One of the ironies about winter is that when you are surrounded by snow and ice it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re water issues are over.
Once in a while someone asks me about how I keep water in a vehicle emergency kit in the winter. The answer is I keep it he same way i keep it in the summer – small pouches or small plastic bottles. But don’t they freeze? Yes.
See, the problem isn’t really about the water freezing. The problem is about how you thaw the water. The solution, of course, is pretty freakin’ obvious – the smaller the quantity of ice, the faster it will thaw.
Imagine a gallon of ice as a frozen block. Now imagine 128 1-ounce ice cubes lined up in a row. Which one will thaw completely faster? The ice cubes, of course.
There’s two ways I keep water in the vehicle – I use either the small 4 oz. ‘lifeboat ration’ water pouches or the small hand grenade sized plastic water bottles. Both are small enough you can shove them in a pocket or under your butt and thaw them out. The pouches are the easiest to thaw..they are about the size and thickness of a Pop Tart and you can thaw them in just a few minutes by sitting on them. Yes, it takes a lot of them to add up to a couple gallons of water (which you should always have in your vehicle). So what? Whether its 2 1-gallon jugs or 64 4-oz. pouches its still the same amount of water…the only difference is that it wont take two days for the pouches to thaw.
The pouches freeze quite well and I’ve never had one fail from being frozen, but, of course, whenthey are frozen try no to bang them around. The plastic water bottles have also never given me any problems and I’ve had them go through several freeze/thaw cycles. Fact is, most bottled water is packaged in bottles that are so darn tough you can pretty much ignore them. Roll a couple under the seats of your car and forget about ’em.
Melt snow and ice when you’re by the side of the road? Well, yeah, you can do that but you would be amazed at how much snow it takes to make an appreciable amount of water. I remember reading somewhere that 1″ of rain is the same amount of water as 10″ of snow.
What this means is that if you think you’re going to cut the top off an empty beer can with your pocket knife, scoop up a can full of snow, and melt it over your Zippo to drink..well..you need to do that about a dozen times to get one can full of water. Youre better off storing the stuff in your vehicle. Sure, you can do it as a last resort, but don’t you have better things to do with your heat sources?
So, for those who wonder how do you keep water in your vehicle in the winter without it freezing, the answer is: you don’t. You let it freeze, but you take steps to make sure its easy to thaw. I suppose if youre creative you could have a small ice chest in your vehicle to keep the water in and if you get stuck throw some chemical handwarmers in there to keep the water from refreezing once you thaw it.
Me, I go with the pouches….light, easy to transport, fit in my pockets, and they thaw fast.
Here in the Deep South I have just the opposite problem – defrosted ice… While it very occasionally gets cold enough here to freeze the water jugs in my vehicles, they seldom do even then being under insulation. It’s actually in the 60s here right now but we’re expecting a one off dive to the mid 20s Sunday night then back up to the 50s again.
Planning especially for the summers when we would really need ice if there was a power outage (I like to run my generator as little as possible to avoid attracting attention) I keep one stand freezer packed with filled large pop bottles (85% full to compensate for expansion) to provide both cooler ice and chilled drinking water in a pinch.
They stack nicely and I can get ~ 30 gallons worth into the freezer. Combined with the non refrigerated stores I can provide 3 gallons a day of drinking water per person for 2 months min. Additional non pot requirements can be drawn from the river at the end of my street and stored in the earmarked tanks after settling, filtering, and addition of pool shock if needed depending on the use for it.
Have you ever thought about keeping your water stores in insulated jugs? We had them in the mil and if they could keep water from freezing at Ft Wainwright AK, they would probably work for your location as well.
Best Regards
From previous experience, I totally agree that small sachets of water are the way to go. I learned this after destroying a couple of metal water bottles. Warming the frozen sachets up from frozen with body heat, that I’m not that fond of. The last thing a person wants is to lose body heat in a severely cold environment. If the vehicle you’re in is still running and you have lots of fuel this may not be a problem but in the worst case… My winter kit has two liters of water in small home made sachets, a small butane stove with an extra butane cartridge, tea bags, instant oatmeal, a KFS and a canteen cup. I also have a cut down 1.5 X 1.5 foot piece of BBQ grill mat to put on the floor so the truck will not catch fire. The gear all fits very nicely in a small wooden box I made for it.
KFS?
Sorry, KFS is short for Knife, Fork & Spoon…
Knife, fork, spoon.
A couple of years ago I ran across an article talking about water stored in the car. Of course, up here we do have Winter, so things get frozen. I also use the 4 oz. pouches. I got a case, split it into 2 packages using some clear, locking lid tubs, with a handle on the top. Applied a but of Gorrilla tape to keep them closed – now I have mobile emergency water in the 2 main vehicles!
I’ve had problems with the small plastic bottles of water. The bottles themselves are being made of ever-thinner plastic — I’ve had several split when frozen.
Carbonated-water/beverage bottles are thicker and stronger. A rinsed and refilled 1L seltzer water bottle will survive freezing. At worst it will stretch and deform when the water freezes — if filled to less than the “factory” level then that won’t be an issue.
A GI canteen cup — or a small thrift store cooking pot — and a fuel-tab stove are a fast and easy means of melting ice or snow. If there’s no snow or ice to harvest and you need to thaw a frozen plastic bottle of water, just cut the bottle off.