How long do you think bottled water can keep?

I've heard that potentially toxic compounds leach out of the plastic,
and 2 years is the maximum safe storage time.
 
Some plastics are food grade, some are not. And, some toxins can permeate plastic, so don't store your drinking water in the garage.

If you use food grade polyethylene you should be fine. Translucent polyethylene has no coloring added (I believe), and black polyethylene normally uses carbon as a pigment. I have no idea what other colors use, and I am sure it varies.

Some claim polycarbonate leaches things into water, especially when heated.

Water containers (large ones) conforming to National Sanitation Foundation standard NSF-61 are certified to not add contaminants to drinking water. See here:
http://www.nsf.org/business/water_distribution/standard61_overview.asp?program=WaterDistributionSys

You can get small water tanks that carry NSF-61 certification from, for example, Norwesco (or their distributors): www.norwesco.com

These are the tanks that I often specify for small public water systems that I design. You can get a tank that holds several hundred gallons for a couple of hundred bucks. (Water storage is usually around a dollar a gallon.)

If you are worried about it, keep an activated charcoal filter handy for when you do use the water. If you wanted to do long term storage ina Norwesco or similar tank, I would recommend a filter. They don't seal hermetically, so you never know.

The main problem is that the water you put in the tanks has dissolved nutrients in it, so bugs can grow. Theoretically, jugs of distilled water should last forever.

Scott
 
bottle samples had initial antimony levels of about 160 parts per trillion, but six months after sitting in plastic the level had doubled. . . .
Click to expand...

You can pretty much ignore that kind of concentration, especially when you are talking about something that doesn't get drunk every day for weeks and months and years. Start thinking about starting to consider looking it up to see if you should maybe worry when it is 10 times that.

The water you drink from your tap is worse for you. For example, did you know that "lead free" plumbing fixtures can have as much as 8% lead in them? Water sits in you pipes overnight and leaches metals into it. What you do is run the tap for a quart or so before drinking the first water from it. And then there are the carcinogenic byproducts from chlorine, and bacteria from biofilms in the pipes, and the one on 10,000 pathogens that make it through the system's treatment system, and. . .

So a antimony in the less-than-parts-per-billion range represents a pretty negligible risk. When they say "small doses" cause this or that ailment, I think they are talking several hundred parts per million (and a lot of water at that), not per billion, and much less per trillion.

Scott
 
I've drank bottled water that has sat for over a year almost two and it was fine, I would think if its sterile when it went in it should be good as long as its in a cool dry dark place.
 
I have random bottles sit around, for long periods on end. God only knows why....

I had a couple year old bottle of Evian that was just fine to drink (didn't cause any illness) when I drank. It was sealed, so I wasn't too worried about bacteria or anything.

I pulled one of my GI 1QT canteens that has been partially filled since October (never emptied remaining water out) and drank it, with no ill effects. It had been filled with tap water.

I don't recommend what I did, but I'm still here.
 
How about consuming it regularly???? I.E. we drink bottled water daily in our house, therefore, we don't have to worry about 'rotating' as we buy and drink it, but there is ALWAYS a sufficient supply on hand. It's just like food, don't stock up for 'storage', stock up and use regularly always resupplying what you've used. Store what you eat, and eat what you store, now it's just water that you'd have to do that with.

We typically have around 15-20 gallons of bottled water in the closet at any one time and have the only access to the building's TWO 60 gallon water heaters! ;)
 
The bottled water I buy has a sell by type of date on it which is generally about 18 months from when I buy it, which seems good. I rotate through it.
 
If it's pure water & sealed, it should be fine for many many years, although they'd probably want to give you an "expiration date" or "rotation date" to keep you drinking it or throwing it out (therefore buying more).

No algae, bacteria, or nothin' I know of can live on & contaminate pure water if it's properly sealed. They need carbon to live, and pure H2O just won't do it. Hydrogen and oxygen won't form any kind of organic / other compound if it's not contaminated.
 
bpetty said:
No algae, bacteria, or nothin' I know of can live on & contaminate pure water if it's properly sealed. They need carbon to live, and pure H2O just won't do it. Hydrogen and oxygen won't form any kind of organic / other compound if it's not contaminated.
Click to expand...

Here is a random rundown of some well water from a job I've done. The water satisfactory bacteriologically, but rest assured there are native bacteria in it (just no human pathenogenic bacteria). The water requires no treatment. This gives you and idea of the level of detection too:
Arsenic < 0.002 parts per million (ppm)
Barium < 0.1 ppm
Cadmium < .002 ppm
Chromium < 0.01 ppm
Mercury < 0.0005 ppm
Selenium < 0.005 ppm
Beryllium < 0.003 ppm
Nickel < 0.04 ppm
Antimony < 0.005 ppm <--- Antimony at 160 parts per trillion (0.000160 ppm) is below detection
Thallium < 0.002 ppm
Cyanide < 0.05 ppm
Flouride < 0.2 ppm
Nitrite (as N) < 0.2 ppm
Nitrate (as N) 1.0 ppm
Iron < 0.1 ppm
Manganese < 0.01 ppm
Silver < 0.001 ppm
Chloride 2.0 ppm
Sulfate < 1.0 ppm
Zinc < 0.2 ppm
Sodium 7.0 ppm
Hardness 62 ppm <--- various polyvalent cations reported as CaCO3; that's your carbon source
Conductivity 132 umhos/cm <--- related to total dissolved solids

In a nutshell this is your standard clean well water. There are some things dissolved in it, but most of those weren't tested for specifically. You can assume these would be various nutrients normally found in sediments. The water should be oxygenated, and it has a carbon source (the hardness -- actually the carbonate that comes with it), so you have what is needed for bacteria to grow.

This is the kind of thing most people would fill their water tanks with. It will grow bugs. You can chlorinate it to start, but that will wear out after a while and the bugs can grow back. You can take out the nutrients by reverse osmosis or distillation, which should greatly reduce the bugs' ability to grow. [edit: then you would have the "pure water" bpetty speaks of.]

Note especially that the antimony reported as a concern in the article would not even be detected in this lab test.

Scott
 
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