Water is the second most important chemical to our survival, second only to oxygen. Number three on the list of "the survival rule of threes" (this rule will be covered in a later post), you can only survive three days without it. That's more of an average than a hard fact, but I wouldn't push it too much.
Everyone knows they should drink eight glasses of water a day. Eight glasses, each eight fluid ounces (or one cup or about 250 milliliters), equals around two liters of water a day. Not a bad start but it is a pretty loose guideline. Depending on a whole plethora of factors the actual amount of water you may need can vary greatly. When it comes to prepping, and the stockpiling of water, another thing to remember is that two liters of water is only what you will be drinking, it doesn't take in to account all the other uses we have for water on a daily basis.
I find a safer quantity to be three liters per person per day, just for drinking. For my young kids the recommended amount is one liter per child, but I prefer to have it at two. For my cat I need about half a liter a day. So, for my family of four plus my cat, for a 72 hour period I need to have about 32 liters (or almost eight and a half gallons) of water for consumption. That's a fair bit of water.
Now we have to figure out how much water we're going to need for our other needs - our sanitary needs. In the event of loss of utilities (water, power, etc.) you're not going to be taking many hot showers, but you'll still need to scrub up to prevent getting sick. So, how much water should you have? Including personal hygiene and sanitation of cookware I suggest three liters a day per adult and two liters a day per child, which equals up to almost eight gallons for my family for a 72 hour period.
Including drinking water and sanitation water, for my family of four plus the cat, we need about 16.5 gallons for the duration of a 72 hour emergency period. However, since 16.5 isn't a very well rounded number, 15 is a little easier to work with. That gives me a few ways to store my water, but the system I most like is; two five gallon water cooler jugs, three one gallon water jugs, and two gallons of bottled water. I find this the best ease of use and storage.
Having this much water on hand poses a few problems. First of all, where will you store it, two or three water cooler jugs take up a fair amount of room if you're living in a small apartment. But more importantly than the space is the requirements for the space. Ideally you should be storing your water in a cool, dark area. This will slow down the growth of algae and reduce the number of times you will have to rotate your stock.
Don't get me wrong, you will always have to rotate your stock of water. Unless you're going to treat your stores with chlorine or iodine (or some other method of water sterilization) - which will leave you with the unpleasant chemical taste - you will have to cycle old water out and new water in. The best way to do this is run emergency drills.
Once a month run through your emergency water supply like you would have to if a real situation arose. I'm not saying you can't rely on your tap water, but try and use up your emergency supply and measure it against what you supplement with piped in water. This will help you see where you can conserve water in an emergency, whether or not you need to increase or decrease your stores, let you get a better feel for how to use water stores in an emergency, and rotate your stock to keep it fresh.
There are ways to gather water in an emergency - which I will write about in other posts - but you won't want to have to go through all that work when you have to deal with other emergency related issues, especially when you can easily already have water on hand.
I hope you've found this post helpful and can use it as the basis for your own water storage needs. Thanks so much for reading. Until next time. Be Prepared. Be Safe. Have Fun.
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