Potty training anyone?

Last time around I asked you how far you'd get on the gas/fuel currently in your car/truck/SUV.  I'm sure that after reading that deathless piece of prose (not to call it nagging) everyone rushed out and made sure they had at least half a tank of fuel.  Also made a solemn promise to never let the gas gauge fall below that bench mark.

No one wants to be "that guy" sitting by the side of the road in an emergency!

Next up on the agenda is water.

I never can remember exactly how long a person can exist without potable drinking water before they run into serious physical problems like dehydration, confusion and, eventually, death.  I do know it's not nearly as long as you might think depending on physical condition, ambient temperature and so forth and so on.

Most of us now depend on electricity to get our water.  Whether it's from a private well or a public water system, eventually it all comes down to electricity.

So what do you have for water right now?  No peaking, what do you have in your house for usable water?

There are a ton of things that we use water for other than drinking:  sanitation (that would be toilet flushing), dish washing, hand washing, tooth brushing, showering, hair washing, cooking (and that includes coffee making!).  You probably notice a pattern here.  Mainly we use water to keep healthy, inside and out, as well as fed and comfortable.  I read once that one of the greatest advances in health was the invention of indoor plumbing.  Which, by the way, isn't much use without the aforementioned water!

Sure, in a pinch we could go back to the outdoor outhouse - I had one at camp for many years.  They have a bundle of drawbacks:  location (especially at 3 am in the winter), other occupants in residence (spiders, ants, bees!) and lack of sanitation - no running water!

Better than having to run outside (face it - we aren't going to have time to build an outhouse when the power goes out - never mind stock it with a cowboy!) is a plan ahead approach.  If you don't want to lay in a supply of big plastic bags and a five gallon can with a toilet seat balanced on top of it, how about just some water?

It doesn't have to be a fancy "system" to store water - I showed a whole bunch of potential containers way back in March.  Your storage can be as simple as using the big juice containers when you are done drinking the juice or maybe gallon containers that came with vinegar or anything else that, when you empty them, you fill with tap water.  A lot of the modern toilets don't take much more than a couple gallons of water to do an efficient flush.

If it's raining and you lose power you can put dish pans or big buckets outside under the drip line of the house and fill them in an amazingly short time.  I did that a couple years ago in a power outage and felt so smart I could hardly stand it!

Obviously toilet flushing isn't the only thing we need to have a water supply for but, as that obnoxious toilet paper ad says, "we all go, so why not enjoy the go".  And, believe you me, running outside in the middle of the night or in bad weather is NOT the way to enjoy that go!

And, P.S., none of the toilet water has to be potable (clean and drinkable) so think on that!