Making Tank Safe

[lannarebirth]

Hi everyone. I planted about 250 fruit trees last year during rainy season and some of them are starting to look really dry. So, I went out and bought one of those 1,000 liter tanks that I can put on the back of my pickup, in order to water them a few times before rainy season commences again. The tank looks clean but there is a strong odor of the latex solution it once held. How can I neutralize this odor/residue in order that I not harm my seedlings. Thanks very much for any insights.

Edited February 10, 2007 by lannarebirth

[Maizefarmer]

Household bleach solution - about 2%. Fil the tank up with water and bleach @ 2% and leave it for a day or so. Empty and rinse well.

That should do it - its how I clean all my dairy equipment every 6 months.

Maizefarmer

[lannarebirth]

Household bleach solution - about 2%. Fil the tank up with water and bleach @ 2% and leave it for a day or so. Empty and rinse well.

That should do it - its how I clean all my dairy equipment every 6 months.

Maizefarmer

Hi Tim, thanks for that.

That was my first thought, but then I got to thinking I don't think I have a bacteria/ disinfectant problem, which bleach is great for, I agree. I was thinking I might need to neutralize the Ph or something? Bleach has Ph of 12.5 and latex rubber solution I think about 10. so I wouldn't really be neutralizing Ph, (but I don't know if that matters). I note that vinegar has a Ph of 2.9 and was wondering if that might work? maybe give it a couple of days with the vinegar to neutralize Ph and then a couple with the bleach to disinfect? Or maybe I'm thinking too much.

[Pond Life]

Lanna,

If its just the Ph youre worried about, why not just fill it up with 1000 lt water & test the Ph ?

If it ok, put it on the trees if its not then dump it & try again.

[Maizefarmer]

You raise a valid point there - to be honest I wasn't thinking about this from a Ph perspective - just from a odour neutralisation point of view.

If you are concerned about PH then repaeated plain water rinsing will do the job (in theory).

Household bleach (while having a decent anti-bacterial effect as well) is a great odour neutraliser and should do the job in one go (i.e. fill up with 2 or 3% percent solution, stir well and leave for a day or so).

Tim

[Lickey]

You raise a valid point there - to be honest I wasn't thinking about this from a Ph perspective - just from a odour neutralisation point of view.

If you are concerned about PH then repaeated plain water rinsing will do the job (in theory).

Household bleach (while having a decent anti-bacterial effect as well) is a great odour neutraliser and should do the job in one go (i.e. fill up with 2 or 3% percent solution, stir well and leave for a day or so).

Tim

Hi everybody, im new on here and have been following all the irigation posts, about gravity feed drip systems ect, On my wifes farm her brother irrigates Papaya with a sprinkler system, last months electricty bill was 2000bht for a bore hole pump and 2 in-line 2inch pumps from a farm across the road, the water from here costs 6000bht a year, {500 a month] plus some fertilizer and some spray againt disease, another 1000bht, he sold a load and got 6000bht, he extended the water system about another 800 bht, plus he travels an hour each way to his home town everyday, add all this up and he made about 1500bht for a month, It seems to me the biggest cost is electricty, Getting to the point, weve just had 6 rai cleared of Thai potatoes, and are thinking of banana plants for a quick turnround in money ect, but this sprinkler system has got me thinking that water will go to waste and promote other things to grow, in 1 of the dutch? barns on the farm there must be 400 meters of 1in pipe with mini sprinklers attached, {obviously a pressure fed system} perhaps if on a gravity fed tank they would only drip?? .

Coming to tanks, ive read a lot on other blogs here and it seems a bit complicated and expensive to me, now what do you think of this idea? i went past a transport yard the other day, and there was an old truck tank laying in the grass, looks like it came of a fuel tanker, about 30ft long, probally holds about 28000 ltrs, the inlet and all the different outlet pipes are still attached, im thinking if i got this cleaned out and checked for leaks, a coat of paint ect, place it at highest point on the farm, {thats easy, its on a hill above where we want to do bananas} fill it from the bore hole pump and hey presto!!!

Will send missus brother to ask price of tank,cleaning and transport to farm, and concrete support for it.

Has anbody got any ideas or misgivings about this idea?

Thanks, Alex.

