As I mentioned previously, you can die a lot faster without water than without food. Water needs to be way up on your list of priorities for surviving a disaster. You could easily die before any help gets to you if you do not have water.
Therefore, I would recommend that you store some water for emergencies. I would also like for you to do that. Please store some water for emergencies. The minimum is a gallon a day per person. Include extra if you have pets or plants. That is very minimum. It does not include enough for keeping yourself or your surroundings or your clothes clean. Three gallons a day is more realistic. If you live in a dry climate you will need to drink all three gallons to stay alive, so then you will have to allow more for cleaning and cooking.
If you do not want or cannot afford to buy water containers to store emergency water in, you need to save up plastic bottles and clean them out to use.
They can be pop bottles, juice bottles, and milk bottles. It would be best to use bottles that held food or drink.
There are some kinds of plastic that leak chemicals into whatever is in them that are not good for you to drink. If the bottles you use came with food or drink already in them, you have a pretty good chance that they will be ok for holding your water safely.
There are several different types of plastic, classified in the United States according to recycling numbers. One can tell by those numbers whether the plastic is safe to put water in. Numbers 1-5 are good. Numbers 6-7 are bad. The numbers are usually in a little triangle on the bottom of the container.
I filter my water before I store it. That is because I filter all of my tap water. My city floods the tap water with chlorine and fluoride. Neither of those agrees with me, so I get the fluoride and chlorine out before I drink it. I don't want it in my stored water either.
Most authorities say to put a couple of drops of chlorine in your stored water to keep it clean while it is stored.
It is also recommended that you change your stored water every six months. That also involves cleaning the containers.
I think it is a lot easier to rotate my water storage into my daily water use. That way you don't have a huge operation every six months.
I like to use a Mr. Coffee coffeemaker. They have a permanent filter that is in addition to the regular paper filters that most coffeemakers have. The permanent filter has charcoal in it and is supposed to remove 97.something percent of bad stuff out of the water. I like it. The water tastes much better out of that than the tap and I don't get sick from it like I do tap water.
I never use that Mr. Coffee coffeemaker for coffee. It is only for water. It is too hard to keep cleaning it when it is used for coffee. That is the cheapest and still easy-to-use system for getting clean water that I have found so far. The coffeemaker is not part of my actual emergency preparedness system because it requires electricity. Most disasters mean no electricity. It is part of the water storage part of my emergency preparedness. I have other plans for ongoing clean water during an emergency.
It is possible to do a lot of blog posts on where to put your emergency preparedness items, so I will. Later. I am roughly posting according to priorities in what will kill you first if you don't do it.
I want to post next about different kinds of commercial filters available on the market and the advantages and disadvantages of them.
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