Miguel talks about his hurricane kit. We have the storm kit.
The first thing we did in deciding what was needed for our storm kit was to determine what we were likely to experience, and under what circumstances.
There are three possible causes, winter storm, summer storm, social unrest.
The most likely is the winter storm. Summer storms are not as bad, in general.
Using the rule of threes, the first thing on the list is medical for a winter storm.
We have all of our medications at hand. Losing power doesn’t change that.
A massive part of the first requirement is hygiene. That is the ability to clean ourselves, clean our clothing, and to use the toilet.
If we can heat water, which we can, then we can clean ourselves. We have a propane gas kitchen stove, we have a propane burner for heating big pots of water, and we have wood to burn to make heat for heating water.
That would be enough for sponge baths. We also have solar chargers and a battery-powered shower unit. Fill a five gallon bucket with hot water. Drop the intake into the bucket. Press the button and hot water comes out the hand-held shower head.
Learn to take ship showers and 5 gals is more than enough.
We collect that water for flushing the toilet. We live at the top of a hill. There is enough “down hill” flow that we would not have to worry about back flow from the sewer lines. As mean and nasty as it might be, I know that there are houses down stream from us that would back flow, long before that shit got to us.
We have a manual washing station for clothing. Half fill a five gallon bucket with warm water, add a bit of wash soap. Use the plunger, agitator. 30 to 45 minutes of work later, you have clean clothes. We don’t have an easy way to get the water out, so that would be done manually. Painful, but not a showstopper.
We buy soap bars in bulk. I happen to use shampoo bars, which have great shelf life and are small. We have wash soap and can make more if needed. We’ve made soap in the past and can make more if needed.
In other words, some five gallon buckets, a recharging method, and a battery-powered shower head gives us our hygiene.
Our next item is shelter.
The power goes out! Everybody grab their Get Out Of Dodge Expeditiously (G.O.O.D.E) bag! We are going to live in the woods until the power comes back.
DOH! That’s not how it works. The best shelter we have is our home. It is water tight, wind tight, and insulated.
We still require some heat, but not as much as we would if we were outside in the elements.
First, we have convenient heaters. That is to say, we have both propane and kerosene indoor safe heaters. The kerosene puts out enough BTUs to heat most of the lower living area. It burns for about 10 hours on one fill.
The propane puts out heat, but I don’t like it. It is just another source of heat, if we needed it, from an alternative fuel.
We then have the wood stove. That is a primary heating method.
Finally, we have an H45 military heater. If I needed to use it, I would take the wood stove out of production to use its thimble for the H45. This thing will burn almost any sort of liquid fuel. In a worse case situation, I could pull fuel from the furnace fuel tank to run this thing.
Next in the rule of threes is water. We normally have 10 gallons of water in water cubes, ready to use in an emergency. We have the hot water tank for secondary needs. We have multiple large containers for gathering water in other ways. There is normally plenty of snow during the winter and there is the lake when it is not frozen.
The takeaway from this is that we have water, we can get water, we can filter the water to make it potable.
We have a couple of 250 gallon tanks that I’m going to setup for catching rain water. Those can be used for a source of water as well.
Food, we have lots of food put away. We can cook it on the stove, we can cook over a fire, it is easy enough to do. We have yeast and flour as well as wheat berries.
This is Hagar’s bread from the weekend. She made it at a 1700s even at a living museum. She baked it in a Dutch oven.
For tools, we have things that require power, but for the most part, we have backups that are manual and we have used all those tools.
You have to use the tools to know what they can and cannot do. As well as what you can, and cannot do.
My daughter gave me a hand generator to charge USB devices. It works. I can’t even put a 10 minute charge on my phone. My phone consumes more power than I can generate per unit time. On the other hand, the solar chargers do work.
