Chapter 5
Storage & Procurement
Treatment gear answers the question "can I make this water safe?" Stored water answers a different and earlier question: "do I have to do anything at all today?" That is the real value of storage — it buys back time and attention in the first hours, when you are also dealing with power, information, family, and whatever caused the problem. Filters and chemicals are the long game. A stack of full jugs is the buffer that keeps the first day from turning into a scramble. You want both, and they cost different things: storage costs space, treatment costs skill and maintenance.
How Much, Honestly
- One gallon per person per day is the floor: roughly half for drinking, half for cooking and minimal hygiene. Heat, exertion, illness, and nursing raise it.
- Two weeks is the target most agencies point to. For a family of four that is about 56 gallons — one drum, or eleven five-gallon jugs.
- Count the animals. Dogs and livestock are easy to forget and not optional.
- Add flush water. Sanitation eats far more than drinking does. Non-potable storage — rain barrels, pool, filled tub — covers that without touching your clean supply.
- Water is heavy: about 8.3 lb per gallon. A full 55-gallon drum is over 450 lb — it goes where it will live, on a level base, before it gets filled.
Four Scales of Storage
These stack rather than compete. Most households end up running all four at different depths.
Everyday scale — jugs and cases
Cases of bottled water and 1–2.5 gallon jugs under a sink or in a closet. Zero setup, no maintenance, and they move with you. Costly per gallon and bulky, but they are the fastest way for anyone to go from nothing to a few days of margin this afternoon.
Rotation scale — 5 to 7 gallon jugs
This is the sweet spot for most households, and it works because you use it every day. Fill five-gallon jugs at a reverse-osmosis filling station, drink and cook from them in normal times, and refill as they empty. Storage stays fresh with no rotation chore, you learn the routine before you need it, and a stack of full jugs is always on hand. A full 5-gallon jug is about 42 lb — keep them low and reachable.
Surge scale — bathtub bladders and drums
When a storm, wildfire, or boil notice is forecast, a bathtub bladder holds roughly 60–100 gallons of tap water in minutes without trusting the tub itself, which is neither food-safe nor leak-proof. 55-gallon drums cover longer outages: opaque, food-grade, filled with treated water, stored on a level base with a siphon pump and bung wrench kept with them.
Renewable scale — catchment and wells
Storage is a fixed number that only counts down. Catchment and a well are the taps that refill it. Both need treatment before drinking, and both need to be part of the plan before the outage — a rain barrel with no filter and a hand pump with no test results are only half a solution.
A Rotation System That's Easy to Keep Up
Stored water usually goes stale for simple reasons: dumping and refilling 300 gallons takes a lot of time, so it sits for five years and becomes a liability. The fix is to put the storage inside your normal routine so rotation happens on its own.
The filling-station loop. Keep six to ten five- or seven-gallon food-grade jugs. Drink and cook from them daily. When two or three are empty, they go in the vehicle and get refilled at a local reverse-osmosis filling station. The full jugs are your reserve and the empties are your errand. Nothing sits long enough to go stale, the containers get inspected constantly, and if the tap goes down you are already living off the system instead of learning it.
One note on RO water. Reverse-osmosis and distilled water have no chlorine residual, so they will not hold off growth on their own. That is fine for water you drink within weeks. For anything you seal up and forget, add a light chlorine dose or plan to treat it on the way out.
Deep storage on top. Behind the rotating jugs, keep the stuff you do not touch: drums or stackable tanks, filled with chlorinated tap water or treated water, dated with a marker, checked once a year for seal and container condition. Refresh every one to two years, and use the old water on the garden rather than pouring it out.
Treating Water So It Is Ready Years Later
1. Start with the cleanest source you can
Treated municipal tap is the easiest — it arrives disinfected with a residual. Well or filling-station water needs disinfection before it goes into long-term storage. Never store untreated surface water as drinking water; store it as flush and wash water and label it clearly.
2. Sanitize the container, not just the water
Wash with soap, rinse, then sanitize with roughly one teaspoon of unscented bleach per quart of water, swirl it over every interior surface including the cap threads, and air dry. Use only food-grade containers, and never a vessel that held fuel, chemicals, or anything but food or water — plastic holds those odors and compounds permanently.
