DIY — How to Make Chlorine Bleach from Pool Shock

Here is Tues­day’s DIY for you…  Need to make sure drink­ing water and water you take a bath in is clean?  Not sure how you are going to puri­fy those 50 gal­lon bar­rels of rain water??? Check out this DIY.  Prob­a­bly worth the pur­chase and worth the stor­age space…

Bleach will not last for­ev­er when you buy it in the gro­cery store.  I replace a gal­lon a year gen­er­al­ly just based on the solu­tion weak­en­ing over time.  It is inex­pen­sive enough to replace, but what if you want to store mas­sive amounts of bleach for puri­fy­ing water for long peri­ods of time?

I read a recent post on post SHTF infec­tion, which made me con­sid­er clean­li­ness. Like many oth­ers I store gal­lons of bleach, but how long will a few gal­lons last, and how much room do I want to allo­cate for bleach stor­age? Well I found a way to store 640 gal­lons of bleach in about 1 cubic foot of space.

http://www.thefoodguys.com/howtoclorox.htm

How to Make Chlo­rine Bleach from Pool Shock

Straight off the EPA site…

We bought a 5 lb. bot­tle of “Shock” from Wal­mart for $10.97, you can find it in the pool chem­i­cal sec­tion. Make sure that it is the “Cal­ci­um Hypochlo­rite” not the “Sodi­um”. MAKE SURE IT HAS NO OTHER ADDITIVES!!!!!!!!!!!

This 5 lb. bot­tle makes 640 gal­lons of “stock chlo­rine” (elim­i­nates pur­chas­ing 640 gal­lons of bleach). Each of these 640 gal­lons of stock chlo­rine dis­in­fects 200 gal­lons of water. For a total of 128,000 gal­lons of clean drink­ing water for the cost of one bot­tle of “Shock”. And think of the space it’ll save.

Direc­tions are at http://www.epa.gov/ogwdw000/faq/emerg.html or as fol­lows:

GRANULAR CALCIUM HYPOCHLORITE.

Add and dis­solve one heap­ing tea­spoon of high-test gran­u­lar cal­ci­um hypochlo­rite (approx­i­mate­ly 1/4 ounce) for each two gal­lons of water. The mix­ture will pro­duce a “stock chlo­rine” solu­tion of approx­i­mate­ly 500 mg/L, since the cal­ci­um hypochlo­rite has an avail­able chlo­rine equal to 70 per­cent of its weight. (THESE STOCK CHLORINE GALLONS ARE LIKE BLEACH GALLONS)

To dis­in­fect water, add the clorine solu­tion in the ratio of one part of chlo­rine solu­tion to each 100 parts of water to be treat­ed. This is rough­ly equal to adding 1 pint (16 0z.) of stock chlo­rine to each 12.5 gal­lons of water to be dis­in­fect­ed. To remove any objec­tion­able chlo­rine odor, aer­ate the water by allow­ing the water to stand exposed to the air for a few hours or by pour­ing it from one clean con­tain­er to anoth­er sev­er­al times.

As always if the water is col­ored or cloudy add more of the solu­tion (EPA says for reg­u­lar Chlo­rine Bleach to dou­ble the amount of chlo­rine used).