The next installment in our Heat and Light series is Making a simple Emergency Stove from Household Materials. This stove is capable of boiling water in less than 10 minutes and is very easy to use and re-use. The materials required to make it can commonly be found in the home and should be stored in your preps. Required are: Paraffin Wax, cardboard and a couple tin cans. Continue reading “How to Make an Emergency Stove from Common Materials”
Making Fire Starting Wafer Candles
The next project in my Heat and Light series is Making Fire Starting Wafers out of reclaimed materials mostly available at home. These wafer candles don’t have the same burn time (but it’s plenty long enough to get a fire going) as the egg carton candles but they have a much smaller footprint. This project will again be familiar to most Boy Scouts and long term Preppers and Outdoorsmen. However, the purpose of this series is to get back to basics and review how to generate light and heat with common household projects. As has been mentioned in the comments on the other posts in this series, you can use old candles or other wax sources instead of the new bars of paraffin I use in the demonstration.
Making Fire Starting Candles
Continuing my series on Light and Heat, today I’m going to talk about making Fire Starting Candles. There are a variety of ways to do this, today we’re going to cover using cardboard egg cartons and dryer lint or cotton balls. This particular project will likely already be familiar to experienced Preppers and Boy Scouts. This post is aimed at those new to prepping who have never been exposed to this kind of thing.
Being able to start a fire is absolutely critical in many potential situations. It can literally mean the difference between life and death. Knowing many ways to be able to start a fire is an essential survival skill, practicing and maintaining those skills is just as essential. Continue reading “Making Fire Starting Candles”
Making Tallow Candles
One of the things that frustrates me in Preparedness is that many of the texts and resources out there don’t adequately cover “Pioneer Skills”. That is to say, they present material lists and instructions that include things that are only available via modern-day manufacturing methods. Often times what I’m looking for is how do I make something out of nothing – nothing being the great abundance that nature provides us with! This is very true when it comes to activities like candle, cheese and soap making. I want to know how to do it in a true collapse or long term survival scenario. Continue reading “Making Tallow Candles”
Bug out/Camping/Utility Trailer
I’ve been wanting to get out camping more often, but I suspect like many have had trouble convincing my wife to give camping a try. For some reason, sleeping on the hard, cold ground doesn’t appeal to her.
Buying a dedicated camper, pop-up tent, RV would be nice, but they are generally more than I want to spend, are single purpose and often require separate registration here in Utah. I often find a need for a small utility trailer for hauling mulch, compost, etc. and here in Utah, smaller trailers under a certain weight and size don’t need to be registered. When I obtained an old home built utility trailer recently, I decided to jump head first into a home built adventure trailer build.
Continue reading “Bug out/Camping/Utility Trailer”
Got Chickens?
According to a recent article on KSL.com many Utah cities and counties are considering or allowing residents have backyard chickens. Most likely you’ll need to verify with your city hall. Many places allow hens, but not roosters so make sure you check up on that.
If you have the space for chickens they provide a nice source of fresh eggs and meat (if you have a rooster). How many of you have chickens or are considering it? I really want to get some, but can’t in my current place. For those that have them what has been your experience?
2 Food Storage Classes in Spanish Fork, April 15th
There will be two classes on Food Storage taught in Spanish Fork on Thursday evening.
Debbie Kent lives in the Southern California. She has been married for 30 years. She and her husband are the proud parents of 6 beautiful children, and grandparents of 3. She has been an advocate of food storage and emergency preparedness since her early teen age years. She enjoys giving emergency preparedness lessons each month at her church. Much of the resources found on this website are the culmination of hours of preparation for these lessons. She sincerely hopes that in sharing this information, other’s may benefit from her efforts. http://peaceofpreparedness.com/
Spanish Fork, April 15th, 2 classes by Debbie Kent
Continue reading “2 Food Storage Classes in Spanish Fork, April 15th”
Got Old Oil in Your Food Storage in Utah or Southern Idaho?
Want to donate some to a study on food storage oils at BYU? I love food storage experiments, so you know I’m letting them have some of my old stuff. If you’d like to help out the oil study, see the details here. They are looking for vegetable oils that have been in food storage 6 months to 5 years. Right now my oldest oil in storage is only 2 1/2 years old. Bummer. I’ve had older stuff before I would have loved to donate. Anyway, contact Ann Saunders at BYU if you’ve got some old oil they can experiment on. :)
Preparedness Christmas: 25% off on Sanitation Preps
Coupon Code: prepxmas
How are your Sanitation Preps? Do you have a bucket toilet lid sitting around? Or one of those portable toilets? That’s what I had until recently. A few weeks ago I learned about a set of sanitation products that, when used together, provide preppers with a toilet solution that equals no mess, low smell and biodegrades all your waste for you! Through a set of fortuitous events, I was in a position to arrange a group buy of 25% off all of their products and offer it to all preppers for Christmas.
Their system is called the GottaGo Toilet system. It’s basically a cardboard disposable (after about 100 uses) emergency toilet that uses biodegradable bags and a microbial sand. Once you’ve filled up a bag you can dig a hole and bury the bag – yes, bury it – within 30 – 90 days it will be completely broken down. You can also burn your toilet once you’re done with it. Basically you can go on a family campout and have everyone use this toilet system and not have to carry any of it home to dispose of it. Continue reading “Preparedness Christmas: 25% off on Sanitation Preps”
Preparedness Stocking Stuffer Swap
You all know Christmas is coming. If your house is anything like mine, you’ve got stockings to fill, and usually Santa is a little more sparse on the grown-ups stockings. Do you stuff your own? Use a sticky note to remind your Santa not to forget the stocking? End up with stuff in there that you really don’t want or need? Of course I’ve never had any of those happen, I’m just asking ;)
Anyway, this year, I thought I’d have a little stocking stuffer fun, so I am hosting a preparedness stocking stuffer swap over at my blog. If you are interested in giving and receiving some fun preparedness/self reliance related stocking stuffers this year, please join in the fun. Here’s the basics: I will assign each participant a new friend for whom they will prepare and ship a stocking full of prep related goodies. And another new friend will be shipping goodies to you. How fun is that? And if your Santa is really on the ball and already stuffs your stocking, you can just call it a preparedness gift exchange. :)
Financial Preparedness – MUST be built in GOOD times!
Everyone knows times are not good and although we’re told they’re getting better – they clearly seem to be getting worse. I’ve recently had an experience that has severely highlighted financial preparedness for me, I’d like to share the lessons I’ve learned in the hope that others can avoid my current situation – allow me to give you some background:
The company I’ve been working for was financially stable – strong even – several months ago. We weren’t worried about the economic crunch and were certain we’d move through it. My wife and I had a financial reserve that we were actively growing, but not aggressively. Certainly not as aggressively as we could have been. In fact, we had become fairly complacent in adding to it. While our long term food storage was fully stocked, we live off our 3 month supply and rotate through it – replenishing monthly or so.
Continue reading “Financial Preparedness – MUST be built in GOOD times!”
Survival Movie Review: 2012
Last night a few prepper friends and I went to the midnight opening show of the new survival/TEOTWAWKI movie 2012. I wasn’t sure what to expect as I had already heard that they had blown it or that it was really bad. But I figured even a bad movie can be enjoyed (through mocking) if you’ve got a group of friends with you!
2012 really has very little to do with survival. You won’t walk out of it with ideas or inspiration of things to add to your preps. In fact, the scenario that the movie presents is pretty much total un-survivable destruction regardless of who or where you are. It is however a bit about surviving based on your wits with 20 gallons of luck!