. In order to dispose of them at a local scrape yard they require us to steam clean them. We do this in our garage that has an oil water separator.

Hi Trans,

Think what you can do with the oil, and the drum after.

To collect rain water, the best drum or container is made in wood, mainly cedar or other soft but resin rich. Maintain wet all the time, Gil.

Transcendian,

Sorry, just can't resist - Answer: Janitor in a Drum

Hi Transcendian,

It really depends on what kind of residue is in the drum, as Baffled has alluded to.

Are they open-top:

Or closed-top:

?

Some open-top drums have bungs in the lid; some do not. Some drums also can have different coatings on the inside to provide compatibility for certain compounds.

The more info (especially the residue), the better we can direct.

Mike

Hi Transcendian,

Take the comments from Just an Engineer seriously!

The closed top drums won't allow you to burn anything inside as there will be insufficient oxygen for combustion. Even an open top is unlikely for 100% combustion and is not going to eliminate all the toxins anyway.

In my experience of working visits in breweries, food manufacturing and pharmaceutical premises;

In a brewery never drink from a tap/bottle/can outside the dining room

In a food manufacturing plant never eat what is being manufactured - or in transit to the waste dump - buy it in the supermarket

In a pharmaceutical plant avoid touching or sampling the creams and tablets, even the Viagra. If you have a headache go and buy a pain reliever from the corner store.

If you really want to use the drums, turn them into gasifiers and make some cheap energy.

Very good advice. The local distributor of new clean steel drums charges 90 bucks. Think anyway the new range is from 90 to 120. I'm messing with salvaged stuff intended for a student transient market.

Even when CR4 is at its lowest points, like now, lower than ever before, it is still a lifesaver.

I used to stay up till 1 or 2 every night. There was usually 3 hours a night that I would write poems or essays, or work on a novel. I'd set deadlines for myself, and do the work, and that was that.

These days, those days are gone and 10:30 PM, and I want to go to bed weekdays or weekend.

Thanks a lot for letting us know what drums to look for as good to pick up if you come across them.

P.S. I am avoiding making full sense and fully focusing these days here in hopes of helping us all understand the animal brain. No technical focus out of me at all these days. I have become a squirrel, a cat, and am no longer reliable like a dog might me.

I intend to look for 55 gallon drums of eggs from now on.

I understand, my friend.

Maybe you just need a break and then you may find inspiration to go back to writing. I hope you do.

I though modern anti-depressives have made the act of writing poetry redundant.

You can probably get remanufactured drums for around $50

A reworked drum will have been burned out & recoated inside & out

the inside coating is generally food grade

Don't give up- now if you wander over here;

http://cr4.globalspec.com/thread/54985/Why-Has-No-One-Thought-of-This-or-Where-do-I-Purchase

with all your 55 gallon drums and a welder and you weld them all end to end into a tall stack, fill them with rainwater, you could create your own pumped storage hydro plant!

Here's three links:

drums http://www.usplastic.com/catalog/default.aspx?catid=459&parentcatid=458

drum liners http://www.usplastic.com/catalog/item.aspx?itemid=23747&catid=455

Tanks & Accessories

http://www.usplastic.com/catalog/default.aspx?catid=838&parentcatid=-1

I am a water engineer by profession and education. I have a steel barrel that came from a company that owns coin operated car washes. I assumed it was containing soap as the labels were either scratched off or otherwise rendered unreadable.

I proudly carted the free barrel home, and stuck a garden hose down in the hole in the top (integral, non-removable top with two threaded holes for inserting a siphon pump) and flushed it for two days allowing it to sit in the sun to heat as well. I then took a sample to the water analysis lab at the agency where I was employeed at that time.

IT turns out that the drum contained a very concentrated engine degreaser and my flushing had had little impact, if I HAD chosen to taste the water, it could have killed me. While it was full of water to prevent having any fumes that would respond to a spark, I cut the top off, cut vents in the bottom and have used it as a burn barrel. At the end of the first year, the bottom was gone and the sides for the first half foot or so are paper thin and you can put your finger thru it very easily.

seeing clear water does NOT mean it is Clean, only that it does not contain contaminants that discolor, cloud or otherwise become evident visually. That is all !!!

