Build Your Ark - Water Basics

If you had to stay home for seven days with no reliable tap water, would you feel prepared or trapped? We start our new Build Your Ark series with the most urgent “tenant” of preparedness: water. I lay out a realistic plan for building a solid one-week supply, why that one week buys you time and clear thinking, and how to calculate the minimum you need (plus the buffers that keep “minimum” from turning into painful rationing).

From there, we get into the unglamorous details that actually keep water safe: rotating your stock every six to twelve months, treating larger containers with unscented bleach, storing water out of direct sunlight, and keeping containers off concrete to avoid contamination risks. We also talk redundancy, because a single leak, freeze, or accident should not wipe out your entire emergency water storage plan.

We then move into water containers and water purification. We compare practical options like five-gallon jugs, 55-gallon blue barrels, and IBC totes, including what to watch for when buying used. On purification, we cover boiling, bleach, gravity and bottle-style filters, UV pens, and chemical tablets, with a strong emphasis on having at least two methods so you are not stuck when something fails. Finally, we walk through rainwater harvesting, basic rain barrel setups, maintenance, and the reality that local laws can affect what you can do.

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Transcript

Show Open And Sponsor

SPEAKER_00 0:02

You are listening to the Common Sense Practical Prepper. Sponsored by Duct Tape. The real duct tape. It fixes everything except that decisions. Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America. From border to border, coast to coast, and all ships at sea. Here is your host, Keith.

Why Build Your Ark Now

SPEAKER_01 0:26

I'm gonna start a new series and we're going to go in depth water, food, power, and security. So that's four tenants, I guess. And the series is called Build Your Ark. And the genesis behind this is in prepper camp 2025, I saw a lady with a t-shirt, and it said something to the effect, Noah built the Ark before it started to rain. And I know that makes a lot of sense, and it kind of goes without saying, but as preppers and people in preparedness, again, preaching to the choir, we want to be prepared before something hits. So Noah did not wait for the first raindrop to fall before he started building the ark. He prepared while everything looked normal. And I believe as a prepper, that is the proper mindset that you need to have. So here's the good news. We're not building a fortress, we're not spending thousands of dollars a month on gear and gadgets.

One Week Supply Buys Clarity

SPEAKER_01 1:36

But what we're gonna concentrate on is this the smartest thing that most people can do right now is build a solid one-week supply. And today we're gonna focus on water. So why do I say one week? Because if you have one week of everything that we're gonna talk about, one week buys you time. It gives you time to think clearly instead of panicking. It gives you time to figure out your next move. What if the power goes out tomorrow? What if the power goes out Wednesday? What if I make a trip to the store, but the shelves are pretty much bare? Most people, and I know a lot of you out there this really doesn't apply, but most people don't have anything stored up. And I'll qualify it with this you probably have tons of food in your pantry, your cabinets, your fridge, your freezer. But when it comes to food, do you have the right kind of food to get your family through the one week? So let's get back to water.

The Real Math Of Water

SPEAKER_01 2:50

The most important thing of this whole plan is water. One gallon per person per day is the minimum, in my opinion. So a family of four, you need 28 gallons, family of four for a week at the minimum. That is a lot of water. That can take up a lot of space. I say at the minimum because I wouldn't want folks to have to get into a situation where they're literally having to ration the water. All right, little Susie, here's your eight, here's your eight-ounce glass of water today. All right, little Timmy, you can't wash your face or brush your teeth because we're running low on water. If you can do a gallon and a half per person per day, there's your buffer. If you can do two gallons per person per day, that's even a larger buffer that gives you a lot of room to work with in case you need it. Now, for most of us, if we've been prepping for a while, we should be thinking bigger. 60 days, 90 days of stored water. That means going beyond just bottles of water, cases of water, and moving into larger solutions like your 55-gallon blue barrels, your IBC totes that are about 275, dedicated cisterns, both above and below the ground. I've seen some folks on YouTube, and the above-ground systems they have are just incredible. I wish I had the time and the money, but I certainly don't. Some of the systems I've seen are just fantastic, but I digress.