[chownah]

Pumping water up into a tank that is high enough to give you the head you need for sprinklers or a drip system will consume approximately the same amount of energy as pumping directly into the sprinklers or drip system....so there will be no appreciable energy savings from the standpoint of developing pressure for distribution....if, however, you want to pump the water faster than you are using it in the fields then the tank will act as storage and you could use a large pipe from the pump to the tank so that would reduce flow friction so there could be some energy savings there but its probably minimal. Also storage is good for people who have intermitten water availability so storage gets you through the dry times.

Chownah

[Lickey]

Pumping water up into a tank that is high enough to give you the head you need for sprinklers or a drip system will consume approximately the same amount of energy as pumping directly into the sprinklers or drip system....so there will be no appreciable energy savings from the standpoint of developing pressure for distribution....if, however, you want to pump the water faster than you are using it in the fields then the tank will act as storage and you could use a large pipe from the pump to the tank so that would reduce flow friction so there could be some energy savings there but its probably minimal. Also storage is good for people who have intermitten water availability so storage gets you through the dry times.

Chownah

Thankyou for your input Chownah, my plan is to take a meter reading before and after filling my tank, there fore only pay for what i take, for top ups, fill ups ect, being on a well drained hillside i think bananas will thrive on little mositure, so a gravity fed system could be ok for this? look forward to yours and others comments on this, Alex

[Maizefarmer]

Electricity is his biggest cost you say.

Easy to deal with that - I can;t see the sense in using sprinklers to irrigate a Papaya plantation. About 80% of the distributed water goes into the ground to "feed" other plants (e.g. weeds and grasses) or soaks away with no benenfit to the Papaya plants.

So long as he has laid the plants out in some sort of pattern (i.e. lines in one direction or another), he should be able to irrigate using drippers -saving most of his water (as with drippers it's only delivered to where it's needed - next to each plant). This in turn will slash his biggest expense (electricity) as he will not need the to use the energy he's currently using to deliver water at the pressures required to drive sprinklers (drippers will run efficiently from a tank no more than 1 or 2 meters above the dripper#ground level)

Maizefarmer

You raise a valid point there - to be honest I wasn't thinking about this from a Ph perspective - just from a odour neutralisation point of view.

If you are concerned about PH then repaeated plain water rinsing will do the job (in theory).

Household bleach (while having a decent anti-bacterial effect as well) is a great odour neutraliser and should do the job in one go (i.e. fill up with 2 or 3% percent solution, stir well and leave for a day or so).

Tim

Hi everybody, im new on here and have been following all the irigation posts, about gravity feed drip systems ect, On my wifes farm her brother irrigates Papaya with a sprinkler system, last months electricty bill was 2000bht for a bore hole pump and 2 in-line 2inch pumps from a farm across the road, the water from here costs 6000bht a year, {500 a month] plus some fertilizer and some spray againt disease, another 1000bht, he sold a load and got 6000bht, he extended the water system about another 800 bht, plus he travels an hour each way to his home town everyday, add all this up and he made about 1500bht for a month, It seems to me the biggest cost is electricty, Getting to the point, weve just had 6 rai cleared of Thai potatoes, and are thinking of banana plants for a quick turnround in money ect, but this sprinkler system has got me thinking that water will go to waste and promote other things to grow, in 1 of the dutch? barns on the farm there must be 400 meters of 1in pipe with mini sprinklers attached, {obviously a pressure fed system} perhaps if on a gravity fed tank they would only drip?? .

Coming to tanks, ive read a lot on other blogs here and it seems a bit complicated and expensive to me, now what do you think of this idea? i went past a transport yard the other day, and there was an old truck tank laying in the grass, looks like it came of a fuel tanker, about 30ft long, probally holds about 28000 ltrs, the inlet and all the different outlet pipes are still attached, im thinking if i got this cleaned out and checked for leaks, a coat of paint ect, place it at highest point on the farm, {thats easy, its on a hill above where we want to do bananas} fill it from the bore hole pump and hey presto!!!

Will send missus brother to ask price of tank,cleaning and transport to farm, and concrete support for it.

Has anbody got any ideas or misgivings about this idea?

Thanks, Alex.

