About The Water Gap

A water gap is the distance between what your household has and what it needs. Every calculator here measures some version of it, and the audit is named for closing it.

What this site is

A set of calculators and guides for households preparing for a water interruption. Not a well, not an acreage, not a fourteen thousand dollar construction budget. An apartment or a suburban house, a few hundred dollars, and a specific worry.

That framing matters because most of what has been written for this audience assumes land and money. The rest assumes you want to be frightened. Neither is much use at eleven at night when the boil notice has just gone out and you are trying to work out whether what is in the pantry gets four people through the weekend.

How the numbers get made

This is the part worth judging us on, and it is deliberately open to inspection.

Every calculator shows its formula. Every figure names the source it came from and the date that source was last checked. Where guidance varies by bleach concentration, by elevation, by humidity, we ask for yours instead of publishing an average that fits nobody.

Sources run in a fixed order: federal and state agencies first, then university extension services, then manufacturer specifications cited as manufacturer claims rather than as fact, then published research, then community reports used for what actually goes wrong and never as the basis for a dose. Where two credible sources disagree, both get shown.

The full detail is on the methodology page, including what we refuse to calculate and why.

Where the numbers come from today

Right now, everything on this site is built from agency guidance, statute text read directly, and published specifications. None of it rests on our own measurements yet.

That is worth saying plainly rather than implying otherwise, because the plan is to change it. The gap in this category is that nobody publishes independent output data. Atmospheric water generator manufacturers quote a single figure at roughly 80% relative humidity and never show the curve underneath it. Well drilling companies do not publish payback calculations that recommend against drilling. Filter makers publish capacity ratings and not failure modes.

As original testing gets done, it will appear here with the conditions it was measured under, and the pages that rely on it will say so. Until then, the pages say what they actually rest on.

Published under the project name

This site publishes under The Water Gap rather than a personal byline. What we think you are owed instead is the thing a name would only be a proxy for: visible arithmetic, named sources with dates, a plain statement of what each method fails to do, and a correction policy that leaves a record.

Judge the work. If a number here does not survive being checked against CDC or your state health department, that is a real problem regardless of whose name sits on top of it, and we would rather hear about it than have it stand.

What this site will not do

The offers this audience gets sold run on fear. Leaked files, suppressed technology, an industry supposedly in a panic. You will not find that here, and it is a position rather than a matter of taste.

Fear sells a product once, and it makes every number on the page suspect afterward. A site willing to manufacture urgency is a site willing to manufacture a dose. This one shows its arithmetic instead, including on the occasions when the arithmetic says you do not need to buy anything at all.

Some pages carry affiliate links, disclosed where they appear. No calculator result changes based on what it could earn. An atmospheric water generator is a poor purchase at 30% humidity, and the tool says so on a page that links to atmospheric water generators.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, tell us. It gets fixed, and the page carries a note saying what changed and when.

Nothing gets revised quietly. A site whose entire argument is that you should check its work does not get to edit its own history.

Corrections, questions and source challenges: corrections@thewatergap.com