Household supply planner

One gallon per person per day covers drinking and basic sanitation — roughly half and half. Storing the whole horizon is impractical for most homes, so store two to four weeks and cover the rest with collection and purification. Never ration drinking water unless you are told to.

Quantities below are calorie-complete for 90 days, which is more than most starter lists carry. Buy foods your household already eats and build up gradually — a crisis is the wrong time to introduce new food to a small child.

Packaged emergency food earns its place in two situations: the first days when there is no water or fuel to cook with, and the long tail where you want something that keeps for decades without thought. It is a poor way to buy bulk calories — rice and beans beat every kit by four to ten times per calorie — so the sensible plan uses staples for the backbone and kits for the layer staples can't do.

What each category is actually for

An uncooled garage in a hot climate gives MREs one to two real years, not five. Inside the conditioned house they get seven or eight. The 25-year freeze-dried ratings assume room temperature too — and are based on the most stable thing in the bucket, so anything with meat, dairy or oil fails far sooner than the rice beside it. Two further honest notes: most vitamins are gone by year five even while the calories hold for decades, and oil and dried eggs should be rotated within a couple of years whatever the bucket says.

• Store inside the air-conditioned envelope. Interior closet, under beds, interior-wall pantry. Not the garage, attic, shed, or against a west-facing wall. This single choice matters more than which brand you buy.
• Put a $12 min/max thermometer where you plan to store it and watch it through one summer before spending real money.
• Off the slab — pallet or shelving. Concrete transmits heat and moisture.
• Split by heat tolerance. USCG bars live in the car and garage; MREs and freeze-dried stay inside.
• Transit heat degrades fats, not starches. Rice, wheat, beans and oats tolerate a hot truck fine, so order staples whenever. Freeze-dried meat, dairy powder and anything oily do not — time those for cooler months. Lifeboat bars are the exception; they are engineered for it.
• If you repackage into mylar yourself, do it on a dry day with the A/C running. Humidity sealed into the bag defeats the oxygen absorber, and you will not find out for years.
• Inspect stored grain before you eat it. Long-stored grain and nuts can develop aflatoxin, a mold toxin you cannot cook out. Any off smell, visible mold, caking or discoloration means throw it out rather than sort it — and that risk rises with exactly the heat and humidity an uncooled garage provides.
• MREs carry a four-digit Julian pack date, not an expiry. Learn to read it, write the date on the case, and rotate every three to four years in a hot climate regardless of the printed claim.

Where the calories are cheapest

Most of your calories should come from bulk staples, and the value gap against packaged kits is not close. Verified prices:

Warehouse-club staples that you repackage yourself in mylar with oxygen absorbers run roughly two to three times cheaper per calorie than the cheapest pre-packed option, and more than ten times cheaper than kits. What you pay instead is labor, and the risk of a bad seal. If you go that route, buy the mylar and absorbers at the same time — the advice is incomplete without them.

Suppliers

These exist and are established. Verify them yourself against the checks above — this page does not vouch for any company, and a list like this goes stale. The arithmetic is what protects you: it works on a vendor nobody here has heard of.

Fuel is sized by burner hours, not by calories, so it gets its own table. If your range is electric, this is the difference between hot food and cold cans for however long the grid is down.

The quiet category. Everything above assumes you can cook the food, wash the pot and bag the rubbish, and almost no preparedness list budgets any of it. A household living indoors for months generates a startling amount of washing-up and waste, and runs out of dish soap long before it runs out of rice.

Stress commonly causes regression, so budget high rather than low. Dehydration from diarrhea is the single biggest risk to a small child in a prolonged emergency.

A house without power slowly becomes whatever the weather outside is. In a hot-climate summer an unpowered home can pass 95°F indoors; in a cold-climate winter it falls toward the outside temperature over a day or two. Small children and older adults lose ground fastest in both directions, because they regulate temperature poorly and say less about it. Which way your risk runs is set by the climate toggle at the top — the cooling and heating sections below follow it.

This is the part of the plan most likely to be bought wrong. Battery power stations are excellent at some things and useless at others, and the gap between the two is where a heat-vulnerable household gets hurt.

