About ReadyWater Prep

Hurricane Beryl knocked out water to my neighborhood for four days in July 2024. Four days doesn't sound like much until you're doing the math at 11pm on how many bottles are left versus how many days until the tap probably comes back on. I had a stock pot, a Brita filter two months past its cartridge change, and a case of water bottles. That's not a preparedness plan — that's three things that look like a plan until you need them.

I work IT support remotely, which means I spend my professional life troubleshooting infrastructure failures and documenting what breaks and why. Embarrassingly, I had treated water preparedness the same way I'd treated backing up my router firmware: I knew I should, kept meaning to, never actually did it. Beryl rerouted that. My wife's opinion of the resulting garage situation has evolved from "this is a lot" to a look that communicates the point more efficiently than words do.

Testing started in October 2024. First filter I bought smelled like a fishing tackle box, needed a countertop to operate, and took eleven minutes to assemble correctly when I was following the instructions. That number would've been longer under stress. Returned it in week two. The replacement went in the garage for six weeks on collected rainwater — daily flow rate notes, temperature tracking across Houston fall into early winter, taste tests my kids treated as suspicious. Flow rate dropped 22% over six weeks on non-tap source water. Not in the product description. Goes in the review.

That's what this site is. Head-to-head comparisons of emergency water systems — storage, filtration, purification — with real numbers: capacity per dollar, weight when full, setup time under stress. The focus is suburban families in disaster-prone areas preparing for short-term emergencies. Not homesteading, not off-grid, not the kind of content that assumes you own acreage. The writer background is on the author page.

Some links here are affiliate links — I earn a small commission when you buy through them, at no extra cost to you. I only link to gear I've actually run through its paces. If something let me down, the review says so.