Drinking water storage is always of great concern to preppers. Clean, drinkable water is so precious and so hard to come by, that it is no wonder the average prepper spends so much time planning for it.
One of the biggest and most reliable vessels for keeping water inside your own home happens to be your bathtub. Capable of holding several dozen gallons, it is perfect for auxiliary or emergency storage.
But there is just one issue: how does one get water from an outside source into your house and into the bathtub?
The most straightforward way to get water from outside your home into your bathtub is by first collecting a large quantity in some other vessel or containers and then bringing it inside gradually via other means.
Done correctly, this will minimize the chance of major spillage and also prove to be a quick, simple and adaptable method for caching drinking water.
Like everything else, there is more than one way to execute this seemingly simple task. We will tell you about some of our favorite methods in the remainder of this article so you’ll be prepared no matter where you live and what sort of water you are sourcing.
First: Use a Bathtub Basin
Before we get into the actual methods of collecting and getting natural water sources into your home, I want to make one recommendation that will make your life easier and keep your water and better condition for a lot longer.
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Use a bathtub basin. Sometimes called a bathtub reservoir bag, a bathtub basin is a heavy duty plastic or mylar bag that is folded up until you need it, and is placed inside your tub where it acts as a large storage bladder.
Designed to be filled typically from the faucet in the tub, it is easy enough to fill from other sources with the use of funnels and other simple attachments.
The biggest advantage of the bathtub basin is it will keep your water clean and free of contamination compared to leaving it in the bathtub alone, and it is also far less likely to leak over time compared to simply pulling the stopper in the tub’s drain.
You definitely don’t want your hard work to go to waste, and you also don’t want your water mingling with the germs in your tub. And let’s be honest, you probably don’t clean your tub as often as you should!
Bucket Brigade
Probably the simplest and most straightforward way to fill your bathtub with water from another source is to do the good, old-fashioned bucket brigade.
Using any suitably large buckets and, hopefully, a small army of volunteers you won’t have to make too many trips with full buckets to meaningfully fill up your bathtub with collected water.
water is however quite heavy, so this can be a workout if you are using larger 5 gallon buckets, like the food grade painters type storage buckets that are so popular among preppers.
Even if you were forced to undertake this task yourself, assuming your water source is not too far away you can collect quite a large quantity of water in a reasonably short period of time, at least short enough to make the investment of time and energy worth it, no question.
One variation of this method is to simply grab buckets and any other clean or clean-ish container that you can set out during a rainstorm and allow them to fill up with rain water.
Once the rain stops, you can ferry the buckets and other containers one after another to the bathtub. This is a great method to cut down on the distance you’ll need to travel to collect the water.
Hand Pump
Fulfilling a larger tub or transferring water from an outside container to your bathtub in a less demanding way is simply by use of a hand pump and hoses. This is especially good when combined with the bathtub basin bag described above.
It is highly convenient to simply pop one end of the hose out of a nearby, convenient window in the bathroom, if available, or route it outside through the nearest door.
By inserting the drawing end of the hose into your water source and placing the other into your bathtub or your basin bag all you need to do then is actuate the pump to steadily and quickly draw water from one to the other.
depending on the arrangement of your other water source and the length of the hose, this might require a fair bit of muscle but is nothing that cannot be easily accomplished quickly enough using just a couple of people.
Modified Diverter
If you already have a comprehensive rain catcher setup on your home, one that makes use of your existing gutters and downspouts with a diverter, it is possible to modify a diverter or disconnected and reroute it with some flexible, corrugated tubing through a nearby window in the bathroom to deposit water rapidly into your bathtub.
This is probably a task that should be undertaken ahead of time for best results, but it is reliable and a great way to get a little more storage out of an existing rain catching system.
Obviously, you’ll need to be standing by and ready to halt the incoming water before your tub gets too full in order to prevent the risk of an overflow, but if you have a helper or time the cutoff to be a little bit on the conservative side you shouldn’t have any issues.
This setup works especially well in tandem with other large-scale water storage containers inside the home such as 5 gallon cans, 10 to 20 gallon tanks or even barrels, the one must take care because you cannot easily move these larger containers once they are full!
A Quick And Easy Lifesaving Tip
Your bathtub is an unconventional but reliable and spacious water storage vessel if you get set up to make use of it during an SHTF event.
Finding another natural source of drinking water outside the home is only half the battle, and the other half is moving that water from its location to a reliable reservoir, in this case the bathtub.
With the right equipment and plan, this can be done easily enough and equip your home with a sizable reserve of drinking water suitable for many purposes.
Make sure you familiarize yourself with the techniques and procedures above so you are ready to take advantage of any natural water sources available.
Tom Marlowe practically grew up with a gun in his hand, and has held all kinds of jobs in the gun industry: range safety, sales, instruction and consulting, Tom has the experience to help civilian shooters figure out what will work best for them.