Water Charge from WAPA?

Wapa charges about 22 cents/gal according to their office here on stx. I went thru almost 3,000 gallons and thought the way she said it my bill was going to be $600.

Marco Water Truck charges 55 cents per gallon on the smallest truck.

Linda, are you sure that's correct?? I have a cistern, so I have no idea, but that doesn't sound right.

My bill ended up being $64 for water usage plus their other charges. Yep - 22cents per gallon

I think it's more like .02 a gallon.

RL

the Marco's water service on STX charges $150 for a 5000 gallon truck... so 3 cents per gallon.

Most of the condos that don't include water, have a metered rate anywhere from 3 cents to 7 cents per gallon.

Purified water to fill small containers is 50 Cents a gallon at the water machine.

Linda - your numbers come out to 2.2 cents per gallon, which is at least reasonable! That pesky decimal!

So, I guess all I have left is my beauty. Boy am I in trouble!

BTW - from a source that works for a water delivery company:
Be careful of using less than reputable water delivery services. Some of them short change the delivery amount.
So you might be paying... what? 4 cents per gallon?
Also, while the water delivered is potable, be careful when they mix it with the cistern water, it still should be treated/filtered.
And keep in mind, when you hold out on filling your cistern because "it will rain any day now", and go dry, expect to have a downpour WHILE the delivery truck is finishing unloading 5000 gallons. You then watch the FREE rainwater spill out the overflows.

I pay $300 for a 5,000 gallon load, trucked to Coral Bay.

peace.... bert

It sounds like WAPA is about .02/Gallon and the truckers anywhere from .04/Gallon to .06/Gallon.

When you have a cistern do you test the water yourself or does it have to go to a lab or some testing company?

Is the tesing expensive and/or complicated?

Home-owners aren't required to have water tested. Restaurants and suchlike which are considered "public water facilities" are required to undergo monthly testing which costs in the region of $55/month while the annual nitrate testing is higher.

You can purchase a water testing kit for your private home if you like but I'm not sure where they're available. Caribbean Safe Water on STT could probably tell you where. Otherwise just toss a cup of chlorine bleach into your cistern once a month which is what a lot of people do and a lot don't!

Okay, just to get a little of the subject......I know that cisterns are supposed to be emptied and cleaned, however I have never heard an exact schedule for this. Some of my neighbors say once every few years, some say once a year.

The water from my cistern is treat with clorine bleach every month, runs clear and clean, and I have lived here less than a year, but don't know when it was last done.

Any suggestions? Is there a rule of thumb on maintenance?

Thanks as always for your support. I do hope that my learning curve starts to subside so that I am not asking so many questions!

Dan G.

an alternative to emptying your cistern to clean it is to get one of those swimming pool crawlers that wanders about the bottom to suck up stuff and put it in your cistern for a few days every so often. Then you wouldn't really need to drain your cistern unless it began leaking and you needed to seal a seam and re-coat the interior.

If you don't have much vegetation overhanging your roof, you probably don't accumulate all that much muck at the bottom of your cistern. Properties with stuff dropping on their roof and getting washed into their cistern need to clean them out much more frequently. That also accounts for the variation in times people will tell you for how often to clean your cistern.

Your cistern should have an access cover plate that you can remove which will allow you to inspect it from above yourself with the aid of a strong flashlight. You can make a T-Handle out of pipe nipples that will make it fairly easy to lift off. A few days after we bought our home in 2002 I inspected our cisterns (we have 2) and found a rat skeleton on the bottom of one with a relatively fresh dead rat floating on the surface. The other cistern was clean with only some silt on the bottom and was fortunately the one that was in service. I had the rat one cleaned, found the rat access point, an unscreened overflow pipe, and screened it off. Ever since then I have inspected the cisterns every couple of months and have never seen anything else in them, other than a few small lizard skeletons. I seriously doubt that the previous owners had cleaned them in years and we have only cleaned the one. We do add a cup of bleach to each cistern every couple of months and have filters for the kitchen sink and ice maker. I have looked at both cisterns within the last month or two and both were still clean, other than some silt on the bottom, so I just can't see the value of regular cleaning and sealing unless you have a specific reason for it.

my husband, well known nurse practitioner, used to throw a cup of chlorine in our cistern, we used it for cooking and teeth cleaning.

so many people mention throwing in ONE cup of bleach every month or two. That being the common wisdom, I was absolutely shocked at a pamphlet page that was recently faxed to me by a home inspector. It had a chart for recommended amounts of bleach to add to a cistern. It did not say if it was monthly or occasionally. The ratios it shows are:

(gallons of water : cups of bleach)

1,000 : 4/5
5 000 : 3-3/4
10 000 : 7-1/2
15,000 : 11-1/4
20,000 : 15
25,000 : 18-3/4
30,000 : 22-1/2
40,000 : 30

It was pointed out that this should be plain bleach, not scented or colorsafe bleach or ones with added cleaners.

I suppose the amount of bleach you add would depend on the amount of new water you believe has been added to the cistern by rainfall since your last bleaching. If there has been no rainfall at all, you may not need to add chlorine. If only a couple thousand gallons have been collected since the last treatment, then the typical 1-cup ought to be enough. However if your cistern was getting pretty low and then we had a huge storm system go by that filled it to overflowing, you would need to add a LOT more to get the ratios back where they should be to provide proper decontamination treatment for the volume of water.

If you are bleaching your cistern water for the first time ever, you would want to start with more than just one cup of bleach if you have a large cistern.

The chlorine in bleach outgases/evaporates so bleach should be added monthly in the amounts noted above regardless of whether or not new water has been added to the cistern!

adding more than a gallon of bleach to each of my two 25K gallon cisterns each month does seem excessive!

Yeah, it seems like a lot but the chlorine you buy in the store is over 90% water. I believe UVI recommends monthly cistern treatments of five ounces of bleach per thousand gallons of cistern capacity.

this pamphlet was based on 6 ounces per thousand, so that's pretty close. It wouldn't have occurred to me to put THAT much bleach in the cisterns on a MONTHLY basis. Especially since all I've ever heard of anyone adding was a cup or two now and then.

I've always chlorinated but plenty of my friends never do. Chlorinating makes the tap water smell for a couple of days but that's the only "drawback" I've noticed. Public water systems buy concentrated chlorine by the tanker and nobody really cares but everyone, including me, feels weird pouring a few gallons of diluted chlorine into their cisterns. After all, the Clorox warning label claims drinking chlorine can be fatal! 🙂 People are such amusing creatures.

Ouch, dntw8up, a few GALLONS! No wonder your tap water smelled for a couple of days - and your stomach must be all bleached out! Depending on the size of your cistern and how much water is in there, a cup is all it takes.

Alexandra,
I just did the calculations for your water tratement. If you start with 25,000 gallons of water with no residual chlorine in it, by adding 1 gallon of Clorox (3-5% max chlorine content) you will have a maximum of 2 parts per million (ppm) of active chlorine. As a Ph.D chemist with some background in water treatment I would say that this is about right for initial tratment. Don't go higher unless there is a specific problem. I would recommend getting a cheap chlorine test kit from a pool supply store. As long as the test shows some chlorine you should be ok. As dntw8up said, the additions depend on how much water you actually have and the residual chloine in the water.

To eliminate the chlorine you can add a few drops of dilute sodium thiosulfate solution to a gallon of drinking water. You might be able to get sodium thiosulfate from a phamacy. An injection of this chemical is used a an antidote for acute cyanide poisoning.