Update: Added info about Zeolite-water ice makers and re-edited.
When your electricity fails, with it goes your ability to refrigerate. A well-insulated, full refrigerator will keep the perishable contents for perhaps 4 hours with the door kept shut. A full freezer should be fine for 48 hours. See Keeping Food Safe During An Emergency for further recommendations.
So, what can you do if power goes off for days or weeks? Well, you could use a propane refrigerator or if you would prefer to prepare ahead of time and like the notion of both independence and sustainability, you could try building a solar ice maker (pdf).
So you’re tired of hauling ice every morning, but still need to preserve a lot of food. There are methods to preserve food other than freezing or refrigerating, which include canning (the subject of a future post) and dehydrating, otherwise known as drying. Properly dried, food enzymes are deactivated to prevent discolouration, vitamins are preserved, and the moisture content is too low for bacteria or mould to form. Additionally, food becomes much lighter and sees a reduction in volume, making it easier to store. The question is how to dry food effectively?
Electric food dehydrators are available, but their obvious downfall is their reliance on electricity. They are still quite useful in preparing emergency rations for short-term problems like power outages or being house bound due to inclement weather. However, for those looking for a longer-term solution, or a sustainable one, I would suggest a solar food dehydrator.
This particular (pdf) dehydrator has been extensively researched and tested in laboratory studies. With some creativity and common sense I’m sure you can find ways to improve the design for your own use as well. For starters, how about foregoing the expensive stainless steel mesh and simply using off-the-shelf cooling racks instead?
If you’re going to make your own solar dehydrator, just make sure it doesn’t turn into a solar oven instead.
You need to eat. No matter the situation, you need to eat, and in some cases it’s imperative that you do to keep your strength up. A large portion of our diet is (generally) made up of carbohydrates, so it’s obviously important to find a source of carbohydrates. If you’ll be doing a lot of manual labour, carbs are especially important to keep your energy up.
Let’s assume you have some land and some equipment. You even have some seeds to plant. How much do you plant to sustain yourself?
Going back to daily caloric requirements, you’ll see that one person will need about 370g of carbohydrates a day. If you’re in dire straights, you could eat nothing but grains, but that wouldn’t be good for you in the long run. Nevertheless, let’s assume you really like fresh bread, and round that 370g/day up to 400g, which translates into 1000g of actual grain products you need to eat.
So, 1kg/day. As you’ll likely only get one growing season, you’ll need to harvest your annual carb intake all in one season. That means 365kg per person per harvest. So, how much do you plant to get that kind of a harvest?
[What’s with all the circles? A circle is the way to enclose the most area with the least perimeter. If you’re going to fence your crop, a circle will use the least amount of fence per area enclosed.]
Please note that despite my research, this may not be a good representation of what your yields will be. This data is from commercial farming, using big equipment, fertilizers, chemicals, the whole nine yards. You’ll likely be simply using yourself. Expect lower yields typically, although who knows what good effects the use of chicken manure will have on your crop, or the use of heartier natural grain varieties.
For a much more authoritative article on grains, look at Mother Earth News’ archives.
If you are considering homesteading, or are simply interested in growing your own food, you’ll want to know what kind of soil you have, and if it’s suitable for agriculture. Should you not already own land that you can farm on, you’ll want to know where to look for suitable land.
For Canadians, there is an excellent online map tool for determining exactly how suitable soil is for agriculture. There are additional map tools for forestry, land use, recreation, ungulates, and waterfowl. A good tool for determining where you may or may not want to homestead.
If you live in an urbanized area (like much of SW Ontario) you likely don’t have acres of land to raise your own cattle or pigs for food. However raising chickens requires very little land, and only as much investment as you want to put into it.
You can raise your chickens either for meat, for eggs, or both. It sounds like it’s much more cost-efficient to raise chickens for eggs for personal consumption. That will obviously change if the world ends tomorrow, but either way, the feathery little dolls are a good source of protein. Eggs would be an excellent barter as well.
It is interesting to note that chickens also feed on bugs, so allowing your chickens to range free in your yard (see the precautions about animals, especially dogs) may be an excellent natural way of protecting your vegetation and yourself from pests. They don’t stop at eating bugs, either… they will apparently consume just about anything, from kitchen scraps to weeds. This provides an even richer diet for your flock, producing richer eggs to boot.
One further aspect that shouldn’t be ignored is their manure. Although very hot, meaning it will burn plants if applied directly, their manure is an excellent fertilizer. Apply it to a future garden to prepare it for next year, or let it mellow in your composter. Either way, there seems to be no end to the good stuff that comes out of these fowl.
GatewayToVermont.com is packed with great information about raising chickens, including raising the chicks, the infrastructure you’ll need, care for your birds, and even their take on how to process the birds destined for your stomach.
Earthquake? Meteor strike? The Rapture? Joined a deep-woods militia? No matter what the situation, you still can’t shake that sugar craving you’ve been having? Fear not fellow sugar addict, I’m going to tell you how to get your fix from our friend the Maple tree.
Maple syrup is but one goodie that can be made from maple sap. By pouring a ladle of hot syrup onto some fresh snow, you’ll get maple toffee. If you continue to boil the syrup down, it will eventually crystallize into maple sugar, also known as maple candy. In theory, candy should be easier to store, keep indefinitely, and could be remade into syrup again simply by reconstituting it. But enough chitchat, let’s get down to how to make it.
