Funny how things like that wake people up. A few weeks ago an electrical switch for our well pump got fried — between Saturday night and Sunday morning. We went one day - one day - without water in the house and it honestly felt like we were in the stone age.
Toilets don’t flush, no washing of hands or plates, no showers, nothing. We were lucky to have it repaired on the ensuing Monday, but I’ll tell you, it was a wake up call.
I live in one of the few towns in the country where we have a gravity fed water system of the most wonderful water you can find.
A few years ago the town water tower had to be emptied and cleaned. We went a week with horrible water pressure, but that is when I learned that our reservoir can operate without pump and they just open the spigots and the water flows.
The town tower is just needed to add a little local pressure. But it is not essential...just nice. I tell me wife that is where they put in the chemicals that keep her in love with me.
Makes you want to have a spare!
We are on a well too, in an area that has lots of electrical outages. Some are short, but some are of longer duration, so we learned that lesson about 50 years ago. Now it’s not a big deal usually.
While I keep at least 25 gallons of bottled water on hand for drinking and cooking, the first thing we do is to drain the pipes of water into several large containers before someone forgets and flushes the toilet.
That is sufficient for the shorter term outages of around 36 hours or less without having to use the bottled stuff.
If you have a water heater, you should also have about 50 gallons of water to use in an emergency. Heat it on a gas stove or camping stove or even a wood fire. When it’s the temp you want, put it into a watering can with a sprinkler head (I use mine to water the garden normally) and use that for a nice warm shower.
We have 4 toilets. Each one will flush only once with the water in the tank already. So we are judicious about when a particular toilet gets flushed.
we have water in rain barrels, or the swimming pool that we bought on sale at the end of last summer to use to water the garden. A five gallon bucket can be used to haul that in and used to flush the toilet.
It’s a good thing to be able to adjust to lack of modern conveniences when you need to.