72-Hour Kit vs. Stay-at-Home Kit: Which One Do You Actually Need?
A 72-hour (or "go") kit is built to be portable and sustain you for about three days if you need to leave home quickly, prioritizing compact, lightweight, grab-and-go supplies; a stay-at-home kit is built for sheltering in place for a longer period (commonly two weeks or more in official guidance), prioritizing larger quantities of food, water, and backup power over portability — most households benefit from having both, since they're designed for genuinely different scenarios rather than one being simply a smaller version of the other.
Conflating these two kit types is a common source of either under-preparing for a genuine evacuation or over-packing a kit meant to be quickly portable.
When a 72-hour kit is what actually matters
If you might need to evacuate on short notice (a wildfire, a mandatory evacuation order, storm damage forcing you out), a compact, portable kit that covers roughly three days and can be grabbed and carried quickly is the more relevant preparation — bulky, home-sized supplies work against you in this scenario.
When a stay-at-home kit is what actually matters
If the more likely scenario is sheltering in place through an extended outage without needing to leave (a regional storm knocking out power for a week, for example), a larger stay-at-home kit — with more food, water, and backup power capacity, sized using the Power Station Size Calculator for your expected duration — is the more relevant preparation, since portability isn't the priority here.