Two new survival tips I learned.

A couple of new survival tips I recently learned.

If electricity goes out (storms, attack on the grid, whatever) & you don't have a woodstove/fireplace here is how you can keep warm:

Heat!
Start a fire outside.(use dryer lint to help start it) Heat large rocks on fire, bring inside and put in large pots or crocks to heat a room. It is a safe way of heating without fear of CO or catching fire. If you all stay in a small room, body heat and a small source of heat is enough to survive.

Water!
If you have your own well on your property the pump will go off when electricity is down. You can basically create your own "well bucket" by using
pvc pipe closed off on one end, drop it down into the opened well cap and bring it back up filled. I saw a video selling a gadget to do this for a lot of $$$ It looks very simple to make yourself. If you don't have your own well, you really need to think about water as your #1 priority during a SHTF scenario.

Last winter I cut some wild honeysuckle switches, and brought inside to force them to bloom. I had a huge vase filled with water. So here is what shocked me. I had those switches in there a good two months or so. The water never spoiled, never got mold/murky. It was as crystal clear at the end of the two months as the first day. I learned Some plants/bushes/reeds are very good at purifying water. Some can even clean e coli and heavy metals.

This sounds weird, but a great way to learn about survival is to watch videos on how third world people live and cook. It is very eye opening.

Something to add for heat in a small room.

Put a sheet and or blanket over all the doors, windows or any other openings. This will keep the cold air from drafting into the room and will allow the room to stay warmer. Also, if you have a basement with rooms, you can stay even warmer. That's because underground, it is much warmer. especially with a finished insulated basement. Just make sure the windows are covered with plastic, a sheet or a blanket.

a reply to: JAGStorm

Heat! Start a fire outside.(use dryer lint to help start it) Heat large rocks on fire, bring inside and put in large pots or crocks to heat a room. It is a safe way of heating without fear of CO or catching fire. If you all stay in a small room, body heat and a small source of heat is enough to survive.

Funnily enough, I was looking for a way to heat my polish Lavvu canvas tent without dying from carbon monoxide or smoke inhalation and finally settled on the idea you mention above. Hot Rocks in a large metal vessel.

I have had one of these...
kicking around for a wee while wondering what it could be used for. I think i may have now found a solution to the heated lavvu problem.

Cheers.

a reply to: Soloprotocol

I read something about burying the hot rocks in the ground and they will give off heat for a long time too.
Stay warm in your little tent!

BTW, another tip, I learned this in an actual emergency situation (kept us warm for two weeks with no power). Heat water (not boiling) fill up plastic containers and put it in with your bedding. It is incredibly warm!

a reply to: JAGStorm

You are right about water. Large cities will be the worse.

There are lots of water well solutions for pumping well less than 100 feet deep. Fewer for wells between 100 and 300 ft deep. And none that I know of for really deep water wells. Lots of folks have 300 to 500 ft deep wells. Solar powered pumps will pump those depths but $$$$$$.

originally posted by: whywhynot
a reply to: JAGStorm

You are right about water. Large cities will be the worse.

There are lots of water well solutions for pumping well less than 100 feet deep. Fewer for wells between 100 and 300 ft deep. And none that I know of for really deep water wells. Lots of folks have 300 to 500 ft deep wells. Solar powered pumps will pump those depths but $$$$$$.

We have a kitchen wood cookstove. It needs filling every forty five minutes, one small block of firewood lasts that long. The stove will heat our two thousand square foot house to seventy degrees with no problem, except for the basement that is, that does go down to about forty degrees and there are pipes down there. By the outside walls it gets colder than that so freezing pipes could be a problem. Heating bricks in the oven can be a good way of heating the bed, they used to do that in the old days. Heat them then roll them in a cotten towel and put it in the bed to warm it up, switching to a new one an hour later when you are getting ready to go to bed.

The block of wood only lasts thirty five minutes when it gets below zero here but still heats the house. Draft increases the colder it gets outside, but the stove also puts out more heat. No creasote in the chimney from the stove, a little dust of soot is all we get.

