Depends on where in Richmond. My wife's family lives on the East end and they have a well so water quality isn't that great but it tastes fine to me. I have no idea about the city water.
Putting together ingredients to do this brew but I am having trouble sourcing the WLP500 yeast locally and don't want to risk having it shipped and getting useless yeast. I google'd and didn't come up with any good equivalences to the WLP500, anyone have any suggestions? I looked at a belgian...
Start by figuring out what yeast you used first and what it's capabilities are. Was your starting gravity actual measured at 1.045 or is that just what the kit said? Did you do your temperature adjustments?
I split a 55 gallon plastic barrel in half and did my plants in there last year and it worked fine. From my reading it'll be fine for a year or two but they will quickly outgrow it. As for the 15 gallon bins you might consider doing two of them and having one plant in each.
Repitching the same yeast probably won't help any. When you added the additional DME soup the airlock started bubbling again so that tells me that your yeast is working fine but it can't get below 1.020 for some reason. Have you looked at the specs for the yeast you are using?
I've done that kit and in my experience most of the wine expert kits end up too sweet and the abv is pretty low. Typically I'll add in an extra 2-3 pounds of sugar which takes the abv to around 9% and drys the final product out a little bit.