Drinking the water from your tank?

Tim Good

Tim Good

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Just curious but who drinks the water in your tank or if you take bottled water for drinking?

If you do then what do people do to clean the tank or do you out additives in?

I have flexi bag tank and the water has been sat in it for over a year before I bought the boat. It looks clear and tastes fine but I wouldnt want to swallow it that's for sure.

Advice?
 
if you are concerned about the water quality, then empty the bag/tank, refill, and add a tablet or two of Milton. (The stuff used for baby's bottles).

Bleach can be used as a sterilising agent to disinfect a dirty tank, but the forum chymists have reasoned reservations about using it as a prophylactic.
 
Flush it out, use some sterilising tablets from Boots, repeat if you're not sure, then fill up and use normally. Never take bottled water as I'm too tight to buy it, and too lazy too cart it around when there is usually a tap closer to the boat than the supermarket.
 
We also have a flexible tank ( 50 litre plastimo). At the beginning of every season we flush it out and then treat it with Milton and flush again, and again. We have a carbon filter and drink the water , so far without any ill effects, or any bad taste.
 
I've always drunk our tank water un-boiled & never had a problem. Mostly had rigid tanks which I run out over winter and refill in the spring. The flexi-tanks were more troublesome and I used to use Milton or Puritabs - more problematic because they never dry properly & so the biofilm persists (technical term for the "slime" that lives in plastic pipes).

Maybe I never had a problem because I'm not paranoiac about absolute hygiene as some are and so I'm "used" to a little "challenge" and tolerate it well ??

I'm also too mean to buy bottled water............:D
 
We have two 360 litre tanks. We run them alternatively in use and atend to run them down to about 100 litres and then fill them. If for any reason the water has been in there for more than a couple of months I would probably run it right down by washing the boat with it.

Either way all our drinking water goes through a Seagull filter so is safe to drink.
 
The original 225 litre flexible tanks in my boat were 25 yrs old when I first bought her. When I emptied them for the first time (manual foot pumped) the last few dozen splodges were dark brown in colour with bits in them :eek:

I then chucked in a good dose of bleach, refilled them, pumped them out again, refilled again and pumped out a third time before filling with fresh water.

Fit an in-line filter (which is replaced every Spring) and bung in the specified dose of Puriclean every time you refill or top-up the tanks.
 
We drink the water from our tank and clean our teeth with it. The tank is grp moulded into the keel. We have never opened it up in the 15 years we have had the boat and never added anything to purify it. I think I'd rather drink bacteria than bleach.
 
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We drink ours, no problem. No tablets or sterilising, no filter either.
These are rigid tanks. The flexible tank on our previous boat was another matter - used Milton and a filter as well!
 
I've always drunk boat tank water unless (eg on some cheap old charter boats) it came out obviously smelling or looking suspicious. Never had any trouble. Doesn't apply in Forn Parts where you can't drink the tap water ashore either, of course.

KS has a plastimo bag tank; the existing liner was a bit manky so I replaced it with a new one. Very easy, not too expensive. I could do the same again in a few years if it seemed necessary. Each year I sterilise the tank with powder from a caravan shop (can't remember the name, puri-something, I think). I usually leave it full of a fairly strong mix overnight, then flush out the next day with repeated changes of fresh water till it no longer tastes of anything.

Pete
 
I have a small flexible tank.
I treat the first fill each year with Milton solution at the rate recommended for treating drinking water

I usually try to run some slightly more concentrated solution through the pipe between tank and galley pump.

However because the tank is so small I usually take 5 or 10 litre on board with me for use as drinking water. What's left at the end of a weekend goes into the tank. That almost keeps the tank topped up

On the Westerly on which I have done most of my serious sailing we always used water from the tank for all purposes. I can only remember it being necessary to treat the water/ clean the tank once in about 20 years.

Dose rates for sterilising tanks, water containers and treating drinking water with Milton

Milton is a solution of sodium chloride and sodium hypochlorite.

Milton tablets and other water purifying tablets such as Aquatabs are sodium dichloroisocyanurate, which like sodium hypochlorite, is a source of chlorine.

Boots and some of the major supermarkets may offer products similar to Milton and be cheaper
 
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As I fill up using marina hose that quite possibly has been dunked in the marina I always flush the hose through for a while (no hosepipe ban in Scotland :D) and clean the last couple of feet in a bucket of sterilising solution. Then I top up the tank and chuck in a couple of steritabs.
To ensure palatability the galley tap draws through an inline filter; can't remember the name but it contains activated carbon (charcoal?) and silver iodide crystals (or som'at like that).
 
I Always drink the tank water, and don't put any of that stuff that makes it taste like a swimming pool.

To keep the algae under control, deny them light. Dark tanks and opaque pipework order of the day.
 
VicS said:
I have a small flexible tank.
I treat the first fill each year with Milton solution at the rate recommended for treating drinking water

I usually try to run some slightly more concentrated solution through the pipe between tank and galley pump.

However because the tank is so small I usually take 5 or 10 litre on board with me for use as drinking water. What's left at the end of a weekend goes into the tank. That almost keeps the tank topped up
Click to expand...

Similar here ~50 litre fixed tank filled up as and when (run through with milton once a year) *and* a 10 litre jerrycan with tap. That came with the boat and is strapped in the cabin, a foot from the kettle. We fill it up before row out to the mooring and every couple of days thereafter. Tank water is mainly used for washing & cooking.
 
Ex-SolentBoy said:
We have two 360 litre tanks. We run them alternatively in use and atend to run them down to about 100 litres and then fill them. If for any reason the water has been in there for more than a couple of months I would probably run it right down by washing the boat with it.

Either way all our drinking water goes through a Seagull filter so is safe to drink.
Click to expand...

+1

I would never take bottled water on a yacht -- enough useless carp on board already without that.

My water tanks are high density polyethelene and don't impart any taste to the water. I don't have any greater reservations about water from them than I do about water from the tap at home.

That being said, however, I do use a Seagull filter on what we actually drink :)
 
When you consider the industrial scale on which tap water is treated, pumped and piped, by comparison your tank is probably a fairly clean and friendly place to keep it for a little while before drinking it.
 
Two stainless tanks and a filter on the galley cold tap.
I make sure the tanks are full for winter and before filling I clean the deck around the filler, this also flushes the hose.
The water gets used over winter and spring till I fill again.
I've done it like this for 12 years and all ok so far but I am thinking of also putting a filter on the tank outlet.
 
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