For washing dishes, you can melt snow. If you want ice to maintain the freezers, melt the snow in a bucket on the stove then put the water into plastic milk jugs three quarters full and put them back outside to turn to ice. Then put the ice into the freezer or fridge to keep the stuff cold. We have a well, we can get drinking water if necessary from the well. It is two twenty volt, so I have to use the generator to run it or I can just open the valve in the basement and it will drain out because the water level is higher than the intake pipe in the well, when the well digger was welding the flange on he had to use a plug in the well so it would not keep flowing out of the hole.

Keeping salt on hand to salt our meat for preservation is a good practice, we keep about thirty pounds of pickling salt on hand for that. Corned beef may be salty, but it is good. We also have about three or four gallons of vinegar in stock, but it is in plastic jugs, I would rather get the glass jugs but I haven't been able to find glass gallons here, glass gallons last for years, no leaching of endocrine disruptors occurs. Someday we will find the glass gallons, the vinegar is usually higher quality and tastes better in those too.

I asked some old timers how they did it in the old days. If the woodstove goes out, having a rock wall around the chimney or having some stone around the fireplace keeps the place warm for a lot longer time. You can put rocks under the woodstove too, that creates a heat sink, but beware, some rocks explode, know your rocks.

.

a reply to: rickymouse

but beware, some rocks explode, know your rocks.

Excellent point! Don't use river rock or soft layered rocks,
Look for hard rocks like granite/marble etc. If rocks are wet, slowly heat them.

originally posted by: whywhynot
a reply to: JAGStorm

You are right about water. Large cities will be the worse.

There are lots of water well solutions for pumping well less than 100 feet deep. Fewer for wells between 100 and 300 ft deep. And none that I know of for really deep water wells. Lots of folks have 300 to 500 ft deep wells. Solar powered pumps will pump those depths but $$$$$$.

All you really need is an exercise bike hooked up to a pump then to the pipe with shut off valves to isolate it.

If you dig half buried rocks out of the ground to put around the fire they often pop and throw out sharp stone chunks. It would be good if you wanted to make a knife to cut something though, they break off sharp. A piece of flying sharp rock could cut you, I have found some flaked rock knives here and tried using them to cut meat and they work as well as my best knife. most of the old flaked rocks are dull but I did find a few sharp ones.

Rubbing a few crystal stones together can make some dull red sparks, I was able to start some fuzz on fire doing that. Quartzite works well for that, so do a couple of other types of crystals. You can't put those stones around the fire though, they blow up.

a reply to: JAGStorm
Be careful with the rocks you choose, sedimentary rocks have air gaps and can explode with dire results. I've seen it happen.
Igneous for the win.

a reply to: JAGStorm

In addition to using water in bed, which is basically the old style rubber hot water bottles, that many people used in the grand old days to keep warm. You can also layer the inside of your clothing with newspaper. Newspaper is an excellent form of insulation when addition clothing isn't available.

originally posted by: JAGStorm

originally posted by: whywhynot
a reply to: JAGStorm

You are right about water. Large cities will be the worse.

There are lots of water well solutions for pumping well less than 100 feet deep. Fewer for wells between 100 and 300 ft deep. And none that I know of for really deep water wells. Lots of folks have 300 to 500 ft deep wells. Solar powered pumps will pump those depths but $$$$$$.

Well that’s nice but the video says the well is 10 ft deep. And, there is no well pump in it.

Try one like I said that is 300 to 500 ft deep with and installed pump.
If you had 500 ft of rope imagine pulling it up from that depth to get a couple gallons of water. And firstly you need to remove 1,000 pounds of pump and pipe.

originally posted by: rickymouse

originally posted by: whywhynot
a reply to: JAGStorm

You are right about water. Large cities will be the worse.

There are lots of water well solutions for pumping well less than 100 feet deep. Fewer for wells between 100 and 300 ft deep. And none that I know of for really deep water wells. Lots of folks have 300 to 500 ft deep wells. Solar powered pumps will pump those depths but $$$$$$.

All you really need is an exercise bike hooked up to a pump then to the pipe with shut off valves to isolate it.

