THE HOUSEHOLD WATER WORKBOOK

There are thirty to fifty gallons of clean drinking water in your house right now.

It's in the water heater. Most people never think of it. The ones who do usually don't know you have to shut off its power or gas first and let it cool, or you can damage the tank and scald yourself getting to it.

That's one page of this workbook. There are twelve more.

You can be cold for three days. You can be hungry for three days. Water is the one that doesn't wait, and it's the only thing on the list with no substitute.

What's inside

1. How much your family actually needs. A gallon per person per day is the number everyone quotes. It's also the number that leaves you short, because it doesn't count washing, cooking, or the toilet. The real math, written out for a real household.

2. The water already hiding in your house. The heater, the toilet tanks — the tank, never the bowl, and only if you've never used those blue cleaning pucks — and the ice in your freezer. Plus a short list of what looks like water and is not: waterbeds, pool water, the hot tap during a boil notice.

3. Storing it the right way. What containers keep and what containers spoil, where to put them, and how often to rotate. Most stored water goes bad because of where it was kept, not how long.

4. The four ways to make water safe. Boiling, filtering, tablets, and plain household bleach — eight drops per gallon, thirty minutes, and the one bottle in the laundry room that works versus the three that don't. Each method gets what it handles and what it misses.

5. Finding water outside the house. Rain, streams, and standing water: which to take, which to leave, and what to do to it before anyone drinks.

6. The family water plan worksheet. Blanks you fill in.

7. The quick card. One page. Boil times, bleach ratio, gallons per person. Print it and tape it inside a cabinet door.

It's a workbook, not a book.

Section 6 has blanks in it. Where your water lives and how many gallons. Who fills what when a storm gets named. The date you last rotated it and the date you do it next. You write it in and it goes on the fridge — because a plan that only exists in your head is a plan nobody else in the house can use while you're at work.

We tell you what our own filters can't do.

The section on filtering covers our Field Straw and Gravitywell, and in the same breath it says what they don't handle: hollow-fiber removes bacteria and protozoa, not viruses and not chemicals. When those are the risk, you boil or use tablets, and the guide says so in the same size type as everything else. Anyone who tells you a straw handles everything is selling you something.

Who this is for

You've had a boil notice, or you've read one too many stories about a town that lost its water for two weeks, and you'd like a plan on paper instead of a general sense that you'd figure it out.

Who it's not for

There's no collapse in here, and no chemistry lecture. No density, no frequencies, no detox. Just what to fill, what to drink, what to boil, and who does it.

13 pages, with diagrams. Arrives by email within minutes.

Nothing to ship and nothing to wait for. Fill the jugs this weekend, then decide whether you want a filter behind them.

Free inside The Water Kit. You can keep it either way.