Burning a barrel to clean it, as noted before, ruins the quality of the steel drum and it will rust very, very rapidly. also, for proper burning, you need to supply Oxygen to the bottom and either will ruin it cutting vents OR not reach everywhere inside and not do a thorough job. Additionally there are many items that burning will not remove and may actually bring them out and make things worse than when you started (lead is a good example)

From the same car wash company I did get 14 plastic 55 gal drums that I carefully selected from those that I could read the labels and knew were water soluble soap concentrates. I made sure I had fitted plugs for each of the two bung holes in the tops and after flushing out, installed the plugs and they were used by an associate for a floating pier at his home on the Chesapeake Bay. My fee for providing the plastic barrels is the occasional invite to go out on his boat with him.

IN CONCLUSION -

the advice you have gotten here is sound.

1. do not clean a barrel by burning, this destroys the barrel and will not do a complete job anyway.

2. under NO circumstance consider a used barrel for drinking water, unless you are very very VERY certain of when and where it was filled/emptied and how it was handled after original opening. (Think about it, if they cost $90 or $100 bucks each, why do they give then away free when emptied? Because a new barrel is CHEAPER than cleaning and assuming liability for a used one).

3. plastics can absorb and hold chemicals that will then slowly leach back into the water you pass thru the barrel in storage of rain water, etc. Most countries are, or have already, enacted regulations requiring plastics that are not recovered for recycling to have (built-into the plastic) chemicals that cause rapid breakdown and decomposition to protect the environment from the long term effects of plastics in our landfills.

You might consider touching base with the nearest brewery for used oak barrels that cannot be used for aging thier product any longer and will be burned or sold en-bulk to be disposed of.

where the top & bottom of a steel drum are roll crimped on with a bead gasket there is no way to get all the contaminates out. the joints will leach the previous contents out into the water in small amounts. a drum that contained mineral oil would be pretty safe after cleaning but remember they were not designed to hold water & they will rust out. most of the materials shipped in them like petrochemicals & paint prevent corrosion. the rusting process itself will contaminate the water. rainwater carries down a lot of things that attack steel. a steel drum may last you a year if you keep it painted & off the ground before it starts rusting out & leaking. a plastic drum can last 5 years or more if you keep the sun off of it.

Much good advice here! I made rain barrels for a garden project at a housing project. I used plastic barrels that had soap,but were cleaned and rinsed well.I bored a hole near the bottom, inserted a threaded faucet with a rubber washer outside the drum. Inside I used a steel washer and an electrical box nut. I siliconed both sides. We connected a 4" rectangular to round adapter to the gutter down spout and ran 4" flex line drain to the barrel. I cut a hole in the removable lid for the flex line. Its good to use open head drums so you can do the plumbing inside. The water is fine for watering a garden, but I wouldn't drink it due to all the "stuff" in the air. I don't eat snow creme, either for the same reason.

Hi Trans,

First, we cannot use steel drum for water. Steel is "rusting".

If drum contained solvent, let evaporate if allowed. Rinse and use for another solvent or non-rusting products.

Soaps and other detergents can be washed out and contained for further use or disposal. Check what you can dispose.

What's the question about steel drums and water contamination? Rust can be the contaminant? Could be!

What you want to do with the collected water? Specify and get specific answers, Gil.

With all that has been said on this subject I have the the perfect answer to the cleaning of your 55 gallon drums

One stick of gelegnite/drum will do it.

That must've been one hell of a day of fishing!

Way to go..............expanding bait!!

Look up a product called "Hurrisafe". It is 100% biodegradable and cleans ANYTHING. It was originally designed to clean landing wheel tire rubber off of runways. Amazing stuff.

Trans,

As I was able to read through most all the posts, it looks like you've freed yourself of the thought of using a used drum as a potable water container.

Just from a shipping perspective we have to triple-rinse all our drums before we can even transport them... the difference between DOT and RCRA Empty.

However, if you are serious about reclaiming rain water... here's a couple suggestions:

First, always view rain water as non-potable. As soon as the vapor condenses in the clouds, it begins to pickup contaminates. Falling through the smoggy atmosphere, onto a dirty roof, down a gutter that has not been cleaned in years, across the porous concrete. Yeah, no... rain water should not be considered potable. Converting non-potable rain water to potable water should be a separate project you can undertake after building your cistern.

I had put a cistern in at my old house. I placed it under ground and it was of poured concrete construction, it was about 300 gallons in size. When I first started, I had no clue about rain water collection, or how to build a cistern so I found the perfect resource...

The Agricultural Extension of our State University. They had engineering drawings of different types and even came out and assisted with its construction and installation. Little did I know at the onset that my idea to collecting rain water to water my garden would turn into a Grad Student's field project. Now instead of just watering the garden, I was also used it as the water feed to my workshop's WC.

