Rationing is not a plan
I have about 26 litres of water, mostly sitting in a bathtub I cannot use, and my first instinct this morning was to hide the bottles so we would not drink them too fast. That instinct is the thing that would have put us in hospital before the cold did.
The number that decides the week
Normal household use is 40 to 75 litres per person per day. Two of us living normally is 80 to 150 litres a day. I have 26. So the question was never how do I make 26 last — it was which uses do I stop doing, and then to store the smaller number honestly.
Drinking alone is about 2 litres a person a day in a cold house; add cooking and it is closer to 3. That is 6 litres a day for the two of us before anyone washes anything. Twenty-six litres is four days of drinking and cooking, and zero days of washing, and that is the true figure I should have written down yesterday.
The one rule I nearly broke
Do not ration drinking water. FEMA is explicit about it: ration drinking water only if officials tell you to. Hiding bottles to slow consumption is how people dehydrate themselves in a house that still has water in it. The correct move is to know your number, then drink normally against it.
What 26 litres actually looks like
The bathtub is the worst place for it and I filled it anyway. It holds the most, and it makes the bathroom unusable, and once it is in there it is one splash away from being contaminated by everything that happens in a bathroom. Today I moved most of it into the two 4-litre juice jugs, the kettle, the stock pot and the bucket, left about 8 litres in the tub under a sheet of plastic, and wrote D1 on every container with a marker.
Two things I got right by accident:
- Never dip a cup. Pour from the container, or tip it into a jug. A cup that has touched a mouth turns a four-day supply into a two-day one, and you will not notice until the water smells.
- Keep it cold, not warm. Water stored near a heat source grows things. A cold bathroom is an asset right now, and it will stop being one the moment the pipes freeze.
Snow is not water yet
There is 30 cm of it on the lawn and it is worth almost nothing as it sits. Eating snow lowers your core temperature and costs you calories to melt it in your mouth — the exact two things you cannot spare in an unheated house. Melt it, and understand the price: melting snow on a stove is fuel, and fuel is the thing that keeps one room warm tonight. Filter the grit out with a cloth before you drink it.
What I am not doing today
No laundry, no dishes beyond a rinse, no flushing on a schedule. The toilet is a separate problem I have been avoiding and cannot avoid past tomorrow. Washing hands still happens before food — with a cup of water poured over, not a running tap.
What I should have had on day zero
- A written number. Litres stored, divided by litres per day, gives days left. I had to work it out by torchlight and I got it wrong twice.
- Containers with lids, not a bathtub. Twenty litres in four sealed jugs beats twenty-six litres you cannot carry.
- A water filter — not for the stored water, for the day the stored water runs out and the only source is a creek.
- Fuel for melting snow. The snow is not the resource. The heat to melt it is.
Four days of water is the whole margin. The cheapest fix is a number on the fridge and four jugs with lids.
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