A Great Deal on Emergency Food and a Water Filter
Also: Why preppers love big water filters.
MyPatriotSupply currently has a fantastic deal: if you buy a three-month supply of Ready Hour emergency food, they’re throwing in an Alexapure Pro water filter for free — a $279.95 value. This deal is only good through July 29th. They’re also selling the Alexapure Pro by itself for $199.95, $80 off the usual price.
Usually, we steer readers away from these prepackaged survival buckets. You can put together your own emergency bucket with 46,590 calories for just under $50. However, for folks that have a little extra money to burn and just want to get some food in storage, you could do a lot worse than the Ready Hour buckets, especially when they’re on sale.
Also, the foods are already prepacked for maximum shelf life, which saves you the time and hassle of vacuum sealing or Mylar bagging. Out of the box (er, bucket), they can sit on the shelf for 25 years. And you get more variety than with our buckets of beans, rice, and fat: entrees like mac and cheese, chicken rice, stroganoff, etc1. Of course, these food kits always include some lame additions like plain white rice and mystery orange drink, which give you calories but aren’t terribly satisfying.
Note that these buckets have enough food to last three months for one person. The total calorie count is 182,360. Assuming 2,000 calories per day per person, it would last two people about 45 days, three people about 30 days, and so on.
Per calorie, both the Unprepared food bucket and the Ready Hour kit are very cheap and well under a penny per calorie. However, ours is still significantly cheaper:
Ready Hour: ~$0.005 per calorie2
Unprepared: ~$0.0009 per calorie
However, when you factor in the $279.95 MSRP of the Alexapure Pro filter, the total cost per calorie of the three-month Ready Hour supply is ~$0.003 per calorie. Still not quite as cheap as our bucket, but not a bad deal.
Why Preppers Love Big Water Filters
Gravity-fed water filters are a mainstay in prepping communities. These are big metal units with two chambers. The upper chamber holds the filters and it’s also where you pour in your dirty water. The water (slowly) flows into the filters and drips down into the bottom chamber. The bottom chamber has a tap you open to pour the clean water. As the name implies, this is all done through the magic of gravity.
Why are these so popular? Why not use a pitcher filter instead? The simple answer is volume. These big gravity-fed filters hold gallons at a time, while the pitchers only hold a few pints. The Alexapure Pro holds 2.25 gallons. Filtering water takes a long time, and you don’t want to wait hours to pour a glass of water, especially when you’re relying on the filter as your source of potable water.
Water Filter Brands Compared
There are three popular brands: Berkey, Alexapure, and St. Paul Mercantile. The filter bodies come in different sizes but are basically the same. In fact, you can buy one brand of filter body and put another brand of filters in it if you choose.
However, the filters have some key differences in effectiveness. The Berkey filters are very good but don’t filter fluoride without an additional fluoride filter. The St. Paul Mercantile filters are probably the least effective of the three but are still quite good. However, the Alexapure test results are impressive, with a nearly perfect 99.9+% reduction in most contaminants, with 97.6+% effectiveness against fluoride without any additional filter.
I own a St. Paul Mercantile filter, largely because it was the most cost-effective at the time, but if I bought another one, it would probably be an Alexapure, especially if it was on sale.
These usually taste pretty good, but don’t be fooled by ads claiming you’ll have a succulent postapocalyptic gourmet meal. These foods are formulated with calories and shelf life in mind. The flavor is a distant priority.
There’s a lot of rounding here, so the numbers are slightly off.