Store the water first, filter it second

Fourteen gallons per person. That's the number to build around: one gallon per person per day, two weeks, which is what FEMA and the Red Cross have been quietly recommending for years while everybody stocked three days and called it done. Family of four? Fifty-six gallons. That's eight seven-gallon jugs stacked in a garage corner, and it costs about $180 all in.

Nobody wants to hear that, because filters are more fun to shop for. A Sawyer Squeeze is a great piece of gear. It will also do exactly nothing for you at 2 a.m. when the pump's dead, the tap's dry, and there's no water in the house to squeeze.

Storage first. Always.

What the outage actually does to your water

Two failure modes, and they're different problems.

If you're on a well, the pump is electric. Power dies, water dies, immediately. There's whatever pressure is left in the tank and that's your entire supply. Maybe thirty seconds of shower.

If you're on municipal water, you usually keep pressure for a while, but a big storm brings a boil-water notice because the treatment plant lost power or a main broke and pulled in contamination. The water still comes out of the tap. It's just not trustworthy, and now you're boiling everything on a camp stove.

Two different problems, one answer that covers both: water already in your house, in containers, before the sky opens.

Buy the boring jugs

The Reliance Aqua-Tainer is around $20 for seven gallons, it stacks, and it's been the default for a reason. The Scepter military-style cans run closer to $70 and are genuinely tougher, which matters if you're throwing them in a truck bed and not if they're sitting on a shelf in your basement.

Cheap is right here. Buy the Aqua-Tainers.

But do the weight math before you buy the big ones. Water weighs 8.34 pounds a gallon. A full seven-gallon jug is roughly 58 pounds with the container, and it has one handle, on top, positioned so the thing swings into your shin. If your storage is in a basement and your kitchen is up a flight of stairs, buy five-gallon or even 3.5-gallon jugs instead. You'll carry more trips and hate it less. A 3.5-gallon jug is about 30 pounds, which anybody in the house can move, including your wife and your twelve-year-old. That's the actual test: can somebody other than you get water upstairs?

Skip the flat collapsible bladders as your primary storage. They crease, the seams give out, and they're miserable to fill. Skip cases of individual bottles as your whole plan too, though a couple of flats are genuinely useful for handing to neighbors and throwing in the car.

The forty gallons already in your house

Your water heater is a storage tank you already paid for. Most are 40 or 50 gallons. In an outage, that water is drinkable, and most people never touch it.

Cut the power to it at the breaker, or shut the gas valve, first. Then close the cold water inlet on top so nothing contaminated gets pulled in. Open a hot tap somewhere in the house to let air in, or the tank will just gurgle at you. Then drain from the spigot at the bottom into a clean container.

Two things they don't tell you. The first gallon or two comes out cloudy with sediment, especially if you've never flushed the tank. And that water can still be scalding hours into an outage, so use something that won't melt. A cheap garden hose on the drain valve makes the whole job about four times easier.

If you have a big storm with warning, fill the bathtub. A WaterBOB runs around $35 and is a food-grade liner that holds roughly 100 gallons in a standard tub, which is better than filling the tub bare, because tubs leak and nobody wants to dip a pitcher into standing bathwater. It's single-use and slightly fussy to deploy. Buy two and keep them with the hurricane stuff.

Now the filter

For a power cut in a house on a municipal supply, your realistic threat is bacteria and protozoa from a compromised main, and the cheap answer works. A hollow-fiber filter rated at 0.1 micron handles both. The Sawyer Squeeze is about $40 and filters a lot of water before it quits. It doesn't remove viruses, and it doesn't remove chemicals, lead or salt. Nothing in this price range does.

The mistake is buying a straw and calling it a water plan. A LifeStraw is twenty bucks and it works, but you can only drink through it, face down over the source. You can't fill a pot, you can't wash a cut, you can't make coffee, and you can't hand it to a kid and expect anything good to happen.

Get something that produces water into a container. If there are more than two of you, get a gravity system. A Platypus GravityWorks four-liter is roughly $130 and fills a pot while you do something else, which is the whole point. Throughput is the number that matters once you're feeding a family, not filter pore size.

Where I'd spend more: nowhere, unless you're drawing from a pond or a creek with real virus risk, in which case you're into purifier territory and a different conversation. For storm water at home, the $40 filter plus chemical backup is the honest answer.

Bleach, tablets, and a rolling boil

Plain unscented household bleach is the cheapest disinfection on earth. CDC's guidance for 6 percent sodium hypochlorite is about 1/8 teaspoon, roughly eight drops, per gallon of clear water. Stir, wait thirty minutes, and it should smell faintly of chlorine. Check the label, because concentrations vary, and know that bleach degrades. A jug older than a year is a guess, not a tool.

Aquatabs are around $15 for a hundred tablets, they don't expire in a year, and they take up no space. Buy a pack and tape it inside the lid of your water bin.

Boiling still beats everything for pathogens. One minute at a rolling boil, three minutes above 6,500 feet. It does nothing for chemical contamination, and it burns fuel you may want for food.

The part everybody forgets

The third day of an ice storm, the thing you run out of isn't drinking water. It's flushing water.

A toilet takes roughly 1.6 gallons a flush on a modern unit, more on an old one. Four people, two days, and you've blown through your entire drinking supply on the bathroom. So keep a separate non-potable stash: two 5-gallon buckets with lids, filled from the hose, stored in the garage. Pour straight into the bowl fast and it flushes without touching the tank. Rainwater off a downspout into a trash can works too, and it's free.

Label those buckets. Somebody will get confused in the dark, and you don't want it to be the nine-year-old.

Rotate it or it's decoration

Sealed, clean, food-grade containers of municipal tap water keep a long time, but check them every six months and swap the contents every year. Put it on the calendar the same weekend you change smoke detector batteries. Don't fill containers to the brim if they live somewhere that freezes, because water expands about nine percent and the jug splits at the seam.

And write the fill date on the jug in marker. Future you won't remember.

Fifty-six gallons in the corner of the garage looks like a lot of plastic doing nothing, right up until the week it's the only reason nobody in your house has to stand in a parking lot line waiting for a pallet of bottled water to show up.