Storage

The first time I shocked a drum of stored water, I did it by memory and did it wrong. I had two barrels that had sat through a hot summer, and instead of pulling a test strip and checking what the chlorine residual actually was, I dosed from habit, swirled it around with a length…

The morning I pulled the drum bungs at Carla’s place, the first drum smelled like a cellar. She had her hand on the second bung before I’d finished sniffing the first, and she said the same thing she always says: “Water doesn’t go bad, Gus. It’s water.” She was holding a garden trowel, of all…

Late March, eleven at night, rain on the metal roof. I am in the garage with a headlamp on, a test strip in one hand and the cap off the first of two drums. The strip’s pad has gone the color of weak tea. That drum was filled in October, sealed clean, kept dark. The…

A neighbour asked me last fall whether the two drums in her garage were still good after three years. She had filled them during a dry summer and then forgot about them. That is the most common thing I hear. People set water aside once and treat it like a fence post. Water is not…

A drum of treated water, capped and cool, does not stay “as good as the day you filled it.” That is the belief. It is wrong because water in a closed container is not frozen in time. It keeps reacting — with the air left in the headspace, with the plastic walls, with the chlorine…

The thing that started this post was a number on a rental slip: something like a small daily amount, I think, for a food-grade tote the feed store lets out for people flushing stock tanks. A small daily amount for a plastic box that had been sitting in the sun behind the store since spring,…

The first water storage system worth building is a barrel, a spigot, and a calendar. Two drums in the garage Start with treated water in a container you can seal. That is the whole system. A hand pump sits on the shelf next to them because a drum without a way to get water out…

A man at the co-op last month had a pickup bed full of blue barrels and a question for me. He said his brother told him to rinse them out with bleach and let them dry in the sun, but his wife said that was how you got sick. He wanted to know who was…

The first thing I see most mornings is the gauge on the pressure vessel in the utility room. It hangs off a tee by the well line, needle seeming to hold around fifty pounds unless something is wrong. Last October it seemed to bounce between twenty and sixty, fast, like a heartbeat. The pump was…