How exactly do you hook the exercise bike up to a pump that is 300 ft in the well?

a reply to: whywhynot

Try one like I said that is 300 to 500 ft deep with and installed pump. If you had 500 ft of rope imagine pulling it up from that depth to get a couple gallons of water. And firstly you need to remove 1,000 pounds of pump and pipe

From what i've seen you don't remove the pipe. You remove the well cap, and leave the pipe in and lower the smaller pipe into the bigger pipe until you hit water.

I'm sure you could rig up some kind of pulley system for the smaller pipe too (just like old well buckets). The one video I watched said you could bring up about half a gallon at a time. I imagine this would be good for emergency drinking use. You could pull it up a couple of times.

Besides 3rd world people there's much to learn from modern homeless as well as aboriginal people worldwide. I had occasion to use many survival tips during an ice storm that knocked out power and made the roads impassable for a solid week. I had moved our family to a house in the mountains when the storm struck our first December there. We used wood heat and ran out before we could get more delivered. I did not own a working chainsaw at the time either.

The ice was so thick it didn't break when you stood on it and you had to punch your feet through it just to get around. Fortunately, the weight of the ice which coated everything with over an inch brought down many dead limbs, I had to knock the ice off with an axe before cutting to length with a bow saw. It was exhausting just trying to get enough wood as temperatures got down around zero.

To top it off my wife had a bad flu and my sons were too young to be very helpful. Luckily I had memorized where I could find yarrow, wintergreen, mullein rosettes and wild rose hips which I brewed a medicinal tea from. Everything but the rose hips were buried under ice and had to be dug up. The tea worked very well I was pleased to discover.

The last issue was our freezer was slowly thawing everything out including most of a deer and some small game. We cooked everything up on top of the woodstove then made an ice box outside with a plywood cover. We awoke one morning to find everything gone, eaten by a very hungry black bear and cub. There went 6 months worth of meat.

I didn't use it much but i did buy a gas chainsaw after that. i was trying to do everything including cutting the grass and wood using only human powered tools. The silence brought on by the storm was amazing once the crashing of trees stopped. I was sort of disappointed when the power popped back on and we could once again drive down the road.

a reply to: rickymouse

Just find gallon sized glass containers and pour the plastic ones in.

originally posted by: whywhynot

originally posted by: rickymouse

originally posted by: whywhynot
a reply to: JAGStorm

You are right about water. Large cities will be the worse.

There are lots of water well solutions for pumping well less than 100 feet deep. Fewer for wells between 100 and 300 ft deep. And none that I know of for really deep water wells. Lots of folks have 300 to 500 ft deep wells. Solar powered pumps will pump those depths but $$$$$$.

All you really need is an exercise bike hooked up to a pump then to the pipe with shut off valves to isolate it.

How exactly do you hook the exercise bike up to a pump that is 300 ft in the well?

You hook a different pump with hoses to the tank drain then isolate the tank by shutting it off above the tank. Open the valve and start peddling the bike with a belt around the rim and around the pump pully. With the checkvalve in the well, there probably will not be any priming necessary to get it started. I do not know if the thing will pull through the pump, it may be necessary to release the pump from the seat on the pipe connector where it goes through the casing and stick another pipe going down if there is not enough water. In my case, there is water covering the fitting, almost artesian, so I would only need to lift it and hang it to get water. My pump is down thirty feet, the well is seventy feet, the water in my well is down about three feet from the surface.

originally posted by: lysacid
a reply to: rickymouse

Just find gallon sized glass containers and pour the plastic ones in.

I got some gallon glass bottles for water in case the power goes out, they were wine bottles. The water smells like wine even though I cleaned them out thoroughly. I suppose wine smell in the vinegar might not be that bad.

They want a lot of money for one gallon glass bottles, most of our storage water for two or three day outages is in half gallon bottles from milk, they actually work good. They charge a two dollar deposit on them, we have maybe eighteen of those in rotation and two five gallon plastic water storage containers. We also have three gallon glass wine jugs but they are not so good smelling, but we need dishwater too.

a reply to: rickymouse

Sounds like, with your system, it could work. However, it would not work on a well with a water level greater than about 30 ft.