Cold is the quiet killer in a long outage, and it kills differently from heat. In the Texas freeze of February 2021, 246 people died: 64% of them from hypothermia, another 8% from carbon monoxide, and nearly 60% of the dead were over 60. Almost none of that was exposure outdoors. It happened indoors, in houses, over days.

So what do you actually do

1. Stop treating heat as a stockpile problem. Store around 30 days of fuel, not 90, and spend the rest of the budget on not needing it.
2. Buy your way out with insulation and sleeping systems. A sleeping bag has no refill problem. This is the single best use of a heating budget.
3. Live in one room. Close off everything else, stuff towels under the doors, cover the windows with blankets at night. Pick the smallest room with interior walls, fewest windows, not a basement, near the heat source and within reach of a CO alarm.
4. Decide your leaving trigger in advance. Federal guidance for infants is explicit: if you cannot keep the home warm, make arrangements elsewhere. A 90-day winter plan without a departure point is not a plan.

Sleeping bags — read the right number

ISO-rated bags carry three temperatures and the big one on the packaging is usually the wrong one. Comfort is where an average woman sleeps comfortably. Limit is where an average man gets through the night curled up. Extreme is a survival-only rating that assumes hypothermia risk and frostbite is possible.

• Buy on the Comfort rating and match it to the coldest night you expect indoors, not the average. Never buy on Extreme.
• The ratings assume one base layer and an insulating pad underneath. A bag on a cold floor does not perform at its rating.
• Comfort is calibrated to a 60 kg woman, Limit to a 73 kg man. Smaller, older and less active people sleep colder than the label suggests.
• A bag that is too warm can be vented. A bag that is too cold cannot be fixed.

More people have died of carbon monoxide after storms than in them. It is the failure mode that recurs in every long outage, hot or cold, and almost always because somebody reasoned their way past a rule. The most common wrong belief is that ventilation makes an unsafe appliance safe. It does not. There are two categories, and confusing them is what kills people.

The alarm itself

• Battery or battery-backup, always. A hardwired-only alarm dies with the grid, which is precisely when you start burning things indoors.
• One on every level and outside each sleeping area. Interconnected if you can.
• Most consumer CO alarms are only rated to operate between 40°F and 100°F. A house that has dropped below 40°F in a winter outage is outside the alarm's specified range — exactly when the risk peaks. No official guidance addresses this, so the practical answer is to keep the alarm in the one heated room with you rather than on a cold wall, and to keep spare batteries warm.
• Alarms are time-weighted and will not sound below about 30 ppm no matter how long it lasts. A slow leak from an unvented heater can poison you without ever tripping it.
• A chirping alarm in a cold dark house is easily mistaken for a low battery and silenced. On many alarms five chirps a minute means end of life rather than low battery — patterns differ by manufacturer, so read the label on yours now rather than at 3am.
• If it sounds, get outside first and call 911 from there. Do not investigate.

Buying a generator

Look for ANSI/UL 2201 first — it requires both reduced CO emissions and automatic shutoff. ANSI/PGMA G300 is the weaker second choice, requiring shutoff alone; the current edition is G300:2023, mandatory for certification from January 2026. Sold under names like CO-MINDER, COsense and CO Shield.

CPSC modeling estimates those standards would prevent roughly 87% and 100% of generator CO deaths. Those are projections rather than observed outcomes, market compliance was still low when CPSC last reviewed it in 2021, when more than three quarters of models met neither standard, and both assume the generator is outdoors — certification is not license to bring it closer. CPSC puts generator CO deaths at around 85 a year, 81% of them in residential locations — a figure drawn from 2017–19, over a period where the trend was rising, so treat it as a floor.

The other way a generator kills, and this one kills strangers

Carbon monoxide is the hazard everyone warns about. Backfeed is the one that gets left off preparedness lists. It is the reason the fix below is not optional.

Confirming a meeting point, reaching an out-of-area contact and acting on an evacuation order all depend on communications, and a weather radio with a pair of walkie-talkies does not cover it. Communications is the system most likely to fail quietly: everything looks fine until the moment you need it, and by then the charger is in a drawer and nobody knows the number. The quantities below scale with your household; the panel underneath covers what each method actually reaches.

