Water

Start your reserve with your 72 hour water supply. Then work up to a 2 weeks supply if you can.

A normally active person needs to drink at least two quarts, or half a gallon of water per day. You will also need water for cooking, cleaning, and hygiene. As such, the recommendation is to store a gallon of water per person per day.

The ideal would be to store 2 weeks worth of water per person in the home. This would be 14 gallons per person, or 53 liters. How much is this? think around 25 2-liter pop bottles worth of water, or 3 cases of Costco water bottles (40 bottles (16oz) per case).

Commercially bottled water is the safest, but you can reuse 2-liter soda pop bottles if they are well washed beforehand. (Although I don’t recommend drinking 25 2-liter bottles of pop, as that literally is a dozen pounds of sugar that you would be consuming). Do not re-use milk or juice containers.

Water bricks hold 3.5 gallons each, so 4 bricks per person. Water bricks aren’t cheap at $18-$20 per brick. That’s adds up to some $80 per person. The advantage is the easy storage of stacking the bricks, and fairly easy re-filling. This is also a great option for under-the-bed storage.

If you have secure outside storage available a 55 gallon water storage barrel may be an appropriate choice. These run around $130.