Once gardening season and rainy season was over, I opened a bypass valve to feed well water to the WC and boiled whatever was left in the cistern and put it in wooden barrels. I'd use this as a supply for watering house plants and supplying the humidifiers we had to run in the winter months.

That property is long since gone, but it was pretty cool. What I have now are my remaining wooden barrels located under our gutter downspouts.

JavaHead

Nothing against the other posters, but I still don't know what you plan to do with the water. A buddy of mine uses 55 gal plastcic barrels for holding rainwater (no treatment, and for secondary use in "greywater" applications.

The idea is to minimize the use of treated/potable water. Use the questionably collected and stored water for cleaning, flushing and irrigation (use a 3 way solenoid on your dishwasher/washing machine fill. Cistern water for prerinse/wash, treated for final rinse). What you have left after use is "greywater", perfectly serviceable for flushing toilets.

After "enrichment" by use transporting "organic wastes", the resulting "blackwater" can in turn be fractionated into compostable wastes (downwind, please) and even methane generation.

Can't remember the guy my buddy did this for, somewhere up around Crawford, Texas. Name has a "W" in it, though. NEat passive solar installations, too, and geothermal chill water too.

Really what has been going on to prompt some of my questions of late has to do with the guy I am working with, and for. Truly he is a borderline hoarder. He has a Surplus Store and sells military surplus clothing, rents or sells props and costumes for Halloween or Movies and Theater, and otherwise creates or finds what he calls Frankenstein Furniture.

He sold a 300 gallon Plastic thing for water collection the other day, and some people had come by to look at a barrel he has that was apparently cut to allow for yard waste etcetera to the thrown in for composting.

Since there is some demand for vessels to hold rainwater I thought I'd see if it was possible, or advisable, to salvage some for the purpose, cheap. The typical customers to the place are trying to find a deal.

Course some knowledgeable collectors come in now and then. (One came in the other day and bought a flag that had flown over some important battleship for 900 bucks for instance. So it is a place where one might find actual historical artifacts of great value, or 20 dollar tables and 8 dollar chairs for your student days rental apartment in a town you intend to leave as soon as you graduate.

I myself used to stop into the place about once a week and look around. Infact I have long had the habit of building furniture out of whatever wood I could get my hands on for my own purposes. I am a great lover of 3/4 or 1/2 plywood, and a screwgun. Course I am also a lover of a compressor and a brad nailer, but I don't have one. I use a good deal of finish 1 and 5 eighths finish screws.

I love birch 3/4 inch plywood.

Truly I am aware that some things cost what they cost, and take what they take.

I really wasn't very happy when the new administration canceled the Can We Make a Better Government Thread that Garthh had started in 2007. I have been happy to withdraw some from the forum, but still have friends around.

I really appreciate the insights provided for free, for it would be unethical for me to ever sell anything that I did not understand as fully as possible.

In relation to my interest on Shipping Container Housing for Haiti I was for the use of 55 gallon drums for water collection. I now know that either food barrels or new barrels steel, or plastic are superior for those applications. I also know that a few drops of Clorox go a long way. In Haiti the advantage of rainwater, which is not perfect, is still that it will have less salt in it.

I was influenced towards steel barrels since most all the Water Tanks and towers I've seen are made of steel. Course I am aware that cedar tanks for building pressure are made of cedar. Saw plenty of those in Manhattan on tall building roofs.

P.S. My theory about the rise in the market for bottle water is that bottled water took off when it was reported that fallout from Chinese above ground testing of their Nuclear bombs was putting plutonium into the reservoirs supplying NYC.

It is also reported that for water that is treated with Iodine, powdered Gatorade is nice to have to cover the taste.

P.S. 2 I'm real sad that CR4 is forcibly stunted. It is still valuable, but I'd say many have taken the cues from administration and gone away. I am very interested in politics and engineering and arts all at the same time. I see laments that politicians don't understand science or engineering, but see CR4 administrators driving away those who grasp the interconnected nature of knowledge.

While it is true that my political invention Transcendia is extremely weak, I have tried to be a model both in my concepts, and as an individual.

Might seem grandiose, but what the hell, there was a time my hero US Grant walked around town picking up sticks in a thread bare US Army issued coat. I'm sure no better than he.

Here in the US, the FDA is preparing to intensify regulations on chemical compounds used to mold plastic bottles. The leaching of the chemistry into beverages and the affects on human health is the prime concern.

Since molded 55 gallon drums are not usually designed with your purpose in mind, you may want to explore this before selecting them as cisterns for potable water.

