How To Live Without Electricity In 5 Ways – Part Two – Water

Water is the second obvious resource that we need to conserve in the event of a power outage. If you are lucky enough to live in a town or city then chances are a power cut would not directly affect your water supply and pressure. However, it can affect the purity levels of the water as the purification process may have shut down causing impurities to reverse back into the water lines.
If you have a water pump as your main water supply which is powered electrically then it’s obvious that the power and pressure from this will cease immediately as soon as there is a power cut but in most if not all circumstances when there is a loss of power then there too will be the loss of clean water. Water should be free from bacteria and contaminants. Clean water is so crucial to our survival that you should pay extra particular attention to it.An easy way to guarantee a good clean supply of water is to store it now but the question is how much do we really need? Red Cross officials have suggested that if storing water you should store one gallon per person per day and this is a basic need for cooking and drinking needs but bathing is not possible.When there is a short-term emergency i.e a power cut then only the crucial survival elements should be covered by water such as cooking and drinking. If this short-term incident turns out to be longer than you would have otherwise expected, then then we would of course need to work out methods in which to bathe ourselves and wash our clothes, etc.This would only work if you have constructed a sanitary outhouse whereby flushing is not needed. When taking all of this into consideration then a more adequate amount of water would obviously be needed and an expectation of this would be around 5-10 gallons of water per person per day bathing only once per week.It doesn’t cost much to store water. You can store it in things such as empty bins, buckets they can store around 30-50 gallons each. Refresh the water every two weeks to avoid impurities and contaminants and so it is ready for use should there be a power outage. Farm supply stores sell large water tanks and coolers making them less susceptible to bad bacteria.When collecting water, it can be done using simple 5-gallon buckets. if you are lucky enough to live next to a river or a stream then the purification process must take place before this water is consumed. The same applies if you use rainwater directly from your home guttering systems into plastic bins.Water can be purified in a number of ways but the most inexpensive and efficient way is fifteen drops of plain scent-free bleach per gallon of water costs less than 1p and add 3% hydrogen peroxide per gallon will also destroy any bad bacteria. Boiling for twenty minutes will too.Bleach is effective against diseases such as cholera and typhoid and water supplies have been kept safe for decades using this method. the chlorine taste can be filtered away easily using a simple charcoal filtering system.That’s it for part two. Be sure to check back next Monday for part three where we will discuss cooking without electricity.