Shelf life of bottled water?

M

maury

Joined
Sep 24, 2000
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606
Anyone have any idea of how long bottled spring water can be safely stored? I am talking about the supermarket variety that comes in sealed plastic gallons. Thanks.
 
I would guess many years. However, while we'd like to believe that bottled water was collected via boiling & condensation methods, there are horror stories (veracity of stories is left to the reader) of ordinary city water being bottled at the plants and distributed into stores for retail sale. Like other emergency supplies, water should be rotated through your stored inventory (replacing what you use) to keep it fresh.

Also, I read that the plastic used to make the cloudy translucent jugs are water vapor permeable. Thus you can have less-than-full jugs of water with the original seal intact.

The plastic used to make the clear bottles (e.g. water in plastic bottles like those used for Coke, Pepsi, & other soda pop) apparently does not leak water vapor and so does not have this problem.
 
kept in a cool dark place, I'd expect at least 5 years. I think 2 years is the manufacturer/bottler's recommended use by date in most circumstances... but that's usually very conservative estimates.
 
Anyone can put bottled water and supplements out for sale with no FDA or any regulation at all. Be very careful which brands you buy.
 
many of the milk jug type bottles are made of degradable plastic, and will not keep for long term storage,i had one of the two gallon units leak after about 2 years, stored in a basement so no sunlight exposure.

alex
 
Is there anything that can be added to the water to make it last longer, other than chlorine?

I heard somewhere that tea had disinfectant quality, and lots of bottled drinks have preservatives. In the past I have kept a hiking water bottle smelling good for longer between washes by adding a bit of diet cola to the water.

Have also seen water in a glass Perrie bottle (don't think that it was the original contents) that was left in a car too long, it had LOTS of gundge floating about in it. Very green!

Chris
 
There are 5 people living in my household, and at any given time, there could be as many as 7-8 staying over night. I keep some 80 gallons of water in 1gal bottles (new as purchased from the market) stored away with purchase dates written on them in permanent marker.

I also have maybe 10 such bottles which I refill as needed with filtered water (refills are much cheaper than new). I rotate in the stored bottles every few months and recycle older refills. I try not to keep any of the new ones for more than a year or maybe 15 months.

In otherwords, my entire collection of 80 or so gallons gets recycled (first into refills, then to plastic recycling) every year to 15 months. I've been doing this for 10 years now without any problems.
 
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