Winter water

A few post sback I was talking about how with winter here it was time to swap out the gear that’s kept in the vehicle. A couple people asked how you keep water from freezing in the winter. Short answer: you don’t. What you do is figure out a way around the problem.

Get a 5-gallon jerrycan full of water and let it freeze. Now get a cup of water and let it freeze. Put both frozen containers of water side by side in a warm room and wait. Which one is going to completely thaw first? The cup of water, right?  The smaller the size of the frozen mass of water, the faster it will thaw. To that end, I store those little 4-oz. “lifeboat rations” of drinking water in the vehicle during the winter. They’re about the size, shape, and thickness of a Pop-Tart. As a result, they thaw quickly if you just sit on them or hold them between your hands for any length of time. And, yes, four ounces of water isn’t much..that’s why you pack a couple dozen in your emergency box. What would you normally carry…two gallons? Thas 256 ounces. To get the same effect, you’d need 64 pouches.

I usually just grab mine off eBay or Amazon for convenience’s sake but you can sometimes get better deals at gun shows. If you really want to be a clever lad, you’d buy a case of pocket warmers and a couple insulative foil bags. Throw the heaters in the bag with a couple pouches of water and you can keep a steady rotation of thawed water available during whatever roadside mishap you wind up in.

The pouches are just as good for the summer, but I usually just go with 20 oz. plastic bottles during the warmer weather.

3 thoughts on “Winter water

  1. Are popsicle molds watertight ? Have to of course seal the hole where stick goes through, but its just a slit most often. If so, they might make for an excellent small water storage container.

  2. Genius! I could never think of a reason to ever pick up those little water packets… I knew someone must have been buying them cause they kept making them.

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