Getting Prepared without Breaking Your Budget

Step 1- Storing Water

It's great that you want to make sure your family is prepared in the event of a disaster or emergency, but you also have to keep expenses under control. so how do you do it? You need to plan it out, and start with small steps. Let's look at some basics.

Water is the first thing you need. We want to have at least 1 gallon per person, per day. Our first goal is to have a 3 day supply of food and water for everyone in the house.

Let's go over a couple of different options on water storage.
If you have some advance warning, you can fill bathtubs with water than can be used to flush toilets, or to drink or cook with after it's been sanitized. Water can be sanitized by boiling it for 3 minutes, or by adding common household bleach. The bleach needs to be unscented, regular bleach. 16 drops per gallon is the recommended dosage- you can also add 4 drops per quart for smaller bottles.

In an emergency, you can also use thee water that's stored in your hot water heater!

The easiest way to get started with water storage is probably the 1 gallon jugs of drinking water. These cost a dollar or less. Keep your eye out for a sale and stock up when you find a good price.
it wouldn't hurt to rotate teh jugs out every 6 months or so. Just buy a couple of new jugs and use the older ones for everyday stuff like drinking, making coffee or cooking.
Some people - like the The Los Angeles Fire Department- report that you shouldn't store plastic water jugs directly on concrete due to possible chemical leaching from the concrete.
Here is te LAFD Emergency Preparedness Booklet  if you'd like to read it.
lafd.org/eqbook.pdf

Moving up in storage size, you can use food grade 5 gallon buckets. It's very important that you use food grade buckets and not the orange or black buckets. The food grade is white and has a "5" inside the triangular recycling symbol on the bottom. You can ask local restaurants and grocery stores for their used buckets. Wash them thoroughly with soap and hot water and rinse them very well- a triple rinse is usually good.  Be aware that pickle bucket are very difficult to get the smell out of. bleaching and letting them sit in the sun for a few days will help- but that pickle flavor still ends up in the water. You could cover up the taste with Kool Aid or Crystal Light if you had to in an emergency- but the pickle buckets are best avoided for water storage.

You can usually find good prices on food grade buckets a home brew supply places in your area- check te yellow pages for listings.

Some folks recommend adding a little bleach to the water before your close the bucket, but I don't do that.  You do need to keep the buckets in a fairly dark, cool place to help avoid contamination.

Moving up the ladder in cost, you can also purchase reusable 5 gallon water bottles. I recommend the ones with handles that are designed for reuse- not the bottles that require a dispenser.
I've found the 5 gallon bottles at local water stores. These are stores that sell home filtration systems and also offer refills if you bring your own bottle. Again, check the yellow pages, or yp.com.

Finally, you can buy water storage buckets and bottles at Target, Walmart or outdoors /camping supply places- but expect to pay top dollar for the. Usually in the neighborhood of $10-$20 for a 5 gallon container. They do tend to come with extra features like easy to use spouts and can sometimes be stacked.

That should be enough information to get you started on water storage. Next we'll look at easy, inexpensive ways to start stockpiling food for your family.