3. Add a residual if there is not one
About 1/8 teaspoon of unscented 6% bleach per gallon — roughly a teaspoon per 10 gallons, or two tablespoons per 55-gallon drum — gives untreated or RO water something to hold. Check the label percentage; 8.25% needs proportionally less. Stir before sealing. Bleach itself loses potency in six to twelve months, so stock fresh bottles or keep calcium hypochlorite, which stores dry for years.
4. Fill full, seal tight, keep light out
Air space and light are what let algae and bacteria establish. Fill to the top, seal properly, and use opaque containers or store them in the dark. Clear or translucent tanks in a sunny garage will green up — if that is what you own, cover them or box them in.
5. Store cool, dark, off concrete, and away from fumes
Aim for a stable cool spot out of sunlight. Put containers on wood or a pallet rather than bare concrete, both for temperature and because plasticizers and odors can migrate. Keep them away from gasoline, pesticides, and solvents — vapors pass through polyethylene walls.
6. Date it, log it, and inspect once a year
Marker on the container, one line in a note on your phone. Once a year: check seals, look for bulging, weeping, or cloudiness, and confirm the pump and wrench you need to actually get water out are still with the drums. Storage you cannot open is not storage.
Short-Notice Capture: Bladders and Every Vessel You Own
When you get warning — a hurricane track, a wildfire evacuation watch, a utility notice, a hard freeze forecast — the cheapest water you will ever get is the water still in the pipes. Fill before pressure drops or a boil notice lands.
Bathtub bladders. A food-grade liner that drops in the tub and fills from the spout with a short hose, typically 60 to 100 gallons, with a small pump or spigot to draw from. The reason to use one rather than filling the tub directly: tub surfaces are not food-safe, most drains seep, and cleaning products and hair are already in there. A bladder keeps the water potable and covered for weeks instead of hours. Buy it before the season, and unwrap and read it once so you are not learning it in the dark.
Everything else, in order. Clean drinking containers and jugs first, then pots and pitchers, then the washing machine, then tubs and buckets for flush water. Water heaters hold 40 to 50 gallons already in the house — shut the inlet, kill power or gas, and draw from the drain valve into a clean container, with the understanding that sediment comes with it and it wants treatment before drinking. A swimming pool is thousands of gallons of washing and flush water, and it is the single most common unplanned reserve people fall back on — see the next section before you drink any of it.
Pool Water: The Accidental 15,000-Gallon Tank
A typical residential pool holds 10,000 to 20,000 gallons — more water than any storage plan a homeowner is realistically going to build. So it will get used, and the honest answer is not "never drink it," it is use it correctly and drink it last. Pool water is microbially about the best raw water you will find, because it has been carrying a disinfectant residual for months. Its problems are chemical, and chemistry is the one category that gets worse when you boil it.
Use the water in tiers. Flushing toilets, washing, laundry, floor cleaning, and animal-pen washdown first — that is where the volume belongs, and it needs no treatment at all. It frees your stored drinking water for drinking, which is the entire point. Only treat pool water for consumption when the stored supply is genuinely running out.
Day one: shut the system down and protect the water. Kill power to the pump so you are not circulating and evaporating it, stop adding chemicals, cover the pool if you can, and keep people, pets, dishes, and buckets out of it. Draw from the pool with a clean dedicated container or a siphon, never by dipping a used bucket. The moment swimmers or a pet get in, or the residual dies off, you have a warm open pond growing algae and bacteria — and then it needs the full treatment train anyway.
What is in it
- Free chlorine, 1–3 ppm in a balanced pool. This is the least of your problems: it is in the same range as some municipal tap water, it off-gasses in sunlight and open air within a day or two, and activated carbon strips it quickly. Right after a shock treatment it can be 10 ppm or higher — do not drink shocked water, wait until a test strip reads back down in the normal range.
- Cyanuric acid (stabilizer), commonly 30–100 ppm. This is the real reason pool water is tricky. Trichlor and dichlor shock and tablets add stabilizer with every dose, and it never leaves — it only accumulates until the water is drained and replaced. Filters do not remove it, and boiling concentrates it. Low, incidental exposure is not the concern; drinking it as your daily water for weeks is uncharted, so treat it as something to remove, not something to accept.
- Algaecides and clarifiers. Copper-based algaecides leave dissolved copper behind (the same chemistry that stains plaster and turns blond hair green), and quat and polyquat products leave surfactants. Copper is a dissolved metal: not removed by boiling, hollow fiber, or ordinary carbon.
