Bottled water is not a water plan

Slightly Anxious

Oct 21

13 min read

Author: Slightly Anxious Date: 10th August 2026 Time to read: 11 minutes

Slightly Anxious is here to help you turn any crisis into a manageable adventure — for you and everyone you care about.

It is just after seven o'clock on a Saturday morning in August, you are still half asleep, and you turn the kitchen tap on to fill the kettle and almost nothing comes out of it. This is roughly what happened to more than 2,500 households in Tonbridge on Saturday 1st August this year, when a water main ruptured on Shipbourne Road, and it is worth paying very close attention to what happened next, because almost every part of it went the way it is supposed to go, and it still was not enough.

South East Water were on site, the repair was worked through the night, and although the job was made considerably more complicated by an equipment failure and by high-voltage electrical cables sitting inconveniently close to the burst main, the company had water slowly returning to the area by the Monday morning. Two bottled water stations were opened in the town, one at Sovereign Way East Car Park and one at Tonbridge Farm Sports Centre, and bottled water was handed out free to anyone who turned up to collect it. On paper that is a functioning emergency response, and we do want to be fair to the engineers who spent their weekend in a hole in the road delivering it.

And then a man called Mark Bown told ITV News that his 99-year-old mother-in-law had been without water since Saturday morning. Bottles had in fact been delivered to her, so the system had found her and the system had reached her. She was simply too frail to lift them, and too frail to use them to top up her toilet cistern, and so she was reliant on her neighbours, and her son-in-law was left worrying publicly about all the other elderly people in the town in exactly the same position with nobody to ring the news for them.

A bottled water station is a response. It is not a plan.

We have written a great deal on this website about how much water to store and where on earth to put it, and if that is what you came here for then please go straight to our article ‘What to do when the water has been turned off’, which is the long and properly detailed version. This article is about something narrower and, we think, more urgent, which is the gap between the help that will be offered to you in a water emergency and the help you will actually be able to use. Tonbridge is the clearest illustration of that gap we have seen in years, and it happened in the middle of the driest July this country has ever recorded.

The summer that made this more than a hypothetical

At the time of writing, on 10th August 2026, the Environment Agency has just confirmed that July was the driest July for England since records began in 1836, with the country receiving just 10% of its long-term average rainfall for the month, and that England has now had seven consecutive weeks of less than 10mm of rain. Reservoir storage across England has fallen to 69%, which is 11.6% below the long-term average for the time of year, and five reservoirs are now classed as exceptionally low. More than 25 million people in this country are currently living under some form of water restriction.

Nine hosepipe bans, or Temporary Use Bans to give them their proper name, are in force across England and Wales, which is the most widespread position since 2022. South West Water extended its ban to its entire supply area on 8th August, covering Devon, Cornwall, parts of Dorset and Somerset and the Isles of Scilly. Essex and Suffolk Water brought in its first ban since 1997 on 3rd August. Thames Water's ban covers roughly 15 million customers. Yorkshire Water, interestingly, has no restrictions at all, which tells you that this is a regional problem rather than a national one, and that where you happen to live matters enormously.

We are not telling you any of this to frighten you, and we are certainly not going to tell you that the taps are about to run dry across Britain, because they are not. We are telling you because a stressed network is a network that breaks more often and takes longer to fix when it does, and because the practical consequence of all of the above for you and your loved ones is not really about your lawn at all.

The ladder that ends in a car park

The thing that is genuinely useful to understand, and that almost nobody explains, is that water restriction is a ladder with rungs on it rather than a cliff you fall off. Knowing the rungs is reassuring rather than alarming, because it shows you how much warning you are likely to get, and it shows you exactly where the cheap and calm moment to act sits, which is near the bottom.

A conservation appeal — your water company asks nicely. Severn Trent and South Staffs Water both did this in July. Nothing is compulsory and most people never notice it happened.
A Temporary Use Ban — the hosepipe ban. No hosepipes for gardens, cars, patios, pools or ornamental fountains, with a maximum fine of £1,000 for a breach. Watering cans and buckets are still fine, and your shower, your toilet and your drinking water are not affected in the slightest.
A Non-Essential Use Ban — this extends restrictions to some business uses, such as mechanical vehicle washing and non-domestic pool filling. Southern Water opened a public consultation on applying to Defra for one, together with a Drought Order, on 4th August, covering Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. They have been careful to say that applying for it does not mean it will be introduced, and we would encourage you to be equally careful before repeating it as fact.
Rota cuts and standpipes — genuinely rare. Britain has not used standpipes since 1976, largely because taking water out of the network that way depressurises it even further, which makes everything worse.
Bottled water stations — and here is the thing that catches everybody out. You do not need to climb all four rungs to arrive at this one. Tonbridge went from a completely normal Saturday morning to a bottled water station in a car park in a matter of hours, because a pipe broke. No drought, no rota, no warning. Just a pipe.

That last point is the whole argument. The dramatic, slow-moving, nationally-reported drought is the thing that gets the news coverage, and the boring burst main round the corner from you is the thing that will actually turn your taps off, and it will do it without asking.

