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If you can afford it, I stumbled across these a while back. They seem like the cat's meow for a supply of good water for lengthy periods of time. http://www.lifesaverusa.com/Home.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Bullets? You probably need to save a couple or three in your pocket.

SRO1911 wrote: Particularly the freeze dried goods - as they maintain nearly all of their nutritional value and can be reconstituted without heat. The trade off is they are pricey. Both mountain house and wise foods are reputable, well known players in this industry. Their packaging is top notch and quality is first rate.

This is a great thread!

For freeze-dried foods, I recommend THRIVE (http://www.thrivefreezedried.com/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;) first, then Mountain House, then, when you run out of those, Wise Foods. Your taste buds will thank you for that bit of advice

Excaliber wrote:

Abraham wrote:Wow, thanks everyone for all the good tips.

Ah, how do you use bleach to make water potable?

2 drops per gallon or something like that?

It sure beats boiling it...

Calcium hypochlorite (sold in pool chemical stores) is a far better disinfectant choice than bleach. It is stored dry, doesn't degrade like bleach does, and a one pound package will disinfect about 10,000 gallons of water. Here's the story on both methods.

Much easier to keep long-term. Liquid bleach is handy to have around for normal, everyday use but Ca(ClO)]2 is much easier and better to pack away.


http://water.epa.gov/drink/emerprep/eme ... ection.cfm
Add and dissolve one heaping teaspoon of high-test granular calcium hypochlorite (approximately ¼ ounce) for each two gallons of water, or 5 milliliters (approximately 7 grams) per 7.5 liters of water. The mixture will produce a stock chlorine solution of approximately 500 milligrams per liter, since the calcium hypochlorite has available chlorine equal to 70 percent of its weight. To disinfect water, add the chlorine solution in the ratio of one part of chlorine solution to each 100 parts of water to be treated. This is roughly equal to adding 1 pint (16 ounces) of stock chlorine to each 12.5 gallons of water or (approximately ½ liter to 50 liters of water) to be disinfected.

To remove any objectionable chlorine odor, aerate the disinfected water by pouring it back and forth from one clean container to another.

Any serious preper has to have his bug-out base, Power independent, secured and defendable, food and water stocked for at least 3-6 months. Better have an underground nuclear-fall out shelter or at least Bio-chemical Warfare shelter with filtration. All other measures are temporally or transient in nature.

Beiruty wrote:Any serious preper has to have...

But the OP stated up-front that he was not one of these.

We are not there (yet) either, but it seems to us that there are a lot of common-sense things you can do to be ready for e.g. a serious power failure of a week, a month (!), or longer (!!!) and we're at least trying to plan for a month to start.

BTW one thing I read somewhere that made way too much sense was to actually test yourselves, i.e. throw the main breaker for a week and see how you fare (obviously you need to be retired or use a week's "vacation"). Would reveal a lot, and we're thinking about it, though of course we would not "throw the main breaker" but rather power-down everything but our refrigerators and our freezer (so's not to spoil food), then place them off-limits for the duration. Still not a true test of an actual grid-down event, since THE FIRST THINGS you'd make sure to use would be the freezer/fridge items, but still it would be interesting would it not...

Regarding Calcium Hypochlorite I tried to determine whether "pool shock" had/has additional chemicals and didn't get very far (downloaded a PPG Material Safety Data Sheet and found it mostly incomprehensible--chemistry is not my strong suit!). We've owned spas in the past, and now have a swimming pool. The Tri-Chlor used in swimming pools contains not only chlorine but also other things to stabilize it that I've understood to be carcinogenic.

Only bringing this up so that people try to make sure that whatever they might buy for this purpose is "pure" and suitable for potable water. And to handle it carefully--is powerful stuff.

Apart from that, I suppose getting cancer from drinking our pool water after TEOTWAWKI would be the very least of our worries.

TomsTXCHL wrote:

Beiruty wrote:Any serious preper has to have...

But the OP stated up-front that he was not one of these.

We are not there (yet) either, but it seems to us that there are a lot of common-sense things you can do to be ready for e.g. a serious power failure of a week, a month (!), or longer (!!!) and we're at least trying to plan for a month to start.

BTW one thing I read somewhere that made way too much sense was to actually test yourselves, i.e. throw the main breaker for a week and see how you fare (obviously you need to be retired or use a week's "vacation"). Would reveal a lot, and we're thinking about it, though of course we would not "throw the main breaker" but rather power-down everything but our refrigerators and our freezer (so's not to spoil food), then place them off-limits for the duration. Still not a true test of an actual grid-down event, since THE FIRST THINGS you'd make sure to use would be the freezer/fridge items, but still it would be interesting would it not...

Thats a good way to test.
In hurricane country, the family always had about a month's worth of food that didn't require electricity and a couple of weeks of bottled water. We also had kerosene and hurricane lamps. Rerminds me I should check on that.

I think IKE in Houston was a good example. It took some people nearly a month to get power back but water came on more quickly.

TomsTXCHL wrote:Regarding Calcium Hypochlorite I tried to determine whether "pool shock" had/has additional chemicals and didn't get very far (downloaded a PPG Material Safety Data Sheet and found it mostly incomprehensible--chemistry is not my strong suit!). We've owned spas in the past, and now have a swimming pool. The Tri-Chlor used in swimming pools contains not only chlorine but also other things to stabilize it that I've understood to be carcinogenic.

Only bringing this up so that people try to make sure that whatever they might buy for this purpose is "pure" and suitable for potable water. And to handle it carefully--is powerful stuff.

Apart from that, I suppose getting cancer from drinking our pool water after TEOTWAWKI would be the very least of our worries.

There are no other chemicals in cal-hypo that would be undesirable or unhealthy. Your three most common powder pool chlorines are Cal-hypo, tri-chlor, and di-chlor. You do want the cal-hypo (Calcium hypochlorite).

I have 3 of these stored away that I could fill up very quickly. They go in a bath tube and have their own pump. http://www.amazon.com/waterBOB-Emergenc ... =water+bob" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; I also have a 30 thousand gallon pool in the back yard that I could use for bathing/toilets, and drinking after boiling and purification. I have about a one months supply for 2 of survival food (commercial brand) and LOTS of bullets. This is the problem. I have 3 adult married children with grand kids. They are all local. I know I would share with them. Do I now need to plan on survival for 11 vs. 2. I've told them to plan but they have more important things to worry about like jobs/mortgages, etc. I had about 100 gallons of gas during Hurricane Rita for my generator (We had no damage and never lost power). I live 2 miles from I-10 and that was a parking lot for a week during this time. People were already starting to drive through neighborhoods looking for easy pickings. The store shelves were empty and gas stations closed.

Do your children usually come to your place I times of trouble? If so I would chat with the most receptive over their emergency plans to determine what you should plan for. It never hurts to have a little more on hand.

howdy wrote:I have 3 adult married children with grand kids. They are all local... I live 2 miles from I-10...

No hope. Though maybe you really like your family, in which case you'd want to be with them anyway.

They won't prep like you--maybe you can help by giving the grandkids guns for b-days and xmas and teaching them how to shoot. Then at least you'll have help when the masses exiting that parking lot on I-10 (after the EMP) come to take all you have...