Two-way radio packaging advertises ranges that assume a hilltop and no obstructions. The honest numbers are much smaller, and knowing them in advance is the difference between a plan and a disappointment. These are transmit ranges — what you can talk over, not what you can hear.

The phone network fails in stages, not all at once

It is worth knowing which stage you are in, because each one has a different workaround and the wrong assumption wastes battery.

• Congestion first. Everyone calls at once and voice calls stop connecting while the network is otherwise healthy. Text instead. A text is a few dozen bytes on a signaling channel rather than a dedicated voice channel held open for the whole call, and if it fails it keeps retrying in the background. Federal guidance is explicit: use text, email or social media instead of voice calls, because they are less likely to meet congestion.
• Then the towers. Cell sites run on batteries, commonly four to eight hours, with generators at the larger ones lasting one to three days if someone can reach them with fuel. There is no federal rule requiring any of this. The FCC adopted an eight-hour backup mandate after Katrina; it was stayed in court, rejected at the budget office and never took effect, and no replacement exists. What backup your local tower has is a commercial decision you cannot look up.
• Then the scale of it. The FCC publishes daily county-level outage figures during a declared disaster. After Hurricane Helene it reported 21.7% of cell sites down across the affected states, 48.7% across North Carolina, and 90.9% in the worst county — twenty of twenty-two sites. Plan for your area being the bad county, not the average.
• Roaming may help, and is no longer optional. Since 2022 carriers must have roaming agreements in place in advance and honor them during a qualifying disaster. It is conditional — your carrier's network has to be down, and it has to be technically workable without wrecking the host network — so treat it as a decent chance rather than a guarantee.

The landline question

An old copper landline is powered from the telephone exchange rather than your house, so it works through a blackout with no battery of your own. That is a genuine advantage and it is disappearing: about 15 million such lines were left in mid-2025, falling roughly 18% a year, and in March 2026 the FCC cleared the way for carriers to wind the copper network down. If you still have one, know what you have. If you are on fiber or cable phone service, it dies with your power like everything else.

There is a rule here that preparedness writing usually gets wrong. Providers of non-line-powered home phone service must offer to sell you a backup battery — one option covering at least eight hours of standby, another at least twenty-four. They are not required to give you one, nothing obliges you to buy it, and if you were already a customer when the rule took effect they need not have offered at all. Eight hours of standby is also not eight hours of talking. Check whether you have one and how old it is; these batteries degrade quietly on a wall for years.

Satellite, briefly

Recent iPhones and Pixels include emergency satellite messaging at no charge for an introductory period that both companies have extended, and one US carrier sells a satellite texting add-on that also works for subscribers of two others. The details change often enough that anything printed here will be stale, so check what your own handset and plan already include — many people are carrying this and do not know it. Two things stay true: it needs a clear view of the sky, so it is useless indoors and in heavy tree cover, and it is a last resort rather than a comms plan.

Strategy is bug-in — stay home — unless the structure becomes unsafe or an evacuation order covers your zone. Survival priorities run fastest threat to slowest:

The numbers behind this page

• Water: 1 gallon per person per day for drinking and basic sanitation, flat across ages. Increase for heat, pregnancy, nursing, illness, or heavy physical work.
• Calories: 2,300 per adult, 1,900 per senior, 2,500 per teen, 1,600 per school-age child, 1,000 per toddler, per day. These are the figures the planner above uses; an infant is fed on formula or breastmilk and carries no food-calorie line. Heavier activity raises the adult and teen figures, which is what the activity control changes.
• Diapers: 5–6 changes a day. Stress raises usage, so budget high.
• Pacing item: a toddler or a senior, not the household average. Dehydration and heat reach them first, so every decision gets made for them.

