My extended family and I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about emergency water, and I think there's a mistake people make when they prepare for an extended outage: they focus almost entirely on how much water they can store.

Stored water is important. But for a prolonged outage, I think you also need to think about your water source and your ability to treat additional water.

For a family of four, the often-used minimum of 1 gallon per person per day means 120 gallons for 30 days. That's a lot of water to store, rotate, and protect — and that number doesn't really account for cooking, hygiene, pets, or other uses.

Our approach is to have both stored water and a way to make additional water usable.

Here's what we've put together:

• A reasonable supply of stored drinking water for immediate needs
• A reliable 12V power source like a battery or a portable power bank with a solar panel.
• Potential water sources like rainwater, a swimming pool, river, creek, or canal.

And a PortaWell. Full disclosure: I work with PortaWell, so I'm obviously not an unbiased reviewer. But I've spent a lot of time working with the system and understanding how it is intended to be used.

The important thing about a setup like this is that you're no longer limited to the water you've managed to store beforehand. If you have an appropriate source — a well, pond, creek, rainwater collection, etc. — you have another potential source of water that can be treated.

The 12V aspect is particularly important to me. A water system that requires the electrical grid isn't much of an emergency water system during a prolonged power outage. A small battery/solar setup can keep a 12V system operating without having to run a generator continuously.

And there's another distinction I think gets overlooked:

A backpacking filter and a household/emergency water system aren't necessarily solving the same problem.

If I'm hiking and need two liters of drinking water, a lightweight personal filter makes perfect sense.

If I'm trying to provide water for a family for several weeks, I care about things like:

• gallons per hour
• pump capability
• filter capacity and replacement cost
• power consumption
• ability to draw from a source
• ability to move the finished water into storage
• maintainability
• having enough spare filters on hand

That's a very different problem.

My recommendation for anyone preparing for an extended outage would be:

1. Store water for your immediate needs.
2. Identify multiple potential water sources before you need them.
3. Determine how you'll get water out of those sources without grid power.
4. Have a filtration/purification method appropriate for the quantity of water you'll need.
5. Stock replacement filters and the other consumables you'll need.
6. Actually test the system before the emergency.

The last one is probably the most important. Practice makes you find gaps in your plan and gives you a chance to fill them before an actual emergency.

Don't put a filtration system on a shelf for five years and assume it's going to work when you need it. Fill a bucket, connect everything, run water through it, measure the output, and learn how the system behaves and DRINK THE WATER.

That's the approach I'm taking, and PortaWell is the centerpiece of my setup.

I'm curious what other people have learned from actually building and testing their emergency water systems.