Silver Bullet

[Nords]

We always christened our (boat drinking) water tank every season with a pint (or two) of vodka (in the tank!). Don't know if it worked or not, but who am I to argue with generations of boat lore...

I like that idea!

During my submarine years I was afforded many opportunities to inspect tanks & voids to ensure they were clean and ready to be closed out. It's a rite of passage for the crew to invite a young officer to enter a tank and lose their lunch in it.

You would think that the sewage tanks would be the worst. They were actually cleaner than the tanks which held "gray water" from sinks & showers.

But the tanks that were by far the worst were the potable water tanks. The distilled water was treated with bromine (chlorine is a very bad thing on a submarine) which made the water "potable" but did not render the tank hostile to life. Some kind of grass was actually growing in there before the tank cleaning.

I think we should've given serious consideration to vodka as a potable-tank disinfectant. Who'd care whether or not it worked?

If it's any consolation, the engineering plant's main lubricating oil tanks and the sail area (masts & antenna and voids) were no picnic either. But at least I never had to drink their contents.

Here is a pdf download of the history of water treatment from a water treatment plant.

If that was a Wikipedia article it'd be flagged for citations... for example, the link between bacteria and disease wasn't established until long after Ben Franklin was dead, and there's some dispute whether he ever made that quote.

 

[NW-Bound]

Don't know about vodka, but I always fill the RV clean water tank with a strong bleach solution (1/2 cup in a 35-gal tank), run through all the pipes, and let it sit at least 24 hours before draining it all out and refill.

And boy, it is difficult to get rid of that super strong chlorine smell afterwards. So, I don't know if anything can survive that, although I cannot look inside the tank and pipes to see what would be growing. I also drain everything between trips.

On top of that, for drinking, I pass the water through a portable 3-stage filter that supposedly can screen out microbial cysts, guardia, as well as lead, etc... So far so good.

 

[Gumby]

During my submarine years I was afforded many opportunities to inspect tanks & voids to ensure they were clean and ready to be closed out. It's a rite of passage for the crew to invite a young officer to enter a tank and lose their lunch in it.

Ahhh, diving the tanks. When I was DCA on the Carver, I dove every single tank on the boat, as well as all the bilges. I remember it fondly (some more fondly than others). Never lost my lunch.

 

[Nords]

Ahhh, diving the tanks. When I was DCA on the Carver, I dove every single tank on the boat, as well as all the bilges. I remember it fondly (some more fondly than others). Never lost my lunch.

DCA & QAO on USS JAMES MONROE, in charge of the wardroom's Junior Officer Tank-Diving Training Team program. "If you have an open manhole, we have the man." That slogan was always good for a few snickers from the crew.

Unfortunately a few of our JOs had weaker constitutions than my Auxiliary Division machinist's mates, and not even an EAB mask could keep them from bazooka puking. I had to write off three EABs before we got that issue under control. The Supply Officer wanted me to turn them in for proper surveying but he changed his mind after I gave him the first one.

This is my daughter's favorite sea story, heaven help her:
Sea story: “Hand me a dustpan!” | Military Retirement & Financial Independence

 

[M Paquette]

Sea story: “Hand me a dustpan!” | Military Retirement & Financial Independence

Urk! You win...

Best I got is a ladder in an "empty" ballast tank. Found before we left dry dock...

 

[Nords]

Urk! You win...
Best I got is a ladder in an "empty" ballast tank. Found before we left dry dock...

Jerome was kind of unusual, even for an A-Ganger. When he left the service he became a professional wrestler and eventually rose to CEO of a wrestling league. He even IPO'd the company, although it was 1999 and you can predict how long that lasted.

He earned some retirement money from the IPO shares and has some amazing wrestling stories/photos to go with his sea stories/photos.

I hope that ladder went into the ballast tank after your boat went into the drydock, and wasn't left there during new construction...

 

[Nords]

Back on topic for a minute.

I subscribe to Rice University's newsletter, and here's some research from their silver experts:
Ions, not particles, make silver toxic to bacteria

Scientists have long known that silver ions, which flow from nanoparticles when oxidized, are deadly to bacteria. Silver nanoparticles are used just about everywhere, including in cosmetics, socks, food containers, detergents, sprays and a wide range of other products to stop the spread of germs.
But scientists have also suspected silver nanoparticles themselves may be toxic to bacteria, particularly the smallest of them at about 3 nanometers. Not so, according to the Rice team that reported its results this month in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters.
In fact, when the possibility of ionization is taken away from silver, the nanoparticles are practically benign in the presence of microbes, said Pedro Alvarez, George R. Brown Professor and chair of Rice’s Civil and Environmental Engineering Department.

 

[Amethyst]

Why pay for silver, when copper apparently works pretty well? Of course you do need to use a lot of it. No putting a penny in the bottom of the water barrel to keep it clean.

P.S. The house I grew up in (built in late 50's) had copper water pipes.

Antimicrobial properties of copper - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Amethyst

 

[MooreBonds]

Why pay for silver, when copper apparently works pretty well? Of course you do need to use a lot of it. No putting a penny in the bottom of the water barrel to keep it clean.

P.S. The house I grew up in (built in late 50's) had copper water pipes.

Antimicrobial properties of copper - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Amethyst

As a plumbing engineer, I was somewhat familiar with the antimicrobial properties of copper pipes...but had no idea the level of anti-microbial protection afforded to a variety of copper alloys, as cited in Amethyst's Wiki link!

Granted, I know there are many other factors to consider, but when you read that several bateria/germ strains had up to 99.9% kill rates within 90-270 minutes on copper-alloy surfaces, whereas stainless steel surfaces had zero kill rates, it starts to make you wonder why you don't see more copper surfaces in hospitals (for example). I realize that stainless steel is usually preferred because of the resistance to reactivity (among other factors), but it makes you wonder what marketing arm has kept copper out of the picture given apparently many studies in the past?

I know that Elkay (major sink bowl manufacturer) is starting to pushing out a few models of copper sink bowls, and is trying to tout the anti-microbial properties of it....but from the healthcare rojects I've been involved in, I don't know of any where the hospital's staff infection control person ever voiced any preference for a copper bowl sink (or any other copper surfaces).

 

[braumeister]

Brewing vessels were made mostly of copper for many hundreds of years. Gradually over the last century, stainless steel vessels replaced them, due to both cost issues and their easier cleaning and sanitizing.

However, beginning in the last quarter of the last century, many brewers learned that their yeast were not as healthy as they had been. It seems that copper, in trace amounts, is an essential micronutrient for brewer's yeast (as it is for us).

So today, most breweries, even the largest ones, have at least one piece of copper somewhere in the system to provide this trace element. It may not be visible when you look at the vast expanse of stainless steel in a modern brewery, but there is a high likelihood that a small piece of copper is in there somewhere just for this purpose.