House Project: Fun With Bleach

I have mentioned previously that the water tank wasn't properly cleaned before putting it into service, and after removing gobs of mud and a bit of algae, the water looked much better. At the time, I ran out of paper towels while cleaning the interior of the tank, so the last 1/4 of the tank still had a slight greenish tinge to the walls--but I thought, "Good enough."

Well, no. The water was beginning to get a little green again--enough so that my wife wasn't keen on using the bathtub. Looking in the water tank was grim. So after leaving a whining message for my builder, I searched the web and found out that the correct solution to algae is bleach--about 1/6 of an cup for every ten gallons of water (at the Clorox standard of 5.25% sodium hypochlorite).

Well, this worked. We found an industrial strength version of Clorox at Lowe's (but not at Home Depot), and we poured in about 15 gallons of the stuff. Then, on Sunday afternoon, we started emptying the tank through the frost-free spigot, to avoid unnecessarily running dead algae through the filters. (The frost-free spigot feeds directly from the water tank, gravity fed, and no filtration.)

By the time we came back a few hours later, the combination of genocide against algae and draining the water tank had substantially cleared up the water coming out of the taps. Of course, it now smelled strongly of bleach, so we just kept draining. By Monday evening, the water from the taps smells fine. It still isn't quite as clear as I would like--and a little green frog jumped into the water tank before I started pouring the Clorox in-- but I think the solution is to repeat the cleaning operation--and not run out of paper towels this time.

I believe the solution is Saturday morning:

1. Drain the water tank.

2. A few hours later, climb inside and vacuum it out.

3. Spray the interior with Clorox.

4. Wipe down the interior with paper towels.

5. Refill the tank.

Last house project entry.