Lets play pretend.

As of right now there is no water coming to your house and there won’t be for at least 7 days. How much water do you have stored right now? That is all the water you get to drink, cook, clean, shower, and flush your toilet with for the next 7 days.

How did you do?

Clean drinking water is the most important thing to have in an emergency. If a major disaster hit your town it might be a couple of days that you won’t have water. I am sure you know a person can only survive 3 days without water.

Even if you don’t have any water storage set aside, you still have a little bit of water storage in your home. Your water heater holds 30 to 60 gallons depending on the size. There will be a little water in your pipes or faucets and maybe some water in the fridge in a pitcher or ice cubes.

You need at least 1 gallon per day per person for water storage and that is mainly just for drinking and cooking. If you like taking showers, flushing your toilet or wearing clean clothes you might want to have more.

Once you have used all the water in your home you could run to the nearest creek or pond and strain and boil the water. However, that doesn’t sound too exciting to me. Have you ever drunk boiled pond water before? I haven’t but I am sure it tastes a lot like boiled mud or worse.

How close is the closest water source to your home? Is it close enough to walk to and haul buckets of water back? You could drive depending on the circumstances of the disaster, but try to plan for worst-case scenarios.

Okay, I have been asking you a lot of questions about your water storage so now it is your turn. Everyone’s water storage should be based on how many people are in their home. We have 2 adults and 2 small children. This is what we have compiled.

2 Cases of Bottled Water

Having individual water bottles make it easier to use water. Consider having 2 of these in a convenient location in your home. We have these for our 72 hour kits as well.

30 Gallons of Arrowhead Easy Pour Spring Water

My wife and I love these because they are made to stack on top of each other very nicely. They are gallon containers that are easy to pour, easy to stack and they are cheap. We bought ours on sale for $.50 a piece. You can usually buy them for a $1. We store these inside.

2- 55 Gallon Barrels

We have these outside. The reason I have these is that 1) I got them for free and 2) I like having different sizes of water containers. These would be easier to use then the 275-gallon totes, I am going to talk about those next. If you needed to load containers into a trailer and go get some creek or pond water, this better to use. One problem of using the 55 gallon barrels is that you have to have a pump to get the water out unless you buy one that has a spigot in the bottom of the barrel. We store these outside.

Most of the pumps you can buy are cheap and they break super easy. Every summer for a week all the men in my extended family go on a Father and Sons campout. One of my uncles brings all the food and water. We always have a large group and we never go to a campground. He would bring water in 55-gallon barrels and so he wanted to find a pump that wouldn’t break.

I love the way he contrasts the two pumps, “I think they sell those pumps believing no one will ever really use them”. He looked for a long time for a good one and finally found one that was super solid and never breaks. He bought it and it has been working great for the last 10 years. He now runs a website called better-outdoors.com and sells them from there. I highly recommend this pump if you plan on storing water in 55-gallon barrels.

If you are not convinced, here is a video where my cousin demonstrates it.

2- 275 Gallon Totes

You can buy nice big water tanks that you can store in your garage for 90 Gallon take for $179 to 520 gallon tank for $599. I decided to go the cheap way. I bought two used 275-gallon food grade totes for $100 each off our local classified. I wrapped them in two layers of black plastic to keep light out so algae doesn’t grow inside. Check out my post on how to wrap them in plastic here. It was easy to do and with a couple of hours of work, $215 for the tanks, plastic and duck tape, I have more than 550 gallons of water storage. We keep these outside.

Water Purification

In case all my water storage runs out I have a Berkey water filter. The Berkey is the best filter on the market. It filters bacteria, viruses, chlorine, dirt, arsenic and about anything else you can imagine. If I really had to go to the pond to get water I would strain it and pour it into my Berkey.

We us our Berkey every day to filter our tap water for drinking and if I really needed to I could pour pond water in it too and it would come out tasting the same. My family loves our Berkey, and the only time we drink from the tap now is when we have forgotten to refill the Berkey. I used to think our tap water tasted great, but now since I drink out of the Berkey, I can taste the chorine and other weird tastes in my water. To learn more about the Berkey water filter check out my post on the Berkey Water Filter and you can learn why we choose the Berkey over any other water filter.

I bought extra filters so if I every need new ones I have them. Each set of 2 filters can filter 6,000 gallons of water. After I run out of my water storage I can filter at least 6,000 gallons and whatever is left on the filters that are in the Berkey right now.

Total Water Storage on my property= 690 Gallons

Plus 10,000 Gallons I can still filter through my Berkey.

If we used 1.5 gallons per person per day with 4 people we would have 115 days until we would have to use the Berkey. I think I am covered on water storage.

Next question…

What else should I have if I have to use my water storage?

Solar Shower- I recently bought a 5-gallon solar water shower. You fill the bag and put it in the sun. The sun heats up the water and you can have a nice shower. I will let you know how it goes when I try it out to see if I would recommend this specific one.

5-gallon water cooler- This will be nice for filling with drinking water just like it is when you go camping.

2- 5-gallon water containers to put at each sink- I thought it would be nice to have a jug of water at each sink so it would be easy to use each sink.

A bucket for each sink- Why I recommend this is instead of letting the water going down the drain you can capture it in buckets and use to flush your toilet.

Now the real test is going to be when my family shuts off our water for 3 to 7 days and only uses water storage to continue our lives. (I am still trying to convince my wife to go with 7). Let me know what you think would be better in the comments below. This could be a good idea for you to see how your family functions living off water storage. I am sure we will learn a lot.

I’ll let you know how it goes once I get my new YouTube Channel up called….

SURVIVORFAMILY