How Long Will Your Stored Water Last?

Count the polytanks and gallons you have filled and see how many days they last your household when the Tano shutdown cuts the town's water.

What do you have stored right now?

Count what is full. Half a barrel counts as a half.

Polytanks (1,000 litres)

The 1,000-litre size is common on roofs and in yards. If yours is a different size, use the box below instead.

Gallons and jerrycans

Most are 20 litres and some are 25. If yours are 25, count five of them as six.

Another tank or drum, in litres (litres)

The size is usually printed on the side of a tank. A 200-litre drum is 200.

People in the house

Everyone the stored water has to cover.

How much water per person

The level you want to plan for.

The lower end of the range the Sphere Handbook gives for drinking, cooking and the most basic hygiene in an emergency. Sphere intends it for a short time, not as a way to live.

How long does it have to last?

At this level, your water lasts

About 51 hours

That is about 21 hours short of 72 hours.

To stretch the same water across the whole time, the house would have to keep to about 5.3 litres per person a day.

To cover it at this level you would need about 33 litres more.

That is about 1 more polytanks (1,000 litres).

80 litres

Stored altogether

38 litres

The house uses, per day

Per person, per day: 7.5 litres

When the Tano gets too muddy for the treatment plant to clear, GWCL has stopped sending water out for days at a time, and the whole town is dry at once. Radio reports have counted five days in a row. This page works out how long what you have already stored will last the people in your house, and what would stretch it.

Everything is worked out here on your phone from what you type. Nothing you enter leaves this page or is saved.

The same water, at each level

The difference between washing and not washing is the difference between one day and three. All of these use the water you already counted.

Level	Per person, per day	Lasts about
Just the essentialsThe lower end of the range the Sphere Handbook gives for drinking, cooking and the most basic hygiene in an emergency. Sphere intends it for a short time, not as a way to live.	7.5 litres a day	51 hours
Essentials and washing handsThe top of the same Sphere range, and the figure used as the established minimum: drinking, cooking and personal hygiene.	15 litres a day	25 hours
BasicWhat the WHO calls basic access. It covers drinking, cooking and keeping people and food clean, but not much laundry or bathing.	20 litres a day	19 hours
Close to normalWhat the WHO calls intermediate access: bathing and washing clothes at home as well. It is roughly how a household lives when the water is not short.	50 litres a day	7 hours

Worth knowing

A cut from muddy river water reaches the whole town: When the plant stops because of galamsey mud in the Tano, every area is dry together. A neighbour two streets away will not have more water than you do, so the stored water in your own yard is the plan.
Rain is a second store: The rains are heaviest around September and October. A roof can fill a tank in an afternoon; the rainwater page for Techiman works out how much your roof catches.

This page cannot tell you when the water comes back

GWCL does not publish a schedule for these cuts, and nobody can say how long one will last, so this page does not guess. The days offered are lengths that have been reported, not predictions.

Is the water off in your area? →

These are estimates

These are estimates. They use published figures for litres per person per day, and real use changes with the weather, with children and animals in the house, and with laundry or washing a floor.

Arithmetic, not health advice

This page divides the water you counted by published per-person figures. It says nothing about whether stored water is safe to drink — that depends on the container, how long it has stood and what was in it, and it is a question for the water authority or a health service, not for this page.

Official pages

Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL) takes calls free, at any hour, on 0800 40000. You can text 1700 to report a burst pipe.

GWCL — contact usToll-free 0800 40000, 24 hours.

About these tools

Town Tools builds free, public tools for Techiman and towns around the world. AI researches each place from local sources and keeps the tools up to date; residents suggest new ones and report corrections.