Store Water Safely And Rotate

SPEAKER_01 4:28

Back to our one week. Here's our key points for good water storage. Rotate your water every six to twelve months, pretty much regardless of what it is. If it's a case of water, six to twelve months. If it's your five-gallon, I think they're called like aquatainers, or you can get the two and a half gallon jugs or the gallon jugs at your grocery store, what have you. Again, we're gonna rotate them. Now, in an SHTF situation, am I really worried about the case of water in my garage? Is it coming up on four months or eight months? Or was that a year ago? I'm not too worried about that. That's gonna be a lower priority, but you need to get into the habit of rotating your stock, rotating your food, rotating your water. It's just a good habit to get into first in, first out. We've spoken about that before. If you're storing water in your aquatainers, or in the event you move up into a blue barrel, you need to preserve that water for that six to twelve months. Several different ways to do that. Primarily for your larger containers, your blue barrels, one teaspoon of unscented bleach per five gallons. So you guys do the math on that. If you have it filled up, that's 55. So that is somebody do the math for me. 11, 11 teaspoons of unscented bleach. Store your containers regardless of what they are: one-gallon jugs, cases of water, blue barrels, IBC totes. Store them out of the way of direct sunlight to help prevent algae growth. Again, I'm not too worried about my case of water in the garage up on a shelf being exposed to sunlight and worrying about algae. That's bottled water that I don't necessarily have to worry about as much as the water that's going to be in my blue barrels or my five-gallon aqua teners. If you're storing any water in blue barrels, aqua teners, or even cases of bottled water, keep them off the floor. Put a couple two by fours, a four by four, something underneath them. Because if it's in your garage, if it's on your carpet in your pantry, no harm, no foul. If you have a blue barrel in your garage like I do, I keep it on a two by four off of the concrete. Because technically, any oil or gas or any contaminants that's in the concrete that is spilled over time eventually will leach up into the plastic, believe it or not, through the plastic of the blue barrel and get into your water. So take that with a grain of salt, but I err on the side of caution and I set my blue barrel up on a two by four. If at all possible, redundancy is very important if you have the ability to do that. Have some water in the pantry, have some in the garage, have some in the storage shed outside or what have you. You wouldn't want your entire water supply in this case to be compromised if a tree was to fall on the shed, a tree was to fall in the garage. It got really cold during a winter storm, and your three aqua teners that were in the garage or in the shed froze and burst. Then you're starting from square one. So have some redundancy, and this goes for almost anything. If you have the ability, have a backup to your backup.

Picking Containers Without Regret

SPEAKER_01 8:02

So now, the water storage container types. Five-gallon jugs, you can get them on Amazon, Walmart, any of the big box stores. I would suggest, especially if you purchase things on Amazon here in the U.S., and I think it's probably across the EU as well. The third week in June is prime day or prime deal days or whatever they're calling it. So what I've done in the past, I've taken things that I wanted to purchase in the future and I put them in my Amazon cart. Now you'll get a notification in the event the price goes up or down. So right now, I probably have half a dozen things in my cart that I am hoping that go on sale on prime deal days in a few weeks. And then you have what Amazon calls peak, which is Black Friday through Christmas Eve later in the year. And that's when there's, I guess, more widespread deals than you see on prime deal days. Real quick about Amazon. If you have a question, if you're worried about the price of something, is it the best price or what have you, go to a website, and this is this is a real website, I promise. CamelCamel Camel.com. I don't know who came up with that website or why they decided to say camel three times. So drop the item into camel camel camel and it will tell you. I'm not sure why I find that so funny. Drop it into camel camel camel and then see if it's the best price. Again, Amazon is no different than Walmart or any other store. You walk in and going, oh man, what a deal, only to find out that it was five dollars yesterday and it was now at $6, but they mark it off a dollar. So you think you're getting some sort of deal when really they jack the price up a little bit, then they take it down a little bit, and you think you're getting some on sale. All right, so we got the five-gallon containers, the aqua teners, back to the 55-gallon blue barrels. Classic choice. Now, when you purchase these new, they can be expensive. If you purchase them used, make sure you're getting them from someone you trust, a reliable company that will tell you or that can show you what was in them prior to you making the purchase. I purchased a blue barrel a few years ago from a distillery here in Richmond. It was full of sugar water. Able to clean that out, sanitize it, good to go. I also purchased one that had Giordelli chocolate in it. I guess they were flavoring one of their whiskies or bourbons, and it didn't work out so well. I tested it and I had chocolate-flavored water for the first six months, but now it's kind of toned down a little bit, and I use that as a rain barrel. So we'll get into that in a second. Your IBC totes. These are the big white plastic totes that are normally surrounded by a metal cage or an aluminum cage. These in the past have carried everything from pickle juice to water to methyl ethyl bad stuff that you would never want to drink out of at any point. Again, chemicals over time, or regardless of what's in the IBC tote, has leached into the plastic itself. So again, just like your blue barrels, don't buy a blue barrel from someone unless it's new or you know what was in it. And the same goes for your IBC totes. The IBC totes that I have seen are a translucent plastic. So you need to be very careful about where they are stored because of algae. I've seen people bury them, I've seen them above ground, and people surround them with uh like fencing and other types of uh protection to keep the sunlight away from them. A little more expensive, especially brand new, but used, not very expensive at all. Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, they're readily available. Now, briefly about large cisterns that I talked about a few minutes ago. These are enormously large containers that start at 500 gallons and move up to several thousand gallons. This is for serious, hardcore people that use it to water the crops, water the livestock. They use it as a as part of their rain catchment system. But anyway, very expensive, but very efficient. But again, that's that's out of most people's price range. And we can go into those at a later date. So, me personally, I've got the blue barrel and some of the aqua taners. I use the aquainers to tote water from the house to the chicken coop. I have a couple of them stacked up, I think, in my pantry as well. Speaking of which, I need to rotate those out. So thank you. Thank you all for the reminder there.

