When it comes to survival, water is only second to air in order of importance. While a man can go without food for 30 days, without water, he’ll be in severe pain within 3 days and may perish shortly after. Water is the elixir of life.
During a survival situation, your access to potable water is crucial. While you can use water from a lake or river to wash your clothes, flush your toilet, wash your dishes, etc. – you’ll need potable water for drinking, cooking and treating wounds.
There’s a difference. More important tasks require clean drinking water. Let’s look at a few water storage tips for preppers.
- Plan early
The whole idea or being a ‘prepper’ is that you must prepare. Storing water is not a difficult task… but there are a few factors to consider.
You’ll need to see how many family members you have. Do you have pets? They need water too. Ideally, you should store about 3 gallons of water per person per day.
1 gallon a day for a dog should suffice. Another point to be aware of is the climate. If you live in a place that is exposed to hot weather, everyone is going to perspire more and need more water.
Once you have done the math, you’ll have a good idea of just how much water you need to store. The bare minimum is 3 days. You need to have sufficient water to last everyone for 3 days.
- How to store water
The vessels that you use to store your water will be dependent on the amount of space you have for storage. The more space you have at home, the more water you can store.
Water cooler jugs are a fantastic way to store water. You can buy them inexpensively and the 5 gallons of water will last about a year. Alternatively, you can get the big 55-gallon blue water drums that you see in so many commercial buildings.
One 55-gallon drum will last about 18 days per person. So, if you have 4 members in your family, 4 of these blue water containers will last for about 3 weeks. That’s good.
If you don’t wish to purchase these drums, you could use old soda bottles, barrels, metal containers or plastic containers. Do note that the plastic containers should be BPA free. Look for the HDPE logo which shows that the plastic is safe for use.
An interesting point that you should be aware of is that the water will take on the ‘taste’ of the container after a while. For example, if you store water in old Coca-Cola bottles, after a week or so, the water will smell and slightly taste of Coke. So, be mindful of where you store your water.
- Conservation is key
No matter how much water you store or how short the crisis may be, always conserve the water you have. Water that’s used to wash the vegetables for cooking, can be collected and used to flush the toilet.
The swimming pool that’s filled with water should be covered. You could use the water for washing the dishes, flushing the toilet, etc. Every bit of water you have is important.
- Additional measures
Besides just storing water, you should buy every single member in the family a water filtration bottle. There are many excellent bottles available on Amazon.
If you live near a lake, you can always use these filtration bottles to drink the water from these water sources safely. The filter will remove 99.9% of the bacteria, parasites, etc. from the water.
Each bottle can be used hundreds of times. So, you’ll always have drinking water.
Purchase water purification tablets too. These will be used to purify large quantities of water. Even if you’ve stored water in a large barrel at home for a while, do add a couple of water purification tablets into the water to be extra safe.
If you follow the tips above, you’ll have sufficient water during a crisis and be able to last until the authorities and external aid arrives to manage the situation.