Every time the news turns, the same question lands in your inbox, usually above a bunker-sized product: how long could you stay home? It is the right question. Here is how to answer it from your own kitchen, with four divisions, one minimum, and the item that ends your stay.
The Iran war escalated again over the weekend. Tehran's military headquarters warned that renewed American strikes would bring painful retaliation against U.S. bases across the region, the president told Fox News he is in deciding mode, and Houthi missiles hit a jet-fuel facility at Riyadh's airport. By Monday morning the preparedness industry's emails were asking how long you could stay home, with a flash sale underneath.
The question is the right one. Roads closed, stores empty, power out, medical care hard to reach: that is what most real emergencies look like from a kitchen, whatever caused them. The answer in those emails is a box, and a box has a number printed on it. Your household has a different number, and it is the only one that matters.
The official floor is low. Federal guidance still starts at 72 hours of supplies. Oregon, Hawaii, Washington and Wyoming now tell their residents to be two weeks ready, because help can take a week or two to reach a hard-hit area, and two weeks is a good planning target for everyone else. So the unit is days, and days are arithmetic you can do tonight.
Four divisions. Water: gallons stored, divided by one gallon per person per day, more in heat and for infants, and a little for each pet. Food: the calories in the house, divided by what the household eats in a day, about 2,000 for an adult and 1,200 to 1,600 for a child. The pantry you already eat from counts. The freezer counts for the first two or three days without power.
Cooking fuel, because dry rice and beans are not calories until they are cooked. A 20-pound propane tank holds about 420,000 BTU. One hot meal a day for four people uses roughly 28,000 BTU, so one tank is about 15 days of hot meals for a family and a 1-pound camping canister is less than one. Medications: pills on hand divided by pills per day, for each person who takes one, and the lowest of those is the household's number.
Your number is the smallest of the four, and the item that produced it is what runs out first. A family of four with 40 gallons of water, 120,000 calories in the pantry, one propane tank and 22 days of a blood-pressure prescription can stay home for 10 days, limited by water. Not 15, not 22. Ten, and it is the water that ends it. That is a more useful sentence than anything printed on a box.
Water, almost always. Two weeks for four people is 56 gallons, which weighs about 470 pounds and takes up the floor of a closet, and that is exactly why it is the thing nobody stores. Most households that own a month of food own three days of water, and the food never gets a chance to matter.
The box problem comes next. One widely sold 30-day emergency food kit lists about 63,000 calories. That is 2,100 a day, which is 30 days for one adult. For a family of four, the same box is a week. The day count on the front is per person; read the calorie line on the back and divide by your household. The same arithmetic applies to the 72-hour kits: three days for whom?
Then medications. Thirty-day fills mean that on any given day the average household is somewhere around ten days from empty, and no pharmacy is part of the scenario. Then cooking fuel, which most people have never measured. And then, as everyone learned in 2020, toilet paper, which people counted in rolls when the question was days.
In order of days gained per dollar. Water first: a case of bottled water is about three gallons for around five dollars, a five-gallon jug per person is a week, and a household rule to fill the bathtub and every pot the moment the news turns is free. A gravity or squeeze filter turns rain barrels, the pond and the water heater tank into supply and moves the water number from days to weeks.
Then the cheap multipliers. A second propane tank is about twenty dollars of fuel and two more weeks of hot meals. A manual can opener is the difference between a pantry and a wall of metal. Ask the prescriber for 90-day fills; most insurers allow it, and it triples the medication number at no cost. Build the pantry from what you already eat, one extra of each item per shopping trip, oldest to the front, and it never expires on you. A bucket toilet with bags and litter, and cash in small bills, round out the two weeks.
Then do the four divisions again, because the number moved and something else is now the thing that runs out first. That is the whole discipline: not a bigger box, but knowing your number and what sets it. If you would rather not keep the spreadsheet yourself, that is what we build.
Roads closed, stores empty, power out: that is the Grid Down scenario. MyPlann counts your household's days from what is actually on your shelves and tells you which shortage ends them first.
MyPlann maps your real preparedness level against every scenario in this brief — and shows you exactly what to address first. Free during early access.
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