Purification Plans With Redundancy

SPEAKER_01 12:58

Water purification. So having your water stored is only part of the equation. We need reliable ways to purify it. If you collect it from a natural source, spring, rainwater, the longer you store the water, the more questionable it can become. So here are some of the basics. Boiling the water. Simple, most reliable. Bring water to a boil for one minute, kills bacteria, viruses, parasites. It requires fuel and a heat source. Lots of pros and cons here. Unscented bleach, we talked about that briefly, very inexpensive. It is effective. So we're doing one teaspoon per five gallons. Drop it in, stir it up, make sure it's unscented, and let it sit for about 30 minutes. In the event it's still really cloudy, you can go ahead and add more, stir it up, take a look at it. So water filters. Gravity filters like the Berkey, the Sawyer systems, there's several different products within the Sawyer line of water filters. They're excellent, really good for long-term use. They remove bacteria, parasites, sediment. Some also reduce viruses and chemicals. Great for daily use. Again, you put the Berkey up on the counter in the kitchen and you can draw water out of it, draw a glass of water, and they're efficient, can be a little pricey. I don't have one. I haven't done a lot of research, so I don't know. There's probably some Chinese knockoffs as well, but they work. So personally, in my go bag, I have one of the Grail water filters, G-R-A-Y-L. I think I did a quick blurb on that maybe a year ago. Can be a bit pricey. It's kind of like a French press kind of thing. You put the water in, you put the filter on top and you push down. And as you push down, it takes all the crap out of it and it comes into the part of the filter where then you can drink it. Relatively fast. It doesn't take a long period of time, and it's very good for purifying questionable water. Does get out the microorganisms and the bad stuff and the sediment as well. Water can also be treated with a UV light or a or a UV pen light. They work, they work very well, kill microorganisms very quickly, but it requires batteries or it needs to be recharged, and it does not remove the sediment. Now I've seen these used where they'll take a large glass of water, really not going to use it on a five-gallon bucket. You put it in, swish it around, and it's going to kill the microorganisms, but it's not going to get rid of the sediment. Something nice to have. I wouldn't expect that they're too expensive, but I personally don't have one. But again, that's for a small, I guess, a small use case. You want to pull water from the stream or the creek that's questionable. Hit it with the UV. That's great. Let the sediment settle. Then you got you some water. Then the old standby chemical tablets, iodine or chlorine dioxide tablets. They work very well, lightweight, very inexpensive. But I have those in my bug out bag and I kind of use those as a backup to the backup. The chemical tabs are not my primary source or my primary method to purify water, but it's an option. Going back to redundancy, if you can have at least two different purification methods available. Filters break, filters clog, bleach can degrade over time, which is something I found out recently. So layering your methods gives you real resilience.

