7-Day Household Emergency Preparedness Checklist

Why seven days, and what a week actually demands

Three days is a margin against delay. Seven days is a margin against a changed world. A week without power can mean a fridge emptied, a water heater drained, shops out of stock and pharmacies shut. It can also mean you are fine at home and simply cannot rely on anything outside it. That is the scenario this stock is built for.

The demands scale less smoothly than people expect. Water for four people for a week is more than one hundred litres. Food is a full shelf. Hygiene stock fills a drawer. Before buying anything, walk your home. Pick the two or three spots where this will live: a cupboard, an under-stair bay, a spare laundry shelf. Space decided in advance stops a stockpile becoming a tripping hazard.

The week-one mindset: A seven-day plan is not fear. It is the normal length of a serious storm, a supply fault or a household illness.

Do the water maths for your own household

The usual sheltering figure is around four litres per person per day. It covers drinking, cooking and a minimal wash, and it goes further than you might think once you plan meals that need little water. Multiply by household size and by seven, and add anyone who visits, plus pets, whose share is easy to forget.

No one wants to buy that in one hit, and you should not. Build it in layers. Sealed commercial water covers drinking. Your own tapped water, rotated in reusable containers, covers cooking. A treatment method turns a risky source into a safe one. Stored water ages, so keep it cool, dark and away from chemicals, and rotate your own taps roughly every six months.

Fix the leak risk while you are at it. A split hose inside a cupboard can empty a stored week in an afternoon. Purpose-built containers beat a cluster of supermarket bottles nobody sealed properly.

Count litres per person per day, then divide the total across three sources: stored, tapped and treatable.

A week of food from your normal shop

Specialist emergency rations solve a narrow problem: they keep for years and they are edible in an emergency. They are a poor foundation for a week of actual eating. A household that dislikes its stock will order takeaway and let it expire. Build the shelf instead from your normal shop. Tinned meals the family already eats, plus dried fruit, nut butter, oats and crispbread. Add shelf-stable milk, and a few things that simply make a bad week better.

Then design the rotation. Move the oldest items to the front each month, eat them in ordinary life, and replace them on the next shop. Tape a manual can opener to the shelf itself. The good one will be in a drawer when the power is out. If you cook, keep a stove and fuel that work in a ventilated space. Never run a barbecue or a camp stove in a sealed room.

Power: capacity, then the refill plan

Over a weekend, a big battery is an answer. Over a week, it is a countdown. Start by naming what must keep running. Usually that is a fridge, a router, a lamp and any medical device. Size the bank against that draw, not the largest number on the box. Our blackout backup planner and power-station runtime calculators do the arithmetic, and the refrigerator guide explains what a fridge really costs overnight.

Then plan the refill, which is where a week diverges from a weekend. A fold-up panel on a window or balcony can top a modest bank back up across sunny days. That turns a finite battery into a slowly cycling one. Ration the load by priority. Phones and medical devices first, light second, entertainment last. The bank that charges a phone for seven days will not run a vacuum cleaner for seven minutes.

It is worth asking whether the fridge belongs on that list at all. It is usually the largest single draw in a household. A week of emptying it out and eating shelf-stable food is often simpler than fighting it for power. Coolers buy the few days that matter for what is already inside. Households with no medical cold needs sometimes plan a week without refrigeration, and find the real constraint is morale, not safety.

Size the bank to the must-run load, then buy the panel that refills it. A week is a recharge problem, not a capacity problem.

Hygiene is a consumable, not a category

Nobody plans for toilet paper and nobody runs out of it gracefully. Count the hygiene layer the way you count water. A week of soap, toothpaste and trash bags per person, plus the laundry substitute nobody thinks to stock. Add the towelettes and sanitiser that stand in for showers when water is precious. It is unglamorous, and it decides whether the week feels survivable.

Waste is the harder half. If your supply fails or your plumbing cannot be flushed, a portable toilet turns a growing health problem into a manageable chore. A bucket and heavy-duty bags do the same job for less. Keep a stock of thick bags and an absorbent deodoriser with it. Photograph the setup instructions, because nobody wants to read a manual on day five by lantern light.

The personal layer at seven-day scale

The longer the horizon, the more the generic list fails the specific household. Prescriptions need a real buffer, not a two-day trickle, along with copies of the scripts in case the bag and the house both go. Infants need formula, nappies and warmth sized for a week. Pets need food, water, medication and a carrier. Older family members may need hearing-aid batteries, mobility aids and someone else's phone number.

Add the things that keep a household settled: a deck of cards, a notebook, a comfort food that means nothing to anyone else. A worried family in a dark house for a week needs morale stock as much as calories. It costs a fraction of either.

The two-hour drill before you trust the shelf

A stocked cupboard is not yet a working plan. Run a short drill on a calm evening: lights off, phones saved, one hour lived on the stock. Find the water by feel. Open a tin with the emergency opener, light the lantern, and charge a phone from the bank. Notice what you could not do. Every failure you find cheaply on a good night is one you will not find expensively on a bad one.

Write the fixes in the same notebook that holds the rotation dates. Then keep a printed page beside the shelf. It should carry the household contact list, the shut-off locations and the plan for who calls whom. A week-long event is a logistics problem, and logistics runs on paper when the screen is dark.

Test the stock in the dark once, on purpose, before you ever have to discover its gaps by accident.