- Non-chlorine shock, bromine, and pH chemicals. Potassium monopersulfate shock, bromine systems, muriatic acid, soda ash, and calcium hardness increasers all leave dissolved residue. Calcium hypochlorite shock is the friendliest of the group — it breaks down to salt and calcium — while stabilized chlorine products are the ones that load the water permanently.
- Everything the swimmers brought. Sunscreen, body oils, urine, sweat, and their reaction products with chlorine (chloramines and other disinfection byproducts). Carbon handles most of this class well.
Saltwater pools are not seawater — but they are not drinkable either
A saltwater pool is a chlorine pool; a cell electrolyzes the salt into chlorine on the fly. Salinity runs roughly 2,500–4,000 ppm, about a tenth of seawater's ~35,000 ppm, so it will not make you violently ill the way seawater does. It is still five to ten times the ~500 ppm total-dissolved-solids threshold where water starts tasting bad, and well past the ~250 ppm chloride and sodium guidance for drinking water. Sustained drinking at that salinity works against you: your kidneys spend water excreting the salt, and it is a genuine problem for anyone with high blood pressure, kidney disease, or heart failure. Salt cannot be filtered, boiled, or carboned out. Saltwater pools require distillation or reverse osmosis, full stop. Salt pools also often carry a stabilizer load and the same algaecide history as any other pool.
How to treat it, in order
- Test first. Pool test strips or a drop kit cost a few dollars and tell you free chlorine, pH, and stabilizer level. Keep a set with your water gear — you cannot make a sane decision without knowing whether you are looking at a balanced pool or one shocked yesterday.
- Distill it, or push it through reverse osmosis. This is the only path that deals with stabilizer, copper, salt, and pool chemistry together. Distillation is the more forgiving of the two here: everything that matters is non-volatile and stays in the boiler, and it needs no membranes you cannot replace. A carbon polish on the output takes care of the volatiles that carry over. Solar or stovetop distillation is slow — a gallon or two a day from an improvised setup — so start early rather than when the jugs are empty. RO works well but chlorine destroys membranes, so the water must go through carbon before the membrane.
- If distillation and RO are off the table, the fallback is a compromise, not a solution: let the water sit uncovered in the sun a day or two to burn off free chlorine, settle and pre-filter the sediment, run it through a generous activated carbon stage (a carbon block, not a spoonful of charcoal), and finish with boiling or a purifier for microbes. That removes chlorine, byproducts, sunscreen, and much of the organic load. Understand what it leaves: stabilizer, copper, salt, and calcium all pass straight through. Use it for cooking and short-term drinking if the alternative is dehydration, keep the volume modest, and do not give it to infants, pregnant women, or anyone with kidney disease if any other water exists.
- Never just boil pool water and call it done. It kills microbes it probably did not have and concentrates every chemical it did.
Hot tubs and spas need extra care. Small volume, much higher chemical concentration, bromine systems, heavy biofilm in the plumbing, and months between drains. Count spa water as washing water only.
The prep that makes this easy: keep the pool balanced rather than over-treated, favor unstabilized shock (calcium hypochlorite) over trichlor and dichlor tablets so your stabilizer level stays low, drain and refill on schedule so it never climbs, skip copper algaecides if you can, own test strips, and own a way to distill. A pool you have maintained with this in mind is a real reserve. A pool loaded with 100 ppm stabilizer and years of algaecide is flush water.
Rainwater Catchment, Without the Hand-Waving
The math is generous: roughly 0.6 gallons per square foot of roof footprint per inch of rain, so a 1,000 square foot catchment area yields around 600 gallons in a one-inch storm, minus losses. That is why catchment is worth doing. But "it fell from the sky" is not the same as clean, and the details below are where most systems fail.
Your roof material decides what you can use it for
Metal roofing is the standard for drinking-water catchment: smooth, inert, and easy to keep clean. Asphalt shingles are a different story — they shed granules, fiberglass, and petroleum-based compounds, and the runoff commonly picks up organic compounds and metals from flashing and vents. Wood shakes may be treated with preservatives; older roofs and moss treatments can contribute zinc or copper; lead flashing and lead-based paint on trim are real hazards on older buildings. If your roof is shingle, plan that water for irrigation, laundry, and flushing, and treat any drinking use as a full project: first flush, sediment filtration, carbon for organics, and disinfection — with the honest caveat that carbon and hollow fiber do not remove dissolved metals.