The free thing you should do before you spend a penny with anyone

Before we recommend a single product to you, and we are going to recommend several, we want to point you at something that costs nothing and that far too few people have heard of, which is the Priority Services Register.

Every water company and every energy company in the country is obliged to keep one. It is a free list of customers who would find an interruption to supply harder to cope with than most, and the criteria are much broader than people assume, covering pensionable age, disability, a long-term medical condition, sight or hearing loss, mental health conditions, pregnancy and young children in the household, and temporary circumstances such as recovering from an operation. What you get for being on it varies by company but typically includes bottled water delivered to your door rather than to a car park, advance warning of planned work, and a priority number to ring that is not the general enquiries queue.

If your own mother is in her nineties and living alone, the single most useful thing you can do for her this month is not to buy her a water container. It is to spend ten minutes on her water company's website putting her on that register, and then to do the same with her energy supplier while the laptop is still open. It is free, it takes very little time, and it is the closest thing to a genuine free lunch in the whole of household preparedness!

We would rather you did the free thing properly than the expensive thing badly.

Do go and check the details with your own supplier, as the eligibility wording and the exact services offered do vary between companies, and we would not want you to assume that what one company offers is what all of them offer.

The carry test

Here is the arithmetic that the Tonbridge story is really about, and it is arithmetic that we have never seen a water company put on a leaflet. Water weighs one kilogram per litre. That is a lovely, tidy, memorable fact and it is also completely unforgiving.

A single 2 litre bottle — 2kg. Anybody can manage this. This is why we recommend 2 litre bottles over 5 litre bottles for rationing.
A shrink-wrapped case of six 2 litre bottles — 12kg. This is about the weight of a large cat that does not want to be carried, and it is precisely the point at which a lot of people quietly start to struggle!
A 10 litre jerry can, full — 10kg. Manageable for most adults over a short distance, awkward over a long one.
A 25 litre jerry can, full — 25kg. Frankly, this is a two-hands, put-it-down-twice job for most of us, and a complete non-starter for many.
One day's water for a couple, at our 10 litres per person per day — 20kg. Every single day.
One day's water for a household of four — 40kg. Every single day, from a car park, on foot, possibly with the children in tow.

Now apply that to a real person. The 99-year-old woman in Tonbridge was not failed by a shortage of water, because the water had physically arrived at her home. She was failed by weight and by geometry, because a toilet cistern is roughly waist height and a full bottle has to be lifted above it and held there while it empties, and that is a task that a great many people in their eighties and nineties simply cannot perform, and a great many people with a bad back, a recent operation, arthritis or a wheelchair cannot perform either.

So the question to ask yourself is not the one everybody asks, which is ‘how much water should I store?'. The question is: who in this household will actually be doing the carrying, and how far, and how many times a day, and what happens on the day that person has flu? If the honest answer is uncomfortable, then your plan needs to change shape — smaller containers in more places, stored close to where the water is needed, rather than one heroic drum in the garage that only one member of the household can move.

Your to do list is:

Put every eligible member of your household, and any elderly relative you look after, on the Priority Services Register for both their water company and their energy supplier. Today, and for free.
Find out which water company actually supplies your address, and check its current restriction status. Do not assume your neighbour's answer is your answer — supply boundaries do not follow county lines, and in Hampshire there are currently two different companies restricting different postcodes.
Work out your household's honest daily figure. Ten litres per person per day, for seven days. For a couple that is 140 litres, and for a household of four it is 280 litres.
Do the carry test. Name the person who will be lifting it, and size your containers to what that person can actually manage rather than to what looks efficient in a photograph.
Store it in more than one place. Under a bed, in the bottom of a wardrobe, behind the sofa, in a cupboard under the stairs. Distributed storage is not just about fitting it in, it is about not having to carry it far.
Keep a small amount of water where it will be needed rather than where it is convenient to store it — a couple of containers in the bathroom will do more for your dignity in a three-day outage than a pallet in the garage.
Write the FIFO date on everything. First-In, First-Out, and treat plastic-stored water as having a six month shelf life.

What we would actually buy

What follows is deliberately weighted towards things a person can actually lift, because that is the entire point of this article. For the full range of storage options, including the large fixed tanks and the decorative planters that hide your water in plain sight, please do read ‘What to do when the water has been turned off’, where we go through all of it properly.

PowerChem 10L Jerry Can (pack of 10) at c.£60-£90 – ten 10 litre jerry cans, stackable, at a genuinely low price per litre. This is our first recommendation for most households and it is entirely because of the weight. At 10kg full, every adult in the house can move one, and you can spread them across four different rooms so that nobody has to carry water more than a few steps. Three packs gets a couple comfortably past their week.

Folding Water Container, 2 Pack 10L Portable Folding Water Bag at c.£10-£14 – food-grade folding carry bags with strengthened handles, a wide opening and a screw cap. These are the single most useful thing on this list for the Tonbridge scenario specifically, because they fold flat to nothing in a drawer until the day the council opens a water station, and then they let you carry water back from it with a handle designed for the job rather than by hugging a shrink-wrapped case to your chest.

