This week we are starting to build our preparedness kit! The first item to collect is water. The suggestion is to have one gallon of water per person per day for three days. In our house, we have 8 people so we need 8 gallons each day and would need 24 gallons for the full 3 days.
Frankly this has been one of the impediments to me building a kit. That’s a lot of water to buy and store! Also, we want to make sure we don’t have that much water sitting around forever if a disaster never occurs. So we decided we need to buy and manage the supply so it is always somewhat fresh. The decision then becomes what is the best way to buy water so we can do that.
If we buy it in one gallon containers then we need 24 of them. We can’t risk having tap water available during a disaster to fill empty containers so the safest solution is to buy them at the store and keep them in a designated spot. But the problem for our family with these containers is that they are not convenient for us to use and rotate through.
Another solution is to buy 16 oz. bottles in a case of 24. If one gallon is 128 fluid ounces then one case would be enough for one person for the full 3 days. For all eight people we would need eight cases. This seems like the best thing to do for our family since we normally buy and use a case a week and could just put the new case in the storage area and take out one of the older ones and keep rotating through the water in this manner. In eight weeks we would have replaced all the cases with new ones.
The next question was where to buy the water because I definitely did not want to spend a lot. We could just buy an extra case each week for eight weeks during our regular grocery shopping trip. We shop at Meijer a lot – they sell a case of their brand of water for $2.79 a case so I would spend a total of $22.32. I also noticed Kroger has their brand of purified drinking water on sale for $2.29 for a case of 32 – 16.9 bottles. For a case of 32 bottles, I would only need 6 cases which would cost a total of $13.74, but there were special conditions at Kroger to get that price so I’m not sure I can do that.
At the end, we decided to make it easy on our family and budget, we will just add an extra case each week for 8 weeks since we still have 16 more weeks of building our kit anyway.