Purification, in order of preference

1. Let it settle, then filter it first. Pour cloudy water through a clean cloth, paper towel or coffee filter before doing anything else. Disinfection works poorly in cloudy water, and this step is the one people skip.
2. Boiling — a rolling boil for 1 minute, or 3 minutes above 5,000 feet. Water boils at a lower temperature as you climb, so a one-minute boil stops being hot enough to do the job. The two federal agencies disagree on where the line sits — CDC says 6,500 ft, EPA says 5,000 ft — so this page uses the stricter figure. That gap matters: Denver and Albuquerque both sit around 5,300 ft and would get only a one-minute boil under CDC's number. Above the line you are into the mountain West — Santa Fe, Flagstaff, Taos, Park City, Big Bear, most of the Colorado high country. If you do not know your elevation, boil for 3 minutes. The only thing it costs you is fuel, and the page has already budgeted that.
3. Filtration — removes bacteria and protozoa. Pair with boiling or chemical treatment where viral contamination is a concern.
4. Unscented bleach — the table below. Never scented, color-safe, or cleaner-added.

Bleach, per gallon of water

Stir and let stand 30 minutes. It should smell faintly of chlorine afterwards; if it doesn't, repeat the dose and wait another 15 minutes. If there is still no chlorine smell after that second dose, discard the water — do not drink it. Bleach loses strength on the shelf: use a jug less than a year old, check the manufacture date and rotate it, because an old one will not deliver the dose above. These ratios are EPA and CDC figures; some Red Cross material gives a different drop count for the same strength, so pick one source and stay with it.

Draining the water heater, in order

1. Turn off the power or gas to the heater first. This is not optional — and never switch it back on while the tank is empty. An energized element in a dry tank burns out, and worse. If you shut the gas off at the valve, relighting it is a job for the gas company or a professional, not for you.
2. Shut the water intake valve.
3. Open a hot-water faucet, and the highest faucet in the house, to let air in.
4. Drain from the bottom tap. The water is 120°F or hotter — wear gloves and eye protection, or let it cool first.
5. The first gallons carry tank sediment, which can harbor bacteria. Filter them through cloth, then disinfect as above. A tank is a reserve, not a sterile one.

A tankless heater holds nothing. Find and label your main incoming water valve now, so you can close it the moment broken mains or sewage lines are reported — that is what preserves whatever is in the tank and pipes.

Everything above scales to your household and your climate. Three things are local, and no calculator can know them for you. Work them out once, write the answers down, and the rest of this page fits your situation rather than a generic one.

1. What is the hazard you are most likely to actually face? Not the most dramatic one — the likely one. It decides how much warning you get, and whether your plan is to stay or to leave.
2. Are you in an evacuation zone, and which one? Look it up now, by address, on your county emergency management site. Surge zones, flood zones and wildfire zones are three different maps and being outside one says nothing about the others.
3. What does your climate do to stored supplies? Heat and humidity shorten shelf life and make cooling a survival item; hard freezes burst stored water and split pipes. The climate toggle at the top already adjusts the quantities — this is about where and how you store them.

A worked example: a South Florida household

Running the three questions above for one real place, to show the shape of the answer. Yours will differ; the method will not.

Likely hazard: hurricane, with 3–5 days of warning. Evacuation zone: Miami-Dade uses five surge planning zones, A through E — Zone A is at risk from a Category 1, Zone E only from a Category 5, and these cover surge only, not the separate FEMA flood zone. Climate: heat, not cold. A powerless home in August can pass 95°F indoors, a toddler overheats far faster than an adult, and heat tolerance falls with age and with many common medications, so cooling is a survival item rather than a comfort.

Two further local facts fall out of that: there are no basements, because homes sit on slab over a high water table, so the safe room is an interior room on the lowest floor away from windows. And the area floods from heavy rain alone, with no surge involved at all.

Phase 1 · Days 1–7 · Stabilize

Get everyone safe and accounted for, and into a basic routine. Keep a small child's schedule as normal as possible.

Phase 2 · Days 8–30 · Establish systems

Shift from stored supplies toward renewable, repeatable systems.

Phase 3 · Days 31–90 · Sustain & adapt

Systems that can run indefinitely until normal services return.

Adjust times to your conditions. The structure matters more than the clock.

These five account for most of the serious risk to a small child in a prolonged emergency. Check them daily, every phase.

