Self-Sufficiency

Turn off your power for a week… what would you learn?

So, you are sitting in your climate controlled home, with lights, refrigerators, freezers, air conditioners, heaters, fans, TVs, computers, home theater systems, running water, sanitary systems and all the other things that go along with modern life. Now, go into your garage, or whatever room where your power panel resides and shut off the main switch. Now walk through your home, look around at all the electronic appliances and gadgets that are now nothing more than lumps of worthless metal and electronics. Now imagine how you would live if none of these things came back on? What if this was not just your home but your neighborhood? City? Country? World? Sounds drastic doesn’t it? Could you live, could you survive without all of these electronics being powered from the grid?…

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How about now?

 

I am so saddened by the aftermath of the big storm that hit the north east part of the USA. This is so apropos to what I have been writing about lately, namely prepping on a budget. I have to wonder how many people were really prepared for this storm, how many had food, water, fuel, batteries and such……

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Prepping on a budget, part 3 – food storage and security

 

 

Now that you have decided to start putting aside some food, you might be thinking “Where am I going to keep all of this food and other stuff?” Hopefully you have lots of extra space, an extra bedroom, or a big kitchen with a pantry and lots of cabinets…  or if you are like many of us, space is at a premium and you will have to be creative about how and where you store your preps.…

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Community

Keeping it real – keeping it warm

Fall is here, that means winter is just around the proverbial corner. For most of us, that means having to keep our homes warm in some manner. For us, that means using our wood burning stove that PB designed and built himself when we lived back in the city and had access to a friend’s metal shop. It’s all made out of 3/16 plate steel with schedule 40 steel pipe for the flue (we aren’t afraid of flue fires). He poured about an inch and a half of refractory cement in the bottom. It serves double duty when I want to cook something on top of it, it makes great tortillas and pizza.  The whole thing weighs in at around 200 pounds, I am still amazed at the fact that PB managed to get it inside the skycastle without any help, up to the second floor (our living space) that didn’t have steps yet, we used a ladder to get in and out.…

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Prepping on a budget, part 2 – book review

While scouring the internet looking for ways to be more self sufficient, I ran across a great (new to me) author, her name is Susan Gregersen. As I dug deeper about Susan, one of the things that really interested me was her very down to earth nature, she writes using everyday language, nothing pretentious here. If you have lots of money to prep with, then this book isn’t for you, but if you are on a tight to impossible budget, like most of us are, then this will be a great book for you.…

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Prepping on a budget, part 1 – food

With prices on everything going up and our earnings going down, many of us are living on the edge, some of us are only one paycheck away from being homeless. Right now, food and supplies for everyday living is readily available, you can walk into any store and find the shelves stocked with food. But you must realize those shelves can be empty in just a matter of hours in any kind of major emergency. These types of emergencies can be on a global scale, solar flares, asteroid or comets impacting the earth, to regional problems such as hurricanes, floods, wildfires, to very local problems, such as a car hitting a power pole knocking out the power for your entire neighborhood… even down to a very personal crisis, like losing your job, being injured and not being able to work, having an unexpected bill. What can you do to help ensure that you will survive?

As I mentioned, grocery stores have stocks of food, right now, but that could change in a heartbeat. It used to be that grocery stores had larger warehouse areas in the back of the store, they received fewer but larger shipments. Now, most stores have at best, a 3 day supply of food in the store, including the stock room in back. They receive multiple shipments a week, but ultimately receive less stocks of food from each one. If anything were to happen to the transportation of these foods, trucks, or trains, or airplanes or ships, then your grocery store will run out of food within about 3 days, that’s IF there isn’t a panic run on food, then you have hours at best. If something happened and you could not leave your home, starting right now, today, how long would it be before you started running out of food? How long before you would be in real trouble? A few days? A week? A couple of weeks? A month?

Today I’ll talk about how to prep in the area of food, even if you are on the tightest of budgets. If you say to me that you cannot afford to put back extra food for emergencies, I will tell you that is precisely WHY you need to do it. If you have extra food, even as little as an extra 2 weeks to a month’s worth of food, then in a financial emergency, such as an unexpected bill, or job loss, you will not have to choose between buying groceries and paying your rent or mortgage.

