Man Does Not Live By Food Alone

It's great to store food for when times get tough.  Having food in the pantry is like having money in the bank.

But if you ever need your food storage to live on, you'll need a lot more than food:  medicines, soap, and toilet paper, for starters. 

But the most important thing to store is water.  We need at least a gallon of water per person per day.  That's roughly 1/2 gallon for drinking, and 1/2 gallong for cooking and sanitation.  And that is a bare minimum.

There are lots of resources on the Internet for how to store water, so I'm not going to go into it too deeply.  But I found one thing recently that I wanted to mention because I've only seen it mentioned one other place:  the WaterBOB(R). 

Many of use who live in rural areas know that if a storm is predicted, we'd best fill our bathtub with water because we'll need it if the power goes out.  But although that water is great for flushing the toilet, it isn't very good for drinking.  It'll pick up any bits of skin flakes, soap scum, cat hair, and dust that may be in the tub.  And you don't want to drink those.

Enter, the WaterBOB.  It's a plastic bladder that fits inside the tub.  You fill it with water, and use the manual pump on top to get water out of it.  It seems to be designed for the scenario I mentioned above, fairly short-term preparedness where you have some warning.  The website says it'll keep the water clean for up to 4 weeks.

I don't know whether it's recommended for longer storage.  Obviously, you wouldn't want to leave it in your bathtub all the time.  And you have to fill it before the power goes out.   But I'd think a reasonably handy person could build a bathtub-sized box to contain and support it, and fill it with purified water.

Anyway, it seems worth looking into--for short-term, predicted, situations like storms.  I'll put the link on the right side of the screen.