Like all of your other supplies, rotate your rainwater supply so it stays fresh. Even if you don’t have a rainwater purification system to use the water in the house, it’s great to use outside for watering your plants, bathing, filling the pool, or doing outside chores such as washing windows.
In addition to knowing where to find a ready supply of fresh water for long-term use, it’s a good idea to store bottled water as well. Many people store only enough for a few days or a week because of the amount of space it takes up. Plan for at least one gallon of water per person, per day, and that’s just for drinking and cooking purposes. If you’re going to plan for hygiene uses as well, double that to two gallons of water per person, per day. Here are some options that you have for storing water:
• Commercially bottled water in personal-sized bottles
• Commercially bottled water in gallon bottles or larger containers
• Home-bottled tap water, purified
• Home-bottled rainwater, purified
It’s fine to bottle water from the tap or from your home filtering system, but make sure that it’s purified before you store it so that bacteria can’t grow in it. Rotate your water stocks just like you rotate your foods. Use it naturally and replenish regularly.
Water Purification Methods
During an emergency event such as a hurricane, flood, earthquake, or tornado, even the purest sources of water may become unsafe to drink. The best way to ensure that your water is drinkable is to purify it yourself prior to drinking it, if it’s not in a bottle. Not only do you need to know how to do it, you need to teach each member of your family how to make water safe, too.
The water filters in refrigerators use mechanical filtration. This method involves running your water through filters such as sand, charcoal, ceramic, or silver to remove debris and physical contaminants.
If you’d like to make your own filtration system at home, you can do so fairly easily. Here’s what you’ll need:
• 2-liter soda bottle, cut in half
• Coffee filter, cheesecloth, paper towel, or other cloth-type filtering material
• ½ cup sand
• ½ cup charcoal
• 1 cup gravel
Flip the top half of the soda bottle upside down into the bottom half of the bottle so that the mouth of the bottle is facing down like a funnel. Put the filter either inside the “funnel” part of the bottle or secure it with a rubber band or string on the outside of the spout. Place the charcoal inside first. Then place the sand on top of the charcoal followed by the gravel. Simply pour the dirty water over the gravel so that it filters down through the rocks, charcoal, and sand, and then drips into the bottom half of the bottle.
Add the water slowly so that it stays below the top of the filter. Otherwise the dirty water will run down the outside of the filter. Remember also that this method filters out only debris; it doesn’t kill pathogens or parasites, so you may want to use a chemical treatment after you filter it.
The age-old, tried-and-true method of purifying water is to boil it. If your municipal water supply is compromised, local officials will issue a “boil water” advisory that instructs you to boil your water for 3 to 12 minutes prior to drinking to kill pathogens. Unless you live at an extremely high elevation, 5 minutes at a rolling boil is long enough to purify the water.
There are two downsides to boiling water: it doesn’t filter out physical contaminants and it uses a tremendous amount of fuel if you’re heating with bottled gas or other finite sources of heat. To help minimize the impact on your fuel supply, boil your water while you’re cooking meals.
You probably associate pasteurization with milk or juice products, but it’s actually just a fancy name for heating a liquid to 160 degrees F for at least 6 minutes to kill pathogens and other bad “bugs” in a liquid. It works equally as well for water as it does for milk and juice, and uses much less fuel than boiling water for several minutes. There are actually solar products that will heat your water to this temperature; if you use one of those methods, you won’t waste any fuel at all. As with boiling, pasteurization doesn’t remove debris, so you may still want to filter your water before you pasteurize it.
This process is pretty complicated, but it produces water that’s extremely clean. To distill your water, you will boil it in an enclosed container that has a hose that allows the steam to escape. The steam then converts back into clean water that collects in another container, leaving the impurities behind.
Plain old household bleach (sodium hypochlorite) is your best friend in an emergency situation. It quite literally kills everything that could possibly harm you in water or on surfaces, and it’s dirt cheap. Simply add ¼ teaspoon to a gallon of water, and give it 30 minutes or so to work and your water is good to go. Use unscented bleach, and change it out every six months or so because it does degrade and lose its effectiveness.
The same stuff that people use to keep their pools clean and clear will do the same for your drinking water, and it’s extremely affordable. Unlike bleach, it doesn’t degrade, and a five-dollar bag will purify about 10,000 gallons of water. There are several different kinds and strengths, so you need to read the label carefully when you’re buying it. Make sure that it’s at least 73 percent sodium chlorite with no other chemicals or harmful additives.
Remember the red disinfectant from your childhood that goes on cuts and scrapes and burns like crazy? It’s also good for purifying water. It changes the taste and color of your water, but either liquid 2 percent iodine tincture or commercially available iodine tablets will work. Iodine isn’t completely effective when it comes to killing harmful protozoa that can make you sick, but if you add 8 drops of liquid iodine to a gallon of clear water or 16 drops per gallon of cloudy water, it will kill most bacteria and viruses.
These are perhaps the easiest way to kill everything in water that could harm you, especially if you have to leave your home, but they take about four hours to work. They don’t expire and they don’t change the taste or color of your water, so they are great options whether you’re in your home or have to leave in a hurry. Make them part of your emergency supply and add some to your bug-out bag as well.
Several different types of ultraviolet light machines are used to purify water, but to be truthful, they are much less effective than heat or chemical purification methods. The water has to be clear, and UV light doesn’t kill viruses. Considering how easy the other more effective methods are, this just isn’t the way to go as far as most preppers are concerned.
As you can see, there are many different options at your disposal when you’re making plans to meet your water purification needs. Which one you choose is entirely up to you, and you should base your decision on what type of disaster you’re planning for and what your individual water needs are. The most important thing is that you do prepare, because without water, you won’t make it for long.