Buy in this order. Nothing here is exciting.
The atlas models ten catastrophes. This page is about the one that actually happens to you: the power goes out for four days, or the water main breaks, or the smoke rolls in, or the road closes. Everything is ranked by expected value, which means how often it pays out multiplied by how much it matters when it does. The bunker is at the bottom for a reason.
Water
Target spend $180 to $450First because the clock is shortest. Three days without water, weeks without food. A boil notice happens to millions of Americans every year and a filter that serves a household costs less than a weekend away. Storage before filtration: a filter with nothing to filter is an ornament.
Gravity filter, household scale
Filters for a group with no power and no pumping. Rated in thousands of liters, not hundreds. The single highest expected-value purchase on this page and the one most people skip in favor of a personal straw that filters for one.
Stackable water storage
Fifteen gallons per person is a week. Stackable containers beat one big drum because you can move them, and a bath bladder is $30 and fills in the ninety seconds you have before pressure fails.
Water test kit
Tells you whether the well or the stream is worth filtering and whether your filter is still working. Twenty dollars of information that changes what you do.
Rainwater capture
Roof area times annual rainfall is a bigger number than people expect. A 150 square meter roof in a 600 mm rainfall year sheds about 90,000 liters. Check your local rules first, because a few places restrict it.
Heat one room
Target spend $150 to $900The livability model says heating load is the largest recurring cost of living anywhere cold, and in a multi-day winter outage it is what kills people. The goal is one warm room, not a warm house. Insulating and sealing that room is cheaper than any machine you could buy to heat the whole building.
Indoor-rated propane heater
Oxygen-depletion sensor and tip-over shutoff, which is what makes it indoor-rated. Heats one room off a 1 lb or 20 lb cylinder. Buy the hose and filter with it, not later.
Carbon monoxide alarm
Non-negotiable with any combustion heater, and the cheapest item on this entire page. Battery, not mains, because the scenario you bought the heater for is the one with no mains.
Insulation and sealing for one room
Window film, draft excluders, a heavy curtain, foam tape. Under $150 and it cuts the heat you need to make by a third. The cheapest kilowatt-hour is the one you never generate.
Sleeping bags rated below your worst night
A bag rated to −7 C is a heating system that needs no fuel and never fails. Rate it to your actual record low, not your average January.
Power
Target spend $300 to $2,400Not to run the house. To run a fridge of medication, a CPAP, a phone, a light and a radio. Size it to the things that matter, not to the panel. A 1 kWh station covers most households' critical load for a day, and a folding panel makes it indefinite where the solar resource is decent.
Portable power station, 1 to 2 kWh
LiFePO4 chemistry, which lasts several thousand cycles instead of several hundred. Check it can pass through while charging and that the output handles your fridge's surge.
Folding solar panel, 100 to 400 W
Turns a battery into a supply. The atlas gives the solar resource for any point on Earth in kWh per square meter per day. Below about 3.0 you need a lot more panel than the box suggests.
Hand-crank weather radio
NOAA weather band, AM, FM and a USB output. Costs less than a tank of fuel and is how you find out what is actually happening when the network is down.
Fuel storage and stabiliser
If you own a generator and no fuel, you own a heavy sculpture. Gasoline degrades in three to six months without stabiliser. Store it legally and rotate it through the car.
Food, ninety days
Target spend $250 to $900Ninety days is the honest target for everything except an engineered pathogen. Buy food you already eat and rotate it, because the freeze-dried bucket you never open is a bucket you never checked. Calorie density beats variety, and fat beats everything on a per-kilo basis.
Staples you already cook
Rice, beans, oats, oil, salt, sugar, tinned fish. A year of calories for a family costs a few hundred dollars in this form and roughly ten times that as branded emergency food.
Freeze-dried, as the top-up
Twenty-five year shelf life and no rotation, which is what you are paying for. Worth it for the go-bag and the last thirty days, not for the first sixty.
