Water Storage

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With a heat wave hitting many areas, a lot of us have water on the mind. And with recent power outages, and a weekend camping trip, I find myself refilling our water storage today. It works out since the two containers I used up were due for rotating anyway.

You may be wondering why we store water. Stored water is part of our preparedness plan. We try to follow the “Rule of Three” which basically means having three sources for everything you need. Our first source for water is our well. We store water because when our power goes out so does the well pump. And the power goes out pretty regularly around here. It’s usually up and running again within a few hours, but we’ve had it out for five days before. So we store at least three days worth for our family and pets. If the outage were to outlast our stored supply, our third source would be a nearby river. We would either filter, boil or chemically treat the river water to make it safe for drinking. Notice a trend?

We store the bulk of our water in seven gallon Aqua-tainers. I like these because the capacity is enough to seem “worth it” and small enough that I can carry one up the basement stairs myself. They also have a convenient tap which turns inside out for storage. We have several of these which would technically meet the gallon per person, per day recommendation for our family of four. But we also clean out and fill our empty two liter soda bottles with water. I recently started freezing some of these, after reading about a few good uses for the frozen bottles at The Survival Mom’s blog.

We store our water for six months and then use it up either by taking it camping, or watering plants, then replace it with fresh.  We treat the stored water with 1/8 tsp of common household bleach per gallon, and store it in our cool, dark basement, where it gets little exposure to light or heat.

Being prepared for these little inconveniences as well as larger crises allows us to live more independently. This approach works well for us, and thankfully, since we started practicing preparedness we’ve never had to rely on our stored water for more than a few hours.

How do you approach preparedness?

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July 10, 2012

  • Oh I love your blog! I will be very happy to follow your posts!

    We live in an apartment so our survival is very different from people who have even a 1/4 acre plot of land. As yet, we have not figured out how we will do our water storage. We do have 2 large plots at a Community Garden, our balcony garden, and then soon we will have a few plants growing inside as well. I think our lifeblood will be the indoor worm farm that we are going to be making. We are getting rid of our dryer today to use the space for worm composting. Without soil, we cannot grow food even in pots. As we prefer fresh food to canned food, growing greens and tomatoes in the house year round will help out immensely with our needs.

    Thank you so much again for this post, it is wonderful!

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