25 Litre Jerry Can Water Container Storage Tank at c.£12-£16 – who doesn't like a jerry can, and at this price you can buy six of them for a couple's full week for about the cost of a takeaway! Our only reservation, and it is the reservation this whole article is about, is that 25kg is a lot of jerry can when it is full, so buy these if you have got the space to store them where they will be used and the arms to shift them, and buy the 10 litre ones if you have not.

AquaBrick 3 Gallon Long Term Water Storage Container (6 pack) at c.£200-£275 – six stackable containers giving almost 68 litres. These are expensive, and we will not pretend otherwise, but each brick holds 13.6 litres and weighs about the same as 34 tins of baked beans, which puts it just about within reach of most people, and the stacking means a couple's entire week fits under a single bed. If budget allows, this is the tidiest answer to the storage problem we have found.

AquaBrick Emergency Water Storage Containers (2 pack) at c.£80-£110 – the top-up pack, adding another 22.7 litres, which is what takes a couple over the 140 litre line and a household of four over 280 litres when combined with the six packs.

Thick Plastic Water Tank, Emergency Water Barrel with Spigot, 50l at c.£40-£55 – we like this one because it is shaped like a barrel lying on its side and has a pull handle, which makes its 50kg something you can drag rather than lift. A spigot also means you are not tipping anything to get water out, which matters more than you would think if your wrists are not what they were.

WaterBOB at c.£35-£55 – a liner for your bath that gives you about 100 litres of clean drinking water, provided you have had a few hours of warning. Useless in a burst main, which gives you none, but excellent for planned maintenance work, and cheap enough that we think it earns its place in the cupboard.

Usion Bed Risers 6 inch Heavy Duty Furniture Risers at c.£20-£30 – deeply unglamorous and quietly transformational. Six inches of extra clearance turns the space under a double bed into storage for around 176 upright 2 litre bottles, which is 352 litres, which is a family of four's full week with a good deal to spare.

Ikea Samla transparent boxes at c.£8-£12 – for keeping bottles contained, clean and stackable under a bed rather than loose in their polythene wrapper. Transparent so you can see what is in them without hauling everything out, which is exactly the sort of small thing that decides whether a system gets used or abandoned.

Oasis 67mg Water Purification Tablets 200 Tablets at c.£7-£9 – chlorine dioxide tablets, one per the stated quantity of water, thirty minutes and you are done. At this price there is no sensible argument for not having a packet in the house. Always read the label and consult a pharmacist if unsure.

Aqua Tabs Water Purification Tablets 8.5mg x 100 at c.£11-£15 – the same job in a different dosage, and worth having if you would rather treat small quantities at a time. Always read the label and consult a pharmacist if unsure.

Hozelock Kitchen Tap Connector with a 24mm male head at c.£10-£14 – because the container you buy will not fit under your kitchen tap. This is the single most predictable and most annoying discovery in the whole of emergency water storage, and it is solved for roughly the price of a sandwich! Do check your tap's fitting before you order.

Mypurecore Blue 12mm 1/2" Cold Water 3m Hose Pipe at c.£12-£16 – the other half of that solution, running from the tap connector to wherever the container is standing.

Water Butts Direct 100L Slimline Black Rainfall Mini Water Butt Kit at c.£35-£45 – if you have any outside space at all. Rainwater is not drinkable, and we would ask you not to try, but 100 litres of water for flushing a toilet and washing a floor is 100 litres you do not have to carry home from a car park, and in a hosepipe ban summer it keeps your plants alive as a bonus.

A word about the water you already have

On the day it happens, before you do anything else, you have already got more water in the house than you think, and it costs nothing to secure it. Fill the kettle, fill every saucepan, fill the bath if you have any warning at all, and fill every clean bottle and jug you own. Your hot water cylinder, if you have one rather than a combi boiler, is holding somewhere between 100 and 200 litres, and it has a drain valve at the bottom for exactly this reason. The cold tank in the loft, if you have one, is another substantial reserve.

And do please remember that the cistern of every toilet in your house is full of clean water that has never been used, which is quite different from the bowl beneath it, and which is perfectly good for washing.

We will be honest with you in closing, because we always try to be. Storing water is the least satisfying purchase in the whole of household preparedness. It is heavy, it takes up room you do not have, it is not remotely interesting to look at, and unlike a torch or a camping stove you will get absolutely no pleasure out of owning it on any ordinary day of your life. Nobody has ever shown a guest round their house and pointed proudly at the jerry cans!

But the woman in Tonbridge did everything right. She lived in a country with a functioning water company, in a town where the emergency response worked, and somebody put bottled water directly into her hands within a day. And it still did not help her, because the plan assumed she could lift it. The whole of our argument, this week and every week, is that being prepared is not really about the worst thing that could happen, it is about the ordinary Saturday morning when a pipe breaks and you would rather be the household that puts the kettle on than the household that gets in the car.

Start with the free register. Then buy something you can lift.

Remember, keep calm and visit us here.