Treating fresh water with bleach

While I share the concern for safe drinking water, I believe it can be misleading to think that by merely adding bleach to the tank water, you can have "safe" drinking water.

There are several reasons for this, including, drinking bleach is not healthy. We have been drinking "bottled" water for many years to avoid the chlorine bleach and flouride additives to our public drinking water, both of which are toxic within our bodies.

Another reason is that merely adding bleach does not guarantee that all pathogens are "killed" that exist in much of our public drinking waters. I'm sure many of you have read about the "outbreaks" of health problems associated with public drinking water from time to time, even though it has been bleached and flourided.

Another reason is that the tank water in our GBs may (most do) contain very toxic amounts of lead and/or other metals. The reasons for this are that the solder used to manufacture the tanks normally has high lead content and the fact that tank water stays in contact with the metals used to make the tank for long periods of time and therefore absorb more toxins. Keep in mind that chlorine bleach also attacks stainless steel and will pit it. This means that certain portions of the metal alloy is being disolved by the "water". This is not good for the tanks nor for our bodies. Most commercial operations use an iodine solution to sterilize SS, not bleach.

Years ago, being suspicious of this problem, we had the water tested from our tanks and the laboratory results showed very high concentrations of lead. We have not drank tank water ever since, choosing to drink the water from our watermaker instead, even using the water from our watermaker at home instead of bottled water. This also has the added advantage of running the watermaker more frequently thereby avoiding the need to "pickle" the membranes.

There are various ways to minimize the potential problems of drinking tank water involving filtration and/or UV sterilization, or as we do, simply avoiding it all together.

I suggest you define what goals you are attempting to reach and then do the research to achieve them. I doubt that adding bleach to your drinking water will provide "safe" drinking water.