Keeping bottles sterilised

[Glyno]

I store my drinks bottles, platypus bladders, etc in the freezer between uses. Advise I was given years ago.

[Cyril Haearn]

It is a wonder that poisoning is so rare, maybe many people are immune

[meic]

Or the poisoning is at such a diluted level that the body is only slightly affected and people just dont notice or realise what is ailing them.

A lot of the things growing in the bottles are deliberately cultivated in other products, like beer and cider for example.

[Vorpal]

Next replacement will be one where the nipple comes apart easily and completely, to clean.

Most of ours do that. I put the separate parts in the dishwasher cutlery basket.

[Vorpal]

It is a wonder that poisoning is so rare, maybe many people are immune

I think that some people are more resistant than others. Also, someone who has been previously exposed/infected to some microbes are already resistant. Finally, some (e.g. giardia) may produce only mild symptoms that people either don't realise are an illness, or blame on something else.

Sorry but you don't, this is false information. Pour boiling water into the bottle, swish it round or shake with the lid on, squirt it out through the drinking nipple/hole. pour some boiling water over the outside of the lid, that's it.

You only need to boil standing 'dirty' water for one minute to kill off Cryptosporidium, Giardia and other bacteria, a sterilisation for a water bottle using the method above is plenty, unless you've had it in some god awful quag of nastiness in which case you'd probably need to soak it and scrub it first.

Water only needs to be boiled for 1 minute, but things that you put in the water need to be at boiling temperature for at least 1 minute, which means that you need to boil them a bit longer, unless they are in the water as it heats up.

Advice for sterilising baby bottles and feeding equipment by boiling varies from 3 to 5 minutes because of this.

I imagine that rinsing with boiling water will kill many microbes, but it won't disinfect your water bottles.

[Brucey]

Water bottles are unlikely to contain any pathogens unless they've been filled with water from a contaminated or inadequately treated water supply.

The riskiest thing about water bottles is drinking directly from a bottle that has been splattered with mud an ****.

Except that water treatment mostly dissipates after a while, and when we drink some of our own micro-organisms can go into the water bottle. People who don't wash their water bottles out regularly are drinking more than just water.

When I was in school, we left some glasses of water sitting about and tested them periodically. It didn't take long before there were bacteria growing in them, and by about 19 hours they exceeded the safety threshold for drinking water. Admittedly, that is a conservative threshold, but I wouldn't want to drink it!

exactly. It is taken as read that there are all kinds of bacteria and spores in our environment (including C botulinum etc) and these just need the right conditions in order to grow. There are some that make you ill by ingesting the live bacteria, there are others that make you ill because when the bacteria grow they create toxins.

It seems to me that there are several ways of reducing the risk of getting poisoned;

1) clean your bottles; any cleaning is better than none. Even dishwashing soap and water kills quite a lot of things. Boiling water is better yet but still doesn't kill everything.

2) don't expose anything that you might put into your mouth to any unusually mucky things; so dirty valves on water bottles (with road dirt on them) and unwashed bottles etc are to be avoided.

3) don't give the bacteria any 'food'. This means not using your bottles with anything other than water in unless they are to be cleaned shortly afterwards. However there will be backwash into the bottle in most cases and even without, you will still need to clean the valve though; your saliva counts as 'food' hence the evil black growth.

4) don't give the most harmful bacteria the conditions to survive. So for example some bacteria don't like oxygen and don't like acidic conditions either; even with 'food' present they won't multiply.

5) make sure that potentially harmful bacteria are out-competed by more friendly ones. In practice this is how we avoid wound infections, how our gut works (most of the time) and how some types of cheese work.

Old bottles will have rougher surfaces than newer ones and these will simply be more difficult to clean well; the rough surface will more easily harbour both bacteria and food for them. BTW metal bottles will interact with what is in them differently to plastic; it will be dark inside a metal bottle (so some things will grow less well, others more) and the metal itself may harbour germs less easily or may actually be pathogenic to them.

BTW it is thought that by cell count, we are mostly bacteria; between the ones in the gut and the ones on the skin, they outnumber the cells in our body by some margin. The types of bacteria we host can greatly affect a lot of things including immune system function, vitamin uptake, how we react to medications, you name it.

cheers

[softlips]

Mine go in the dishwasher, always on the hottest setting. I use the ones with wide necks so the water gets in. Do this after every use.

[Airsporter1st]

Mine are usually scratched and most of the logos are missing after twelve months and are binned at this point,
tim-b

You care about riding with no advertising/disfigured advertising?
Must admit I very very rarely clean my bottles at all, though may have to as I get older and more delicate of constitution. And can't remember when I last threw one away. Seem pretty unbreakable to me.
But a good thread start. Must do some cleaning, particularly of the bottles thaf have had tabs in. I only ever use clear bottles for tabs so that I can keep an eye on anything too bad happening. I use poundshop baby steriliser.

Who needs to sterilise babies?

[bogmyrtle]

Who needs to sterilise babies?

Deadly little bacterial incubators those mini humans. Wouldn't have one in the house.

[GranvilleThomas]

I have 2 Isostar bottles, grey with a yellow screw on wide top with blue Isostar writing on them. I got these free with a cycling magazine. Well, I had to ask for the bottle when I purchased the mag as they had been removed from the plastic bag surrounding it as they were obviously difficult to stack on the shelf with a bottle sticking out.

At the till the assistant stated that I could have 2 bottles if I wanted as the last person buying the magazine declined the offer of the bottle, in fact she said that she expected to have quite a few bottles left over in the box under the counter and if I went back in the shop at the end of the month I was welcome to take them away or they would go in the bin.

Totally forgot about it though so I have no idea what happened to them all. Thing is when I saw this thread I got to thinking how long ago this was and realised that I have had these bottles for well over 10 years! I have had no problem keeping them clean by just rinsing out with water after every use, apart from one time when I left a bottle in my rucksack for a few weeks (take them walking as well as cycling) in the summer and a green alien family moved in that proved stubborn to evict.

Eventually I topped the bottle up with boiling water and added a couple of drops of Domestos bleach to the water and left it standing for a few hours. Gave the bottle a good rinse out with water from the tap after and everything has been fine ever since.

Personally I think people stress too much about sterilisation, disinfecting and over cleansing, not just about cycling bottles but just in life generally, as a healthy dose of bacteria builds up your immune system in my opinion, well Ive been cycling for about 50 years and never knowingly been made ill by my bottles at least.

A mate of mine even disinfects his handlebar tape on a regular basis (no really!), but then he is the type that changes his underpants and socks everyday, I regularly tell him he is totally obsessed but it falls on deaf ears!

[Mick F]

Mine just get washed with the washing-up in the kitchen sink.
Always have done.

33 miles yesterday and took a bottle of water with me.
Never touched it. Didn't need it.

[thirdcrank]

Mine just get washed with the washing-up in the kitchen sink.
...

I hope that's your bidons rather than your socks and undies.

[Tinnishill]

I don't think anyone has mentioned this option. Reuse a pop bottle a few times over a few days and then chuck it in the recycling. Rinse it out between uses. My favorite bottle costs 69p at the COOP and comes with 500ml of lemonade, free.

If you use an adjustable cage, they can hold bottles between 300ml and 2l, as required.

[mattsccm]

Must admit that my method has killed me several times.
Wonder how humans survived?

[meic]

It isnt about survival or even avoiding illness, it is only about not having yukky bottles.