Home › Stay home 3 days
Shelter in placeThree days with no water and no power.
This is the worst case for staying home — both utilities down at once, for three days. It is also the useful one to plan for, because if you are ready for that, you are ready for nearly every stay-home emergency there is. Most are milder. You are safe indoors; the home just stops working for a while.
For a family of four, three days means twelve gallons. That is two cases of bottled water plus a few jugs — about the space of a laundry basket. Pets need water too: about half a gallon a day for a cat or small animal, and closer to a full gallon a day for a large dog. See exactly how much water your household needs.
Two weeks is what emergency managers recommend for staying home, because that is closer to how long service can take to come back after a serious regional event. So build to three days first — then add more days as your budget and your storage space allow. An extra case of water this month. A few more cans next month. There is no prize for finishing fast, and every day you add is a real day of cushion.
Most of what goes in your go bag also belongs in this kit — water, food, a headlamp, first aid, medicine. Having two of each is the stronger plan. Preppers say it for a reason: one is none, and two is one.
If your budget or your closet says otherwise, that is fine. Buy one, keep it in the go bag, and use it here when the power is out. One set covers both. Do what you can with what you have.
Six things to have handled.
In order. Do not skip ahead — the first two keep you alive, the rest keep you comfortable and sane.
-
Water you can reach, and a way to treat it
Store it low and in more than one place, so a fallen shelf does not take out your whole supply. Sealed bottled water keeps for years. If you fill your own containers, use food-grade jugs and swap the water every six months.
Then add a way to treat water, because stored water is only half the answer. A filter, purification tablets, or plain unscented bleach with the dosing taped to the bottle. This is the cheapest insurance in your whole kit and the piece most people skip.
-
Food that needs no cooking
Assume no stove, no microwave, and no fridge. Canned beans, tuna, peanut butter, crackers, dried fruit, nuts, shelf-stable milk. Pick things your family already eats — an emergency is a bad time to introduce new food. Keep a manual can opener with the food, not in a drawer. Count on three meals a person a day.
-
Medicine and medical equipment
Aim for a week of every prescription, and ask your pharmacy about an emergency refill. If anyone uses oxygen, a CPAP, a nebulizer, or dialysis, call your provider now and ask what happens in a power outage — many utilities keep a medical baseline list that flags your address. Keep a written medicine list; you will not remember doses under stress. See the oxygen & CPAP power-outage plan.
-
Light without fire, powered more than one way
Headlamps beat flashlights because your hands stay free, and battery lanterns beat candles because candles start fires in exactly the conditions where the fire department is already busy. One light per person, kept where that person sleeps.
Here is the part most lists miss: do not let everything you own run on the same fuel. Two headlamps are good. Two headlamps that both need AAA batteries are one dead pack of AAAs away from useless. Buy the second one rechargeable, or hand-crank, or solar. Same with lanterns and radios. Redundancy in the item is step one; redundancy in how it gets powered is what actually keeps the lights on.
-
A phone that stays alive, and a radio
A charged power bank keeps a phone going for two or three days — and a small solar or hand-crank charger keeps it going after that. Cell towers can go down even when your phone works, so a battery or hand-crank radio is how you hear what is happening. Text instead of calling — texts get through congested networks when calls do not.
-
The toilet, when the water is off
Nobody talks about this and everybody needs it. If water is out, do not keep flushing. Line the bowl with a heavy trash bag, add a scoop of cat litter or sawdust after each use, tie it off and store it in a bucket with a lid. Two rolls of paper per person, garbage bags, hand sanitizer, and wipes. This one thing turns a miserable three days into a manageable one.
Sometimes the tap works and the water still is not safe.
This is the part people miss when they picture an outage.
We tend to imagine water emergencies as nothing coming out of the faucet. Just as often, water comes out fine and simply is not safe to drink. A main breaks and pressure drops, and untreated groundwater can seep into the pipes. A treatment plant loses power or control of its equipment. The result is a boil-water notice, and the tap keeps running the whole time.
That happened at scale this summer. Beginning in late July 2026, hackers targeted water and wastewater utilities in at least a dozen states. Some utilities lost the ability to monitor their systems remotely and went back to running things by hand. Several issued precautionary boil-water notices after losing pressure.
No contamination was reported, and drinking water stayed safe. Utility crews caught it and switched to manual control, which is exactly what those systems are designed to let them do. This is not a reason to be alarmed. It is a reason to own a twenty-dollar filter.
Because here is the practical upshot: if the power is out, you probably cannot boil water either. A boil-water notice during an outage is the one scenario where stored water and a filter stop being optional. Keep at least one way to treat water that does not need electricity — a pump or gravity filter, purification tablets, or unscented bleach with the dosing written on the bottle.