First-flush diverters are not optional
The first sheet of water off any roof carries the accumulated bird and rodent droppings, dust, pollen, insects, and grit. A first-flush diverter is a vertical standpipe teed off the downspout that fills before water reaches the tank, holding that worst slug aside; a small weep hole or manual valve drains it between storms so it is ready again. Size it for roughly 10 gallons per 1,000 square feet of roof as a starting point — more after a long dry spell. Also screen gutters and every tank opening, and keep a leaf strainer at the inlet.
Light through the tank walls means algae
This is the single most common storage mistake. Translucent totes, white poly tanks, and clear-walled containers let enough light through to grow algae, which clogs screens, ruins taste, and feeds bacteria. Use opaque dark tanks, paint or wrap what you have, or shade and box the tank. A dark tank in the sun also runs hot, so shade is worth having on both counts. Screen every opening against mosquitoes — standing water is a breeding site and in many places a code issue.
Overflow, foundation, and weight
Plumb the overflow away from the foundation deliberately, into a swale, a second tank, or a drainage run. Tanks belong on compacted level ground or a proper pad: 275-gallon totes and larger tanks weigh over a ton full and will tilt, crack fittings, or fail on soft soil. Elevating a tank a few feet buys usable gravity pressure, but the stand has to be built for the real load.
Cold climates and the law
Drain lines, diverters, and above-ground tanks before hard freeze, or use a below-frost cistern. And check the rules: rainwater harvesting is encouraged and even rebated in some states and restricted or permitted in others, particularly in the intermountain west where water rights are involved. Codes may also govern any connection to indoor plumbing.
Shallow Wells, Hand Pumps, and Windmills
A well that works without the grid is one of the strongest positions in preparedness, and a shallow one is the most affordable version of it. It is also the most exposed. Depth is protection — the soil column above a deep aquifer filters and buffers, and shallow water tables get whatever the surface hands them, quickly.
Contamination risk is the headline, not yield
Shallow aquifers respond to surface events in days rather than decades. Septic drainfields, livestock pens and manure, fertilized fields and lawns, road salt, buried fuel tanks, and flood water all reach them. Bacteria and nitrate are the two findings that show up most, and neither one announces itself — nitrate is colorless, odorless, and tasteless, and it is genuinely dangerous to infants and risky in pregnancy. No hollow-fiber filter and no carbon block removes nitrate; that takes reverse osmosis, distillation, or ion exchange.
Test, and keep testing
Have a certified lab run coliform bacteria and nitrate at least annually, and after any flooding, nearby construction, or a change in taste, smell, or clarity. Add arsenic, lead, manganese, and pesticide or fuel screens based on what is in your area — your county extension office or health department can tell you what is regionally common. Keep the results; a trend line is worth far more than one clean test.
The wellhead is where most contamination enters
Casing should extend well above grade with a sealed sanitary cap, the ground should slope away, and there should be no standing water, animal access, or fuel storage near it. Old dug and bored wells with rock, brick, or wood casing, hand-dug pits, and unsealed abandoned wells on the property are direct conduits to the aquifer — they need proper sealing or professional decommissioning. Never let a flooded wellhead go unshocked and untested.
Hand pumps: the honest limits
A suction or pitcher pump can only lift water roughly 20 to 25 feet — physics, not build quality. Deeper than that needs a deep-well hand pump with the cylinder down in the water, which is a real install and real money, and many can be fitted alongside an existing electric pump so both share the casing. Expect meaningful labor: filling a family's daily needs by hand is a chore measured in hundreds of strokes. Keep spare leathers, seals, and rod parts on hand, and freeze-protect the pump body in cold climates. And check clearance — the drop pipe and rod need room next to the existing pump and wiring.
Windmills and solar: unattended pumping
A mechanical windmill pumps whenever the wind blows, which means storage tanks, float valves, and a way to shut it off, plus a tower with grease points and a sucker rod that needs periodic service. It is durable and grid-free but it is farm equipment, not an appliance. A DC solar pump is usually the simpler modern answer: a submersible pump and controller filling a cistern during daylight, with the tank rather than a battery as the storage. Either way, design around the tank — pumping and demand rarely line up.
