The breeders divine

The breeders divine hammer

Plenty of time to worry about water once you take care of getting your food stocked up, right? Well, don t be so sure. Anything can happen to cut off your supply of water at any time. Even a temporary shutoff can be far more inconvenient than you might have realized, let alone a natural disaster that could leave you high and dry for days. Don t forget that most of that food you ve been collecting requires water to reconstitute, and of course you ll need plenty of water for drinking. Even if you have to go without bathing for a day or two, you ll still need to wash your hands, and you ll also want to keep a bucket of water on hand to flush the toilet with. If you don t start storing water right now, the time may soon come when you live to regret your procrastination. You may have seen others spend a lot of time and money at storing water, and you ve put off your own storage because it seemed too daunting or too expensive to get started. The good news is most of those old methods are not the best, anyway. I m going to show you how you can store your first 7 gallons of water cheaply, quickly, and inexpensively. After that you can put away another container every week or every month. Most people who do get around to storing water often go about it one of two ways. They buy flats of bottled water, stack them in the garage, and forget about them. Or they buy a large storage drum, fill it up, then forget about that in a corner of the basement. Both these methods have serious drawbacks, especially the first. Although it may seem that the easiest way to accumulate your water storage is to buy a flat of already bottled water every month and keep putting them aside, there s a very serious problem with that plan, and it s not that there s anything wrong with the water. The problem is in those bottles. Water is water, and clean water in its natural environment such as a pure stream or a well or a glacier will remain in that state practically forever. It will always be plain old water. But stored water won t be. You may find an expiration date on your bottled water, but that s not because the water expires. What expires is the bottle the water is contained in. And those bottles have been expiring at a rate much faster than experts had previously thought. Contamination of bottled water begins almost the moment the water is bottled. It s too bad the most convenient way to store water long term just happens to be about the most dangerous, but there it is. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if you want water that s safe and pristine, you won t get it when you open that bottle of water a couple of years from now. Maybe not even six months from now. Almost all plastic water bottles contain a dangerous chemical labeled Bisphenol-A BPA which constantly leaches into the water contained in those bottles. The longer you store those plastic bottles, the more Bisphenol-A ends up in that water. I ll discuss some of the problems with Bisphenol-A in a future post, but for now let s just say you don t want any more of this stuff in your body than you already have. The average person s bloodstream is already carrying a dangerous accumulation of it already, and it s particularly harmful to young children because it can screw up their puberty. You don t want to ingest massive doses of BPA from water that has been virtually soaking in the stuff for months and years, especially if that water has been in your garage exposed to the heat of one or more summers. I once met a nice couple who showed me two 55 gallon drums they had put away in their basement over a decade ago. They believed they were good to go. They told me they were all set for anything, and thought they could just leave those barrels down there and forget about them. At the time I didn t know any better either. I ve long since lost track of those good folks and I wish I hadn t because I wish I could warn them. It s true those large plastic barrels are rugged and safe, and they do store a whole lot of water. But you can t just fill any container with tap water and forget about it, no matter how sturdy the container.