[lingling]

Hi everyone. I planted about 250 fruit trees last year during rainy season and some of them are starting to look really dry. So, I went out and bought one of those 1,000 liter tanks that I can put on the back of my pickup, in order to water them a few times before rainy season commences again. The tank looks clean but there is a strong odor of the latex solution it once held. How can I neutralize this odor/residue in order that I not harm my seedlings. Thanks very much for any insights.

The first thing I would be worried about when buing a second hand tank is: what exactly has the tank been used for. Re-selling second hand barrels and tanks is common, and who knows how many times they have been reused for for what. Think liquor bottles with gasoline - those will eventually end up back at the Saeng Som factory, and the large tanks and barrels may have been used for stuff a lot more dangerous than the good old gao-ha.

And if you don't know exactly what has been in it, finding the right solvent to clean it out can be tricky. Some chemicals will of course stay in the plastic and get released slowly over time.

A related story - a couple of weeks ago I was out shopping for empty 200l plastic barrels to use as floats under a raft. I stopped at one of the roadside shops that sell barrels and tanks and told them that I needed barrels for a raft. The first pile they showed me had been used for glyphosphate - don't want to kill every plant in the water with that so I said no thanks. The next pile of barrels had big stickers that said "marine pollutant" and a fish crossed over. They were in the process of removing those stickers from the barrels, and washing them out with a water hose. This shop is located about 200m from a river so that marine pollutant will be in the river by the next rainy season. I told them again that I needed barrels for a raft, so I couldn't use those that had been used for herbicides, pesticides or other poisonous stuff. The girl in the shop just replied "don't worry, everyone use these barrels for rafts", pointing at the barrels with the "marine pollutant" stickers. I decided that using second hand barrels for a raft may not be a great idea after all as I intend to eat the fish that I catch from the same raft...

[chownah]

I am very sensitive to the possibility of pollution coming from used barrels and tanks. Perhaps my sensitivity is not well grounded. Consider an "empty" tank. Certainly it is not empty since there will be a residue.....but.....make an estimate of the amount of residue...is it 100 grams?...probably less...5 grams....maybe depending on the size of the tank and how thick the residue is....or maybe it is even less. If the inside of a tank looks clean then any residue left will certainly be a small amount. If the container held a water soluble product then the residue should be really really small after a few rinsings. Consider a pesticide container....that has been rinsed several times. Pesticides are meant to be water soluble and so when the container has been rinsed it will look clean...maybe a on 200 litre container will have 1 gram of pesticide on the wall as a residue? How many litres of pesticide could you mix up with the 1 gram of concentrate and how much land would it be used on? If you look at it this way the amount of pesticide you are putting into the water or on your land from the residue from a rinsed pesticide container is really really small and probably nothing to be concerned about....I CERTAINLY WOULD NOT DRINK WATER FROM A USED PESTICIDE CONTAINER OR USE IT FOR ANY DOMESTIC USE.....but realistically it porbably wouldn't matter if I did.

If anyone has a website that can make a good arguement contrary to what I have said I would really appreciate a heads up on it. I'm an organic farmer....I try to keep a sense of perspective on these sorts of things...perhaps I'm being too liberal here...I don't know.

Chownah

P.S. Inspite of what I just wrote I do consider what has been in a tank and avoid those that I know have contained poisonous substances....all the used tanks and barrels that I have now previously contained food grade stuff as indicated on the label.

Chownah

Edited February 20, 2007 by chownah

[lingling]

I am very sensitive to the possibility of pollution coming from used barrels and tanks. Perhaps my sensitivity is not well grounded. Consider an "empty" tank. Certainly it is not empty since there will be a residue.....but.....make an estimate of the amount of residue...is it 100 grams?...probably less...5 grams....maybe depending on the size of the tank and how thick the residue is....or maybe it is even less. If the inside of a tank looks clean then any residue left will certainly be a small amount. If the container held a water soluble product then the residue should be really really small after a few rinsings. Consider a pesticide container....that has been rinsed several times. Pesticides are meant to be water soluble and so when the container has been rinsed it will look clean...maybe a on 200 litre container will have 1 gram of pesticide on the wall as a residue?

One more thing to consider - in addition to the residue on the wall there will also be residue in the walls depending on what chemical was held in the barrel or tank. Plastic is not dense enough to prevent osmosis, so a certain amount of whatever is kept (depending on molecule size etc of course) will slowly wander into the walls and will then equally slowly be released over time. This means you can rinse it a hundred times but there may still be residue in the walls that will be released slowly into [whatever you keep in it].

