How Much Water Do You Need & How Fast Can You Get It?

An adult needs between 3 to 5 litres of water (2 to 3 quarts) each day to survive. It's a good idea to plan on 1 gallon per person (2.3 Litres) daily. This allows for extreme heat or physical labour conditions when you need more water.

We save 1 gallon orange juice containers, wash them out well with hot soapy water, then fill with cold tap water. Since we live in a very cold climate in winter we can't store them outside so we can't keep as many as we'd like.

Right now we have 26 1-gal. jugs filled with water, and more empty clean ones hanging in the barn, ready for use. So that gives my wife and I 13 days of water.






Three Weeks of Water in Orange Juice Containers & 5-Gallon Jugs

On top of that my wife has filled 4 5-gal plastic water jugs (the kind you buy at Wal-Mart or when you are buying water at a water depot) and we store those in a closet. Those larger bottles give us 20 gallons, enough for another 10 days. So we have 23 days of water for each of us.

Why do we bother filling those big jugs? Well, they still take up room even empty. Yes we could put them in the barn or garage but they would likely have mice or squirrels running on top of them. That means we'd want to disinfect them before we filled them.

It Takes Four Minutes & One Person to Fill One Empty Jug

Also we tried a little experiment this morning. The jugs won't fit under our taps in any sink or bathtub. So one adult has to stand there and hold the bottle at an angle while it fills in the tub, or hold the spray nozzle at the kitchen sink to fill one.

And each bottle took us 4 minutes to fill. If we wanted to fill 4 empty 5-gal bottles it's going to take 16 minutes and tie up one adult! We might not have that much time or we might have other urgent tasks that need doing.

So we fill them ahead of time and store them in a closet. You can see that we actually have room for 4 big jugs and about 5 or 6 smaller orange juice containers in this one closet. It's not a big deal to give up that little bit of space to be prepared.

If you're wondering where the rest of our filled orange juice containers are, my wife puts them on shelves in a basement room which is cool and dark. We have a closet in the basement that we could use too if we want to have more handy.