The number I’ve seen most often while researching suggests a gallon of water, per day, per person.\u00c2\u00a0 That allots for 1-2 quarts of water for drinking, with the remainder for food preparation and hygiene.\u00c2\u00a0 This doesn’t seem like a lot to\u00c2\u00a0me, especially since the most common food storage items are rice, beans, oatmeal, dehydrated products and so on — all which take a lot of water to make fit for consumption.\u00c2\u00a0 And when water doesn’t come out of the hose and I need to water my garden?\u00c2\u00a0 Or the toilet still works, but doesn’t pump the water back in so we need to add water to the tank in order to flush out our waste?<\/p>\n
For a minimal 3 day supply for my family (As I mentioned in an earlier post, my husband and myself, a 12yo boy, 7yo girl, and my mom), I’d need to store 15 gallons.\u00c2\u00a0 A 90 day supply is 450 gallons.\u00c2\u00a0 If I wanted to have a years worth stored, at a minimal gallon a day, that’s over 1800 gallons.\u00c2\u00a0 Overwhelming!\u00c2\u00a0 I could probably find storage for\u00c2\u00a0a couple of 55 gallon water barrels, get a couple waterBOBs for my bathtubs (though you need to have some warning for those to be useful), but I don’t see anyway to store much more than that. So I’ll need to look into other ways to replenish water.<\/p>\n
Contrary to what people believe,\u00c2\u00a0Oregon doesn’t really get THAT much rain.\u00c2\u00a0 In Portland, we average 40-44 inches per year, and its spread out over 150ish days.\u00c2\u00a0 Lots of other cities get more rain (We aren’t even in the top 30 of cities over 20k population!) but typically that rain is more torrential and comes from fewer days.\u00c2\u00a0 If you go east, Oregon is even drier.\u00c2\u00a0 South in the valley, they do get more rain (Corvallis makes the top 10), and on the coast in say Lincoln City, they average double what we see in Portland.\u00c2\u00a0 We get a lot of gray drizzly days, not pouring rain like they see in Alabama or Florida or Texas, etc.<\/p>\n
![\"graydrizzle\"](\"https:\/\/pcgirl.net\/journal\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/graydrizzle-1024x576.jpg\")
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At any rate, I can expect to see 40 ish inches of rain per year, and each inch of rain typically results in collection of around .6 gallons per square\u00c2\u00a0foot of roof.\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t have all the details on my roof.\u00c2\u00a0 But if I had a flat roof (I don’t, its got multiple peaks), just based on the floor plan, its have 40×80 or so of roof real estate.\u00c2\u00a0 Because its peaked, there would be more because of course the peaks are the long sides of the triangle that would be made.\u00c2\u00a0 So to err conservatively, say 3,200 square feet.\u00c2\u00a0 If I set up one barrel on one of the 4 downspouts and it were roughly a quarter of that 3200, at .6 gallons and 40 inches of rain, one barrel here could collect more than 19,000 gallons per year.\u00c2\u00a0 That seems like a lot, but I can’t find an error in my math.\u00c2\u00a0 Of course I would have to be harvesting the water from the barrel on a regular basis.<\/p>\n
I also checked into our longest dry spells.\u00c2\u00a0 Since 1999, the longest dry spell here was 51 days.\u00c2\u00a0 If you go back further, the driest spell on record is 71 days.\u00c2\u00a0 To make it through those dry spells I would need to have 255 and 355 gallons on hand, respectively.\u00c2\u00a0 I just determined that I don’t really have the space to store more than a couple 55 gallon barrels.\u00c2\u00a0 Even if the rain water reclamation barrel was used to store a third 55 gallons, that leaves me 90 or 190 gallons short to get through a potential record breaking dry spell.\u00c2\u00a0 That means in addition to installing a rain water barrel, I have to find a way to store more water, in a way that keeps it safe and drinkable as long as possible, handy enough that I can rotate it<\/p>\n
Wells\/pumps and natural sources of water aren’t an option where I am now.\u00c2\u00a0 I am wanting to have information on that in my preparedness binder though; it’s something I would want to think about if we ever do move.\u00c2\u00a0 And we may need the info to DIY if we were forced to bug out and fine a new place on the fly.<\/p>\n
Finally, filtering.\u00c2\u00a0 There’s a lot of different ways to cleanse and filter water.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m leaning towards a Berkley filter for home and a UV steripen for the 72 hour bags.\u00c2\u00a0 More research to do though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The 3rd item on my list is water.\u00c2\u00a0 This I divided into 4 main areas Water Storage Rain Water Reclamation Wells \/ Pumps Natural Sources Filtering \/ Making Water Safe to Drink The number I’ve seen most often while researching suggests a gallon of water, per day, per person.\u00c2\u00a0 That allots for 1-2 quarts of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[11],"class_list":["post-137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prepper-talk","tag-water"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pcgirl.net\/journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pcgirl.net\/journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pcgirl.net\/journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pcgirl.net\/journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pcgirl.net\/journal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=137"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pcgirl.net\/journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":139,"href":"https:\/\/pcgirl.net\/journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137\/revisions\/139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pcgirl.net\/journal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pcgirl.net\/journal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pcgirl.net\/journal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}