water tank from old fuel tank

matt p

Member
Has anyone ever used an old fuel tank for a water tank? I have a 500 gallon tank on a stand and would to catch rain water and pump slew water for the trees ect.What would I have to do to clean it out to make it safe for watering!! thanks.
 
When I was a kid 50 years age, dad had a 500 gal fuel oil tank on an old steel wheel gear that we used for a water wagon to water the hogs out in the feild. I think we must have used it ten or more years. It worked real good, but if we would get a drink out of it. still tasted like fuel and smelled like it. Dave
 
Like one poster wrote, it will always probably smell and taste like fuel oil, so I would suggest never using it to water animals.

But once it has been rinsed out real well, it probably would be OK for carrying water for plants. I think if it was mine, I would put the tank on my trailer, fill it about 2/3 full of water and add a bottle of Dawn dishwashing liquid to it. Then I would haul it around for a while to get all of the inside of the tank well covered by the detergent solution. I would drain the tank somewhere that wouldn"t matter much and then carefully rinse it out. It would probably be about as good as it ever could be.

Another thought would be to put the tank, with all the bungs open, on a fair sized burn pile. The heat would probably vaporize most of the remaining fuel and it would burn off in the fire. If there was much fuel still in the tank, that might not be the safest plan, as you might produce a rocket or a bomb. And after the tank had burned and you used it to store water, I would expect that it would rust out fairly fast.

I sure would not ever consider a former oil tank for storing drinking water. Good luck!
 
Probably not the best idea to be advertising like this. Some greenie whistle-blowers think that a single drop of spilled fuel is an environmental catastrophe and will turn you in to the DEC.
 
(quoted from post at 18:39:42 04/01/13) Has anyone ever used an old fuel tank for a water tank? I have a 500 gallon tank on a stand and would to catch rain water and pump slew water for the trees ect.What would I have to do to clean it out to make it safe for watering!! thanks.

Absolutely not! Don't do it! You can not clean it! The chemistry involved has deposited many chemicals that you just can't soap away.
 
I have two 1000 gal x-gas tanks that I use for just that purpose. I merely rinsed them out a few times and use them to water trees and plants. I don't even think about drinking it tho.
 

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