Rain Barrels Plus Rules And Upkeep

SPEAKER_01 16:56

We'll talk about rainwater harvesting last. So once you have your basic water stored, adding a renewable source is one of the next best steps if you can. Rainwater harvesting is practical, relatively inexpensive, and it's effective. There's not a lot to it. I currently have three rain barrels and I have an asphalt roof. So the water that comes off of that is not potable. I use that to water my garden with one of the little soaker hoses. So that works well for me. If I had a metal roof or something like that, I would probably take the time to get a decent filtration system to hook up to the back end of those rain barrels and perhaps use that. But with an asphalt roof, I haven't taken that on as a project, and I doubt if I ever will. So a simple starter system, your roof is the catchment area, the gutters, maybe leaf screens to keep the to keep the leaves out of the gutter, then out of the water. A lot of people at the top of the downspout where it meets the gutter, they'll take a little screen, they'll drop it in that keeps sticks and leaves and everything from going down into the gutter and then where it splits off and heads to your rain barrel. My two, two of my three rain barrels are connected at the bottom, so when they fill up, they fill up simultaneously. Some people will put a little overflow PVC pipe between number one and number two. So when number one is filled up, the overflow, in a sense, then drops into number two, six one half dozen. And the third rain barrel that I use sits off by itself, and I also use that to water the garden. So for the more serious setups, we have the large cisterns, the buried cisterns that we talked about a few minutes ago. Now, when it comes to rain catchment, please do your due diligence and check your local laws for your town, your city, your council, wherever it happens to be. Because believe it or not, some states, some counties, some municipalities heavily regulate or even restrict or forbid the collection of rain on your property. Now, don't get me started on this, but I think that is ridiculous. All right, you already got me started. I think that is ridiculous. You own your home, rent your home, own your property, what have you. That is yours. I find it a bit of overreach by the local government to tell you you cannot capture something that falls from the sky. Now, we're not capturing all the water in the world. We're not depleting the water table. So for the folks in the neighborhood of the town or the city that are collecting water, we're not keeping all the water so the people down the street don't have water coming out of their spigots. We're not keeping all the water so the fire hydrants go dry. But I think it's just a bit ridiculous that there's restrictions on catching things that fall from the sky. But do your due diligence, check the laws, make sure you're not violating laws. But in something like this, in my opinion, it's kind of one of those I'd rather ask for forgiveness than permission. Whereas where I live currently, there are no laws that restrict catching rainwater. And like I said before, roof water is not automatically potable or safe to drink without proper treatment. Regular maintenance on your rain catchment system, check your filters, check your pipes, the PVC, the connections, look out for algae. You can drop little anti-algae tablets if it sets for a long period of time. But like anything else, just keep up on the maintenance.

Do A Water Inventory This Week

SPEAKER_01 20:46

So water is the foundation of our arc. That's going to be our first tenant. Water, food, power, security. If you don't have a reliable source of water, your food, power, and security become much more difficult in the short term and the long term. So what I'd like everybody to do, if you are absolutely set on water, do me a favor, take the weekend or take a day next week, and go ahead and do an inventory. First in, first out. If you need to rotate, if you need to retreat the water, then go ahead and do that. For those folks who don't have a one-week reliable water supply, go ahead and start. I'm preaching to the choir. Start small, one case of water, two one-gallon containers of water. Look into rain barrels. Here where I live in the county, the county itself, like the parks and recreation department, have rain barrel classes every once in a while, and they're not very expensive. It's you make like a $25 donation, and they give you the new barrel and they give you the spigot and the washers and the nuts and bolts and everything. So they they subsidize that. And so check around. It's worth it. Rain barrels, I think, are very important. They help water my garden and it keeps my regular water bill down. All right, folks. So that's our first tenant of building our arc.

Thoughts, Prayers, And Final Ask

SPEAKER_01 22:16

So before I close, I need a favor. Um, as you know, I'm a retired police officer, and last weekend two Chesterville County police officers were severely injured responding to a domestic type situation. Two officers were shot, and one officer, well, they're both in stable but critical condition. One officer was shot several times with a long gun, and the other officer was shot once. One officer that was shot once is obviously doing better than the other officer. The suspect was also injured. He is hospitalized and expected to live. The canine, canine knight, K-N-I-G-H-T, unfortunately lost his life in the same situation. So I am not the most religious guy out there, but and this is the department that I retired from. I would ask that if you're a religious person, keep the officers and their family in your thoughts and prayers. The canine officer who lost his partner, keep him in your thoughts and prayers. And when it comes to the family of the officers, both of those officers are legacy officers, meaning their parents were police officers that have since retired from law enforcement. Both this department and one officer's father retired from the department, then went to work for the ATF. So do me a favor, if you got a chance, just keep everybody in your thoughts and prayers as they go through a very, very long and arduous healing process. All right, folks, thank you so much. As always, I appreciate it. Be careful out there, take care of one another, and until next time.

SPEAKER_00 24:09

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