A way to cook without the grid
Dry beans need ninety minutes of heat. Check you own the means to apply it, because a pantry you cannot cook is a pantry of raw material.
Seed, if you have ground
Worthless for ninety days and decisive after. The atlas gives frost-free days for any point, which is the number that decides whether you eat what you grow or merely garnish with it.
Things that tell you what is true
Target spend $200 to $600The cheapest way to make a good decision is to measure instead of guess. A survey meter is the single most under-owned item in preparedness. Without one, the decision to come out of shelter is a date on a wall. With one, it is a reading taken twice, twelve hours apart.
Radiation survey meter or dosimeter
Turns the 7:10 rule from a table into your actual schedule. Also the item a shelter is most likely to admit you for, because they need one and almost nobody brings one.
Satellite messenger
Works where the towers do not. Two-way text and an SOS from anywhere with sky. Hardware plus a subscription, so price the second year too.
GMRS handhelds and a license
The contingency tier of a PACE plan: no infrastructure, a few kilometers in terrain, more from elevation. One US license covers a whole family for ten years with no exam.
Air quality monitor and HEPA
Wildfire smoke is now an annual event across most of the temperate world, and it is the hazard on this page you are most likely to meet this year.
Medical
Target spend $150 to $500The most common serious gap is the least dramatic one: a month of the prescription somebody in the house cannot go without. Fill that first, then buy trauma capability, then learn to use it. Equipment without training is theater.
An extra month of prescriptions
Ask about a 90-day fill or a vacation override. Costs a co-pay and closes the single most common fatal gap in household preparedness. Free to ask.
Trauma kit
Tourniquet, pressure dressing, chest seals, gloves, shears. Buy CAT or SOF-T tourniquets from a real supplier, because the cheap copies fail under load.
A Stop the Bleed class
Usually free, usually two hours, and it is the difference between owning a tourniquet and being able to use one on someone who is bleeding.
Reference that works with no signal
Printed, because the scenario is the one where you cannot look it up. The first is free to download and worth printing.
What we are not selling you
Target spend $0A bunker, before the six sections above
Shelters run from $25,000 to $10,000,000 and the whole bunker segment is forecast at about $175 million by 2030, against $11 billion spent annually on preparedness overall. The money is in water, food, power and medical because that is where the events are. If you have done everything above and still want depth, that is a different conversation and we are happy to have it.
An ammunition-first load-out
The systematic review evidence runs the other way. Post-disaster looting is rare and done by isolated individuals, while 70 to 90 percent of an affected population reports hearing looting stories. High social capital predicts household recovery better than wealth or damage severity. Spend the money on things your neighbors will want to trade for and skills they will want to borrow.
Precious metals as a first purchase
Cash works for about two weeks and metal works after that, which means metal is a year-three asset. If you own no water filter and a tube of silver, you have solved the wrong problem in the wrong order.
Anything sold on a countdown timer
Manufactured urgency is the tell. The events on this page have no launch date and no discount window, and a seller who implies otherwise is selling you the feeling rather than the thing.
The whole thing on one line
| Order | What | Spend | How often it pays out |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Water storage and a gravity filter | $180–450 | Every boil notice, every outage, every year |
| 2 | One warm room and a CO alarm | $150–900 | Every winter outage |
| 3 | 1–2 kWh of power and a panel | $300–2,400 | Every outage over a few hours |
| 4 | Ninety days of food you eat anyway | $250–900 | Every supply disruption, every job loss |
| 5 | Instruments: meter, radio, air quality | $200–600 | Every smoke season, and once in a lifetime |
| 6 | Prescriptions, trauma kit, a class | $150–500 | Roadside, kitchen, workshop. Constantly. |
| — | Everything else | — | After the six above are actually done |
Roughly $1,230 at the low end covers all six categories. That is less than the entry price of a single shelter berth and it addresses the events that have a real annual probability of happening to you.