How To Store Water Long Term
Tap water in clean, sealed, food grade containers keeps for years. What actually shortens that, and what does not.
Municipal tap water stored in a clean, sealed, food grade container in the dark does not spoil on a schedule. Water is not food. What degrades is the container and the seal, and what grows is whatever went in with the water, so the work is all in the filling, not the waiting.
This is a scaffold sample, not finished editorial. It exists so the route, the layout, the schema and the link registry can be checked end to end. The real article is written in session S7.
The three things that decide shelf life
Container material, seal quality, and light. Heat accelerates all three. A drum in an unheated garage outlasts the same drum on a sunny patio by years.
What people get wrong
The six month rule is real, and it is narrower than the pages repeating it let on. CDC publishes it for water you fill yourself, and commercially bottled water carries its own printed date instead. So the rule is about your container and your fill, not about the water going bad on a timer. Rotate on schedule anyway, because the trip proves the seals and the spigots work before you need them.