How much water does a family of 6 need for two weeks?

The short answer

Eighty-four gallons. That is about 700 pounds of water, and it is the first volume where the floor genuinely matters.

Gallons

701 lb

What it weighs

7-gallon jugs

Seven hundred pounds is where placement stops being about tidiness

Up to about sixty gallons you can put water almost anywhere without thinking. Eighty-four gallons is different. Two fifty-five gallon drums, or a tight block of twelve jugs, concentrates something like 700 pounds into a few square feet, which is heavier than a full bathtub and roughly a grand piano standing on one corner of a room. On a concrete slab, a garage or a basement floor it is a non-issue. On an upper storey of a timber framed house it is worth either splitting the load across two rooms or putting it over a load bearing wall rather than mid-span. Nobody wants to discover this the hard way, and splitting it costs nothing.

Larger households should not store it all in one format

At six people a single drum is attractive because it is one object, and that is exactly the risk. A reasonable split is one drum as the bulk reserve and six or eight jugs as the part you can actually carry, lend, take to a relative, or move upstairs if the ground floor floods. The drum solves storage and the jugs solve everything that happens after. Households that store only in drums find that their entire water supply is immovable at the precise moment they need to leave.

Six people empty a container faster than you expect

A seven-gallon jug lasts a household of six a little over a day. That means the practical rhythm during an outage is opening a new container daily, which is worth knowing because every opened container starts a clock on how long the water stays clean. Draw from one at a time, keep the rest sealed, and do not decant into open buckets to save walking, which is the usual route to contaminating a supply that was fine.

Keep track of your 84 gallons as you actually buy them.

Provision Planner counts the water already in your house against the target on this page, and tells you how many days you really cover. Your household and gallon figure carry across, so there is nothing to type in twice.

See how many days you cover

The next questions, answered

How much does 84 gallons of water weigh?

About 700 pounds. Spread across a ground floor or a garage that is nothing. Concentrated on an upper floor of a timber framed house it is worth splitting between two rooms or siting it over a load bearing wall.

How many containers is 84 gallons?

Twelve seven-gallon jugs, or one 55 gallon drum plus four jugs. Mixing the two is usually better than either alone: the drum holds the bulk and the jugs are the part you can carry.

Water is one part of it. See the full supply plan for this household, which covers the food alongside it.