Treat it anyway
Well water is untreated by definition: there is no chlorine residual and no operator watching it. Keep a treatment chain matched to your test results — sediment plus disinfection for biological risk, carbon for organics and taste, RO or distillation if nitrate, arsenic, or salt show up. Know how to shock-chlorinate the well and how long to wait before drinking, and keep the shock chemical stocked.
Frequently Asked Questions
- How long can you store water before it goes bad?
- Water itself does not spoil; containers and contamination are what fail. Commercially bottled water is typically stamped one to two years, mostly for plastic taste and packaging integrity. Water you bottle yourself in clean, sealed, food-grade, opaque containers stores well for six months to a year before rotating, and longer in cool dark conditions if it was disinfected going in and the container stays sealed.
- Should you add bleach to water for long term storage?
- If the water came from a treated municipal tap it already carries a chlorine residual and needs nothing added. If it came from a well, a filling station using reverse osmosis, or any untreated source, a light dose — roughly 1/8 teaspoon of unscented 6% bleach per gallon, or about 1 teaspoon per 10 gallons — gives it a residual so nothing grows during storage. Stir, seal, and date the container.
- Is it safe to collect rainwater off asphalt shingles?
- Use it for irrigation and washing, not for drinking without serious treatment. Asphalt shingles shed grit, fiberglass, and petroleum-based compounds, and some older or treated roofing carries zinc, copper, or moss-killer residue that carbon and hollow-fiber filters do not fully address. Metal roofs are the preferred drinking-water surface. Any roof needs a first-flush diverter, screens, and full disinfection before drinking.
- How much water should a family store?
- One gallon per person per day is the working floor for drinking and basic hygiene, so a family of four needs 28 gallons a week and about 56 gallons for two weeks. Pets, hot climates, illness, and any real cleaning or cooking push that up fast. Most people find two weeks stored plus a filter and a chemical backup is a stronger position than chasing a huge storage number alone.
- Are shallow wells and hand pumps safe for long term use?
- They are valuable but not automatically safe. Shallow aquifers are the most exposed to septic systems, feedlots, fertilizer, road salt, and fuel spills, and they respond quickly to drought and flooding. Nitrate and bacteria are the common problems, and neither is fixed by a standard filter. Test annually through a certified lab, keep the wellhead sealed and above grade, and plan on treatment even when the water looks clear.
- Can you drink swimming pool water in an emergency?
- Use it for flushing, washing, and laundry first — that is where thousands of gallons belong, and it frees your stored water for drinking. For drinking it needs real treatment, because the problem is chemical rather than microbial: cyanuric acid stabilizer from trichlor and dichlor products accumulates and never leaves, copper algaecides leave dissolved metal, and boiling concentrates all of it. Distillation or reverse osmosis is the only complete answer. If neither is available, off-gas the chlorine in open air, pre-filter, run it through a certified activated carbon block, then disinfect — and accept that stabilizer, copper, and salt still pass through, so keep the volume modest and skip it for infants, pregnancy, or kidney disease.
- Is saltwater pool water safe to drink?
- Not without distillation or reverse osmosis. A saltwater pool runs roughly 2,500 to 4,000 ppm salt — about a tenth of seawater, so it is not immediately dangerous, but it is far above the roughly 500 ppm where water tastes bad and the 250 ppm sodium and chloride guidance for drinking water. Salt is dissolved, so no filter, carbon cartridge, or amount of boiling removes it, and drinking at that salinity costs you water rather than gaining it, especially with high blood pressure, kidney, or heart conditions.
- Can you drink pool water right after shocking the pool?
- No. Immediately after a shock treatment free chlorine can be 10 ppm or more, well above the 1 to 3 ppm of a balanced pool. Wait until a test strip reads back down in the normal range, and understand that stabilized shock products such as trichlor and dichlor also raise cyanuric acid permanently every time they are used. Calcium hypochlorite shock is the better choice if you consider your pool part of your water plan, because it breaks down to salt and calcium instead of loading stabilizer.
Storage Safety and Accuracy
General information only, not engineering, plumbing, medical, or legal advice. Dosing figures are common published starting points and vary by product concentration and local guidance — read your chemical's label and your health authority's current recommendation. Use food-grade containers exclusively, follow local rules on rainwater collection and any cross-connection to household plumbing, and have wells drilled, sealed, and decommissioned by licensed professionals and tested by a certified lab. Treat water for infants, pregnant women, the elderly, and the immunocompromised conservatively.