First you need to decide how much extra you can spend, if you do not have a budget written down, it’s time to do it and see just where your money goes, you might be surprised as to how much waste happens a few dollars here and a few dollars there. I know there are ways you can …

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Self-Sufficiency

Prefabulous + Almost Off the Grid

Even as we own more and more gadgets, and spend increasing amounts of time using them, the average energy consumption in American homes has dropped steadily over the past 30 years thanks to factors like more efficient appliances, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. But for some, a little efficiency isn’t enough. “Prefabulous + Almost Off the Grid” by Sheri Koones ($15.95) profiles more than 30 prefabricated homes that use minimal energy. The name is a taken from a BC company that actually makes prefab eco-homes.

They have features like heavily insulated walls, wastewater-recovery systems and passive heating; one home has a wind turbine on the roof. Prefabrication minimizes waste…

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Community

Freezer to fridge conversion

Living off-grid, I get questions from time to time, mainly about how we live, some even think we must live in a cave and eat dirt and wear skins…  I said I live off-grid, but we don’t live that primitively! :) I do enjoy some of the modern conveniences of life, including having a place to keep perishable foods, aka a refrigerator.

When we first moved off-grid, in Dec ’07, we brought with us a small, dorm sized fridge, but honestly we didn’t use it much, only plugging it up on the occasions when I brought home a gallon of milk or a pound of ground beef, once the perishable food was gone, we unplugged the fridge. What I quickly found out was the standard type of fridge used up a LOT of power and they tend to be very inefficient.…

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Community

How to build an evaporative cooler

I know that for many of us, it’s getting closer to fall, summer will soon be a distant memory… but I am still intrigued when I see innovative ways to cool our homes and ourselves. I found this easy to do DIY evaporative cooler while surfing the internet today. I like the quirky look of the offset holes in the orange 5 gallon bucket, and the industrial look of the curved elbow duct.…

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Community

Whole house vacuum aka Bobbage

PB is such a tinkerer, his ability to take nothing but scraps, often discarded items and make extraordinary and useful things is one of the biggest reasons we have been able to live off-grid while spending very little money, I think of him as my personal MacGuyver. He had been talking about making a whole house vacuum for quite some time now. Normally I really like PB’s inventions, but honestly I wasn’t on board for this one, don’t ask me why, I have no real reason except that I just couldn’t see how it would be better than just running a vac in the sky castle like normal, or could it be the fact that I hate vacuuming? LOL……

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Periogen trial and review

I am finally ready to give Periogen a final review (though there may be followups in the future), I must say that I am very happy with it, it does what it says it does, it is removing the tartar from my teeth.

Living off-grid and making very little money, dental and health insurance is pretty much out of the question, so being proactive about my dental health is something that has really become something important to me. I know that many health issues are directly influenced by the state of your dental health, mainly from bacteria and infections that might be simmering just below the surface.

My dental history:
Growing up, no one of my family went to dentists, it was just too expensive. We must have had pretty good teeth though, none of us had any dental problems or emergencies. When I was 16 years old, we were unceremoniously taken to the dentist for the first time. I have to say, that dentist had a terrible bedside manner, this was my FIRST trip to the dentist, of course I had a tartar buildup, he decided the best thing to do was deride me about it, making rude comments and making me feel very bad. Needless to say, it was many years before I went back to another dentist.

As an adult I decided I needed braces, I had very crooked teeth and knew if I wanted to take better care of them, they needed to be straight, and of course there was a bit of vanity in there too, I wanted to smile without feeling self conscious. Well, 5 years and many many many hundreds and thousands of dollars later, I had straight and healthy teeth.

I loved going to the dentist, not to see my dentist though, I had a great hygienist named Beverly, she really knew me and my mouth. All too soon though, she moved away and I just wasn’t happy with anyone else. No one would spend the time she did, no one would baby me like she did, and I need babying when it comes to my teeth and mouth, I tend to be a major wimp about my mouth. I eventually stopped going to the dentist all together.

Move ahead 15 years and even though I still have pretty good teeth, but I had a major buildup of tartar, I knew this wasn’t a good thing, I worked on it myself from time to time with dental picks but that only got some of the worst buildup, it didn’t do a thing for what was below the gum line and between my teeth. I started looking for products that might help remove tartar, I had even looked at some of those tartar removers for dogs, yes I was that desperate. I know I should go to a dentist, but I already know …

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