A long grid-down stretch looks much the same whatever caused it — hurricane, ice storm, wildfire, a cyber incident on the grid or the payment system, a supply failure, civil disorder. Security planning is where people tend to start at the dramatic end and skip the things that actually work. The order below is deliberate: it runs from what reduces risk most to what reduces it least.

One thing this page will not do is give tactical guidance for confronting people. Planning around armed confrontation is both the least likely branch and the one with the worst outcomes when it goes wrong, including for you legally. Deterrence, distance and leaving are the plan; a defensive tool is the fallback when those are gone.

Hardening — do this first

Less-lethal

Firearms

Lawful firearm ownership is a legitimate part of household preparedness and plenty of families already have one. If that is you, the storage question comes before every other consideration on this page, because the risk that actually materializes in a home with a small child is not an intruder.

Staying off the radar

• Run the generator where it can't be seen, and accept that it can always be heard. Noise is the main thing that advertises a prepared house. Run it in bursts rather than continuously — which your fuel budget already requires.
• Don't post about your supplies, before or during. That includes the friendly version where you offer to help — it tells everyone reading where the food is.
• Bring supplies in discreetly and break down the packaging inside. A curbside pile of generator and water-drum boxes is an advertisement.
• Cook outdoors upwind where you can. Cooking smells travel a long way in a neighborhood with nothing else going on.
• Agree what you will say if someone asks what you have. "We're managing, same as everyone" is a complete answer and it needs to be the same answer from every adult in the house.

Cyber and identity resilience

A cyber incident on a payment network, a utility or a bank looks different from a storm: the lights may stay on while money, records and communications stop working. Most of the preparation is just making sure nothing critical exists only in one place.

• Cash is the whole answer for payments. Your cash reserve line already covers it, and this is the scenario that most justifies it.
• Paper copies of what matters: IDs, insurance policies and policy numbers, deeds and titles, medical records, prescription list, account numbers, and a written list of emergency contacts. In the fire- and water-resistant document case, where a dead phone and a dead network can't reach them.
• An offline copy of your password vault, encrypted, on a USB drive. If you cannot log into anything, you cannot prove who you are.
• Printed account and policy numbers are what let you start an insurance claim when the portal is down and the call center is swamped.
• Enable multi-factor authentication now, and keep recovery codes on paper. Identity theft spikes after disasters, when everyone is distracted and filing claims.
• Expect scams. Fake FEMA agents, fake contractors demanding cash upfront, fake charity appeals. Verify independently before paying anyone, and never pay a disaster contractor in full up front.

Neighbors

This is the measure with the best return and the lowest cost, and it is the one most preparedness content skips. Four households who know each other can run a watch rotation, share a generator, pool a chainsaw, and notice when someone's elderly parent hasn't been seen in a day. Work out before the season who on your street has medical needs, who has useful skills or equipment, and who lives alone. You do not have to disclose your own supplies to do any of that.

Bug-in is the default. Leave immediately if any of these is true:

• The home becomes structurally unsafe — fire, flooding, major damage, or a gas leak you can't shut off.
• Water or food can't be secured or purified within 24–48 hours and no resupply is realistically coming.
• Someone needs medical care beyond what you can provide and transport is still possible.
• Refrigerated medication is close to spoiling, or powered medical equipment is close to losing its last charge. Leave while that is still a decision rather than an emergency.
• Local authorities issue a mandatory evacuation order for your zone.
• The area becomes unsafe from external threats — civil unrest, wildfire, approaching severe weather.

What to look for when buying the items your supply list calls for.

At 90 days a stored-food diet is too short to open a micronutrient gap — nobody develops a deficiency in a fortnight. Everything below applies from one month out. It is here now so you know what to add when you extend the horizon, and the first aid and prescription lines in the medical table matter far more at this stage.

A 90-day stored-food diet runs heavy on grains and cans and light on fresh produce, which leaves predictable gaps. Run specific products and doses past your pediatrician and your own doctor before stocking — especially anything for a small child, where dosing is weight-based.

Most supplements run 2–3 years, shorter than your dry food. Rotate annually.