One more habit worth building: if a notice is issued, remember it covers more than drinking. Brushing teeth, washing produce, ice makers, and pets all count.
What did 2020 teach you?
Most people are further along than they think. They just have not written it down.
Nearly everyone reading this has already lived through a long emergency at home. It is worth sitting down for ten minutes and asking your household some honest questions:
- What ran out first, and how did that feel?
- What did we buy in a panic that we never used?
- What did we wish we had bought before everyone else did?
- Who checked on us, and who did we check on?
- What kept us sane — and what would we want on hand next time?
- If we could not leave the house for two weeks starting tomorrow, what would we be short of?
Write the answers in your binder. That list is more useful than any generic checklist, because it is built from what actually happened to your household.
A pandemic is a stay-home emergency, and the kit on this page largely covers it. Add a deeper supply of medicine and hygiene items, a thermometer, masks, and enough food to genuinely not go out for a couple of weeks, and you are prepared. You are not starting over — you are extending what you already have.
The only situations that call for genuinely different preparation are chemical, biological, or radiological events. Those need specific guidance we are not going to improvise here — Ready.gov covers them, and your county alert system will tell you what to do if it ever applies. For everything else, the kit on this page is the kit.
A calm head is equipment too.
You can own every item on this page and still freeze. Plans only work if the person holding them can think.
Under real stress your body does predictable things. Your heart rate climbs, your hearing narrows, your hands shake, and your memory gets unreliable. This is normal and it happens to trained responders too. The difference is that they plan for it — they do not rely on remembering anything.
Slow the body down first
In for four counts, hold for four, out for four, hold for four. Four rounds, about a minute, before you make any decision that matters. This is not a wellness suggestion — controlled breathing physically lowers your heart rate, and a lower heart rate is what gives you back your judgment. If holding feels like too much, breathe in for four and out for six instead; the longer exhale does the same job.
Do not trust your memory. Trust the card.
This is why we tell people to print a checklist and physically put it in the kit. Not on your phone — your phone may be dead, or you may be too rattled to navigate it. One printed card in your stay-home kit, one in your go bag.
Free: your Emergency Action Cards
Printable PDF · two cards · blanks to fill in
- Card 1 — Staying Home. People, pets, gas and damage check, radio, contact, water, medicine, photos.
- Card 2 — Leaving Now. Bags, people, pets, medicine, documents, phone, lock up, contact.
- Both start with the breathing, because that is what makes the rest work.
- Blanks for your out-of-area contact, shutoff locations, and meeting spots.
Print, cut along the dotted line, and fill in the blanks today — not during an emergency.
One task at a time
The plan is a sequence, not a list to do all at once. Read line one. Do line one. Then read line two. When people freeze, it is almost always because they are trying to hold the whole emergency in their head at the same time.
Practice while nothing is wrong
Read the card out loud once a year with your household. Walk your exit route. Familiar actions survive stress far better than new ones — that is the whole reason drills exist.
Plan for how each person actually copes
Calm looks different for different people. Some need quiet and dark; some need company and something to do. Children take their cues from the adults around them, so your steadiness is doing more work than anything you say. Pack for the mind the way you pack for the body: headphones, sunglasses, a familiar object, a deck of cards, a book, something to fidget with. In an emergency these are not luxuries — they are what keeps a person able to follow the plan.
The small stuff that matters more than you think.
- Cash in small bills. Card readers and ATMs need power. Twenties and fives.
- Warmth without heat. Wool blankets, sleeping bags, hats. Bodies lose heat fast in an unheated house.
- Know where your shutoffs are — gas, water, and electrical. Locating them is the part you do now. See the note below before you touch anything.
- Comfort items. Headphones, a familiar toy, a weighted blanket, sunglasses. For neurodivergent family members these are not extras, they are equipment.
- A meeting plan. One out-of-area contact everyone in the family can text. Local lines jam first.
- Fire extinguisher. Kitchen and near bedrooms. Check the gauge twice a year.
This is the one thing on this page we will not teach you, and it is on purpose. Every meter and valve is a little different, and getting it wrong is dangerous.
Call your gas utility and ask them to show you. They do this for free, they know your specific meter, and many will send someone out or walk you through it on the phone. Do the same for your water main. Then write both locations in your binder and on your action card.
Two things every utility agrees on. Only shut the gas off if you smell gas, hear hissing, or see damage to the line — not as a precaution, because you may not get it back quickly. And never turn it back on yourself. Only the utility can safely restore service and relight your appliances. After a major event that can take days or weeks, which is another reason not to shut it off unless you truly need to.
Turn this into your list.
Answer two questions about who lives in your home and we will build a checklist with real quantities and three price options on every item.