Steel drums can be cleaned pretty thoroughly using a mixture of about 30 pounds of sand, aggregate, ten gallons of water and a quart of chlorine bleach. Cap the drum, lay it on it's side and place it on a pair of motor driven rollers, about 6 inches in diameter, perhaps 4 feet long and spaced about 20" apart. Let the drum spin for 30 minutes.

It's not rocket science. It merely replicates the environment created by hobbyist for polishing stones or reloaders for spent brass.

Of course the drums would have to be flushed afterwards but the inside will be clean, polished and sanitized too. Rotational time will vary depending on internal deposits and the extent of any scaling.

L.J.

Sorry I'm late Trans

Had a few things to get on track and keeping them there will take up even more time in the future. Here is what I would do to make the drums usable for storing drinking water.

1. Find a 55 gallon, or better larger, plastic bag. PET or some other food grade plastic.

2. Stuff the bag into the drum. Nice and tidy. Think of your girl friend.

3. Fill with water and make it expand inside the drum while making sure that the fill in part does not disappear down the small entrance.

4 Secure fill hole to drum. If you use a larger size bag there should be plenty of it out side of the drum.

5. Create a plug to seal it all off. Use a soft rubber inflatable ball maybe. If you have a tennis ball that might fit snug in.

6. If you have an air compressor you could start with air first.

Cost: $2 per drum, max

time: 10minutes per drum

Cost for tennis ball, thingo, eff all.

Conclusion: drinking water, never mind what was in the drum before.

Sorry if any one suggested this before, but it was a bit confusing and time consuming to go through all the posts, so I leaped here instead.

A bag in a drum!

How is that for fun?

The wrinkles can't be seen,

'cause there's steel in between

That's about as far as I want to go with poetry, good luck, Ky.

Hello ky,

I tried that tact in post #16 but no traction:

http://cr4.globalspec.com/comment/571995/Re-Use-a-liner

Works for me. Thanks, Ky.

I've not seen barrel liners in my hardware store. There may be a market for them.

I have cut the tops off barrels with a Cooper Tool made for that.

Far as salvaged steel barrels at a dirty dock in Haiti, or anywhere else, it does sound as if cutting the top off is recommended. I have strong doubts from what I hear or read about life in Haiti, that the consistent adherence to proper procedures will be universally adopted, especially if it calls for the purchase of barrel liners.

Might try somehow to make up a simple clean that doesn't require grid or generator energy.

If Shipping Containers are used as cisterns then we need to clean them as well. They may well have plywood floors that are full of poisons. Floor liners for them may be a good idea for pressure treated wood is full of copper and arsenic.

On NPR last night I caught bits of a report about USAID, other NGOs, Mangos and reflections on the conflicts between duty, culture, and those who understand Haitians are not about to fix things as we might fix a problem in a linear and practical fashion.

While Haiti is in dire straits, I wonder about another French legacy, Mali, which is landlocked. It seems that Mali is in fact right now, worse off than Haiti, for it is landlocked, and in Africa.

I do think that in these cases how the French deal with both countries is worth considering and focusing on. I simply can't see how Haiti will be set right in short, medium, or long term, without agreements impossible to obtain when no one in the other spheres can speak the language.

P.S. I'm told that Federal Law requires wooden barrels to be cut in half after their life as Whiskey, or Beer barrel work.

On NPR last night I caught bits of a report about USAID, other NGOs, Mangos and reflections on the conflicts between duty, culture, and those who understand Haitians are not about to fix things as we might fix a problem in a linear and practical fashion.

Very true and to that end I suggest dig a hole line with whatever netting material is at hand and then apply plaster to the inside of the hole, allow to dry then use as cistern.

P.S. I'm told that Federal Law requires wooden barrels to be cut in half after their life as Whiskey, or Beer barrel work.

I heard that Burbon barrels are sold to Scottish distillers for ageing of Scotch. How do they get around the law?

I think that's a Jim Beam company policy never heard is was law

I was told it was a Federal Law to cut the wooden barrels in half, a few days ago.

I think you have been mis-informed

http://www.usedwinebarrels.com/fullbarrels.htm

I noticed that after a dry spell, the water coming off the roof has lots of dirt, pollen, leaves, bird poop and sand from shingles. Plus any pollutants scrubbed from atmosphere. OK for irrigation but drinking.

Nutrition and fiber bonus!!

There should be varying degree of filtration to remove debris before drinking...Iodine will permit purification too.

Fill it with squirrels, leave 'em in there for half an hour then tip 'em out.
Del
Annon