Dried & freeze-dried

More expensive per calorie than rice and beans, but it earns a place: 25–30 year shelf life, minimal fuel, and portability if you end up evacuating.

Rough US retail, scaled to your household and horizon. These are planning ranges to budget against, not quotes — check current prices, and expect to build this over six to twelve months rather than in one purchase.

Two different ladders run through this page, and it is worth keeping them apart. The horizon you picked at the top — 3, 14, 30, 60 or 90 days — is five stages of the same plan, each one containing the one before it, so the figures below are for the stage you selected rather than a separate shopping trip. The three buying tiers further down are also stages rather than additions: Tier 1 plus Tier 2 plus Tier 3 is the same set of goods seen in buying order, so their prices are not meant to add up to the Essentials or Everything totals below.

Buy in this order. Each tier is useful on its own, so you're never half-prepared in a way that leaves a gap. Tick items off as you go — the list remembers in your own browser. Tier prices assume a family of four; see the costs above for your own household. If you would rather start from a ready-made list of the fire, first-aid and document items, skip to the end of this section.

Buying notes

• Buy off-season. Generators, shutters, water containers, and tarps spike in price and vanish the moment a storm enters the Gulf. January through April is when to buy.
• Skip untested no-name gear for anything life-safety related — filters, CO detectors, generators. Check recent reviews and the certifications above.
• Rotate, don't stockpile-and-forget. Eat and replace food stores, test the generator quarterly, replace filters and supplements on schedule. A 90-day supply you've never opened is one you don't know works.

Everything else on this page is arithmetic that works anywhere. This part does not — evacuation zones, shelters, registries and alerts are run county by county, and the numbers that matter are the ones for where you actually live. Look these up before a season, not during one, and write the answers down somewhere that works with a dead phone.

Find these once, write them down

• Your evacuation zone. Most coastal and flood-prone counties assign one by address. Orders are announced by zone — on broadcast radio and TV, by phone alert, and through the county’s own notification system — so a zone you don’t know is an announcement you can’t act on.
• Your county emergency management office — the authority that actually opens shelters and issues orders where you live.
• Which nearby shelters take pets, and what they require. Pre-registration, proof of residency and current rabies records are typical, and registering rarely guarantees a space.
• Your special-needs or medical registry. Most counties keep one for people who need transport assistance or depend on powered medical equipment. It is voluntary and you must sign up in advance.
• Where you would actually go — ideally a friend or relative outside your hazard zone who has agreed in advance. A shelter is the fallback, not the plan.
• A cooling or warming center near you, which is the one most people skip. For a household with an infant, an elderly member, or anyone on medication affecting temperature tolerance, this is a safety item rather than a comfort one.

National starting points

• ready.govFederal preparedness guidance, and the directory that points to your state and county emergency management.
• 2-1-1Free nationwide line for local disaster assistance, shelters, food and utility help. Works in most of the US.
• weather.govNational Weather Service warnings for your exact location, including heat, cold, flood and winter storm alerts.
• 9-1-1Life-threatening only; expect long delays during an active event.
• RadioA NOAA weather radio reaches you when the cell network and internet do not. This is why one is on your supply list.

A worked example: Miami-Dade

To show what “look up your local equivalent” means in practice, here is one county filled in. Yours will have the same shapes under different names.

• Zone lookupStorm Surge Planning Zones — five zones, A to E, assigned by address. Zone A is at risk from a Category 1; Zone E only from a Category 5. These cover surge only, not your flood zone.
• 3-1-1The county answer line: zone lookups, shelter openings, pet-shelter applications and the evacuation-assistance registry, all through one number.
• 800-342-3557Florida State Emergency Information Hotline.
• Mobile homesResidents of mobile homes and trailers evacuate on any order, whatever their zone — as does anyone on electrically powered life-sustaining equipment.

If you do end up at a shelter

Shelters provide basic food, but it takes time to set up — eat before you leave. Bring your own special-diet and infant food, fully charged devices and battery packs (outlets are scarce), bedding, medications and your document folder. Firearms are prohibited. Do not arrive before centers are announced as open.