You had better hope your pressure tank DOESN'T fill up. That would
mean it has an air leak and your well pump would run continuously.

Yep, good point. I should have said the tank had reached it's upper cutoff
point ("full").

When our well pump died several years ago, we bought a bunch of 5
gallon plastic water cans to supplement the one can we had for camping
trips.

That's sounding more and more like the most reasonable and cost effective
solution.

You do have a pickup, don't you?

Nope, just a couple of small VW cars. As long as the snow plow can make it
up the hill, we can make it out.

Your outages can't be as long as we had in Issaquah, Wa in 1994.
More than a week.

We rarely have more than one or two outages a year, and those are usually
just a few hours at most. The ones this year were actually longer than we
typically have. However, I think it was about the same time frame as you
that our power went out for close to a week. We had no backup heat at that
time, which made for a rough week.

Anthony Watson
www.mountainsoftware.com
www.watsondiy.com