But you're right that it is probably very small amount. But I have a zero tolerance policy on pesticides, herbicides, chemical fertilizers etc etc...

...and then you have the tanks that has been used for more dangerous industrial chemicals that were never intended to be released into nature. With a bit of mai-pen-rai attitude I am sure some of those find their ways to places where they don't belong...

Does anyone know a supplier of brand new plastic 200l barrels?

[Lickey]

Electricity is his biggest cost you say.

Easy to deal with that - I can;t see the sense in using sprinklers to irrigate a Papaya plantation. About 80% of the distributed water goes into the ground to "feed" other plants (e.g. weeds and grasses) or soaks away with no benenfit to the Papaya plants.

So long as he has laid the plants out in some sort of pattern (i.e. lines in one direction or another), he should be able to irrigate using drippers -saving most of his water (as with drippers it's only delivered to where it's needed - next to each plant). This in turn will slash his biggest expense (electricity) as he will not need the to use the energy he's currently using to deliver water at the pressures required to drive sprinklers (drippers will run efficiently from a tank no more than 1 or 2 meters above the dripper#ground level)

Maizefarmer

You raise a valid point there - to be honest I wasn't thinking about this from a Ph perspective - just from a odour neutralisation point of view.

If you are concerned about PH then repaeated plain water rinsing will do the job (in theory).

Household bleach (while having a decent anti-bacterial effect as well) is a great odour neutraliser and should do the job in one go (i.e. fill up with 2 or 3% percent solution, stir well and leave for a day or so).

Tim

Hi everybody, im new on here and have been following all the irigation posts, about gravity feed drip systems ect, On my wifes farm her brother irrigates Papaya with a sprinkler system, last months electricty bill was 2000bht for a bore hole pump and 2 in-line 2inch pumps from a farm across the road, the water from here costs 6000bht a year, {500 a month] plus some fertilizer and some spray againt disease, another 1000bht, he sold a load and got 6000bht, he extended the water system about another 800 bht, plus he travels an hour each way to his home town everyday, add all this up and he made about 1500bht for a month, It seems to me the biggest cost is electricty, Getting to the point, weve just had 6 rai cleared of Thai potatoes, and are thinking of banana plants for a quick turnround in money ect, but this sprinkler system has got me thinking that water will go to waste and promote other things to grow, in 1 of the dutch? barns on the farm there must be 400 meters of 1in pipe with mini sprinklers attached, {obviously a pressure fed system} perhaps if on a gravity fed tank they would only drip?? .

Coming to tanks, ive read a lot on other blogs here and it seems a bit complicated and expensive to me, now what do you think of this idea? i went past a transport yard the other day, and there was an old truck tank laying in the grass, looks like it came of a fuel tanker, about 30ft long, probally holds about 28000 ltrs, the inlet and all the different outlet pipes are still attached, im thinking if i got this cleaned out and checked for leaks, a coat of paint ect, place it at highest point on the farm, {thats easy, its on a hill above where we want to do bananas} fill it from the bore hole pump and hey presto!!!

Will send missus brother to ask price of tank,cleaning and transport to farm, and concrete support for it.

Has anbody got any ideas or misgivings about this idea?

Thanks, Alex.

MaizeFarmer, thankyou for you reply, the papaya are in nice uniform rows and would lend themselves to drip feed easily,I understand papaya has a small root formation and can be overwatered easily causing root rot,the soil is red clay and seems very water retentive,but as soon as leaves droop a bit in the sun, he puts sprinkler on the area and keeps going till the ground cant take anymore, its running away in big red rivers!!! and of course the weeds and crap between the trees are getting more prolific, although we have all the pipework for a drip system, to him, there is nothing like "rain" and a few green leaves on a babana leaf and praying that the pumps will keep working,,,

When we decide on our own water be it borehole for the banana plantation, it will be surely dripfed to get them started, soon will be rainy season so they will look after themselves, Had our 1 rai salad garden covered today with that black plastic/nylon stuff to stop the big rains harming it, it was a suprise to me that after 2 weeks garlic is over 6in high, Thankyou for your input and advice, Alex.