Collecting maple sap for boiling is done in the early spring, generally between late April to late March. The exact date isn’t as important as the daily temperature fluctuations. Sap will flow best when the overnight temperature is slightly below freezing, and the daytime high is slightly above. So long as you have these conditions, you’ll be getting good sap. If you collect too long, the sap will start tasting funny.
The first thing you need is a hole in the tree. Generally, the hole should be about waist-height, but keep in mind that there may be a lot of snow around the trees at that time of year. Don’t put the bucket too high, and suddenly realize weeks later that you were standing on a meter of snow! Make sure the hole isn’t right on top of a previous year’s hole.
Once the hole is in, there are two methods for collecting maple sap:
If you take a taste of the raw sap, you’ll detect that it’s sweet. All you have to do to make syrup is get rid of the excess water. The key is to boil slowly and carefully, otherwise you’ll simply burn the sugar and have nothing but a bitter black tar to show for your efforts.
Purpose-made maple boiling pans can be purchased that allow continuous flow, but again, unless you’re a high-volume operation you won’t need this. Boil small amounts to start off with to get the hang of it, so if something does go awry you won’t spoil your entire batch.
(This might be a good time to tell you to think strategically, and collect the water that is boiling out of your sap. It is essentially distilled water once boiled, and thereby worth saving. You may as well make the most out of your fire.)
If you’re planning on making maple sugar, be extremely careful in the last stages of boiling. The less water that remains in your syrup/sugar, the easier it is to burn the whole batch. Instead of boiling right down to sugar, it may be a good idea to stop at the thick syrup stage, and allow evaporation and crystallization to complete the process. Maple rock candy would be quite yummy too.
No matter which way you do it, be prepared for a messy clean up. Syrup is sticky, so you can imagine how hard it is to get maple sugar off of something. Get what you can out, and then perhaps add water to re-dissolve the sugar and add it into the next batch for boiling off.
Alternatively, you can just a very small amount of hot water and reconstitute the sugar into syrup, and give the whole family a treat. Of course, you could just start licking the pot furiously if you still need that sugar fix.
You’re preparing for an emergency. Of the three basic necessities, food and water are likely the two you’re worried about the most (the other being shelter). Stockpiling is an easy, relatively inexpensive method of getting through an emergency. The questions are, How much food should I stockpile? and How long is it practical to rely on a stockpile?
Let’s look at basic caloric requirements. According to the US Adult Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDAs), the average female requires 2200 kcal per day and the average male 2900 kcal. If you’re over 50 you need less (1900 female, 2300 male), and children are a whole different ballgame. Note that these are average values, and your requirements may vary. If you want to check out your specific requirements use this calculator.
For our purposes here we’ll ignore children and simply examine the needs of an average couple. Their nutritional requirements total 5100 kcal per day. Protein and carbohydrates provide 4 kcal per gram, and fat provides 9 kcal/g. For a 30-10-60 dietary ratio of fat-protein-carbs, our average couple will need 170g of fat, 130g of protein and 760g of carbohydrates daily. Based on the approximate nutritional content of typical foods, that total of 1060g (or 1.06kg) will translate into roughly 2.5kg of actual food.
The Canadian Red Cross recommends that you stock 2L of water per person per day (pdf). That seems like a lot, as I’ve previously seen them recommend 1L/person/day, so we’ll go with that. That’s 2L/couple/day, another 2kg.
At 2.5kg of food and 2kg of water per couple per day, one week’s worth of food and water will be 32kg of food and water. One month, and you’re stocking 135kg. Obviously, your stockpile is not mobile. If you aren’t sure where you’ll end up in an emergency, keep a small stock at home or in your vehicle, enough for one day or to get you to where you main stockpile is.
You can reduce your stockpile by storing only small amounts of water, and relying on your [own /rhahn/hpl/food/water/water_from_soil.html] [means /rhahn/hpl/food/water/DIY_filtration.html] of producing safe drinking water. An easy alternative for short-term emergencies is drinking water tablets. This can cut out the necessity of storing 2kg/day of water, but you’ll still have 2.5kg/day of food to store.
How much food should I stockpile?
As long as you realize that you won’t be able to move your stockpile, as much as you have room for. In other words, if you don’t want to wait out an emergency in your downtown apartment, don’t stockpile there. Stockpile at your cottage, or a trusted friend’s place instead.
How long is it practical to rely on a stockpile?
The only limitation I can forsee is whether the contents of your stock will start to go bad on you, so check expiry dates. You should also realize that you will become mighty sick of eating brown beans after a week or two, so you may want to get some variety of foods. It would be a good idea to eat from and replenish your stock frequently.
I really do need to look into the magic that is activated carbon filtration, but I do know it has something to do with the incredible amount of surface area that activated carbon has. Regardless of whether I actually know the science behind it, there is a great link (in not-so-great English) on how to build your own charcoal water filter from just about nothing.
I’ll paraphrase here:
There is a picture at the site that further explains what proportions to use.
The key is that the charcoal you’ll use will come straight from your very own campfire. That’s right, just go through the remnants of your fire (watch out for hot coals!) and pick out the black nuggets that are the charcoal. For such a potentially life-saving device, it’s incredibly easy to make.
I saw demonstrated on television a method of extracting water from the ground using nothing more than a container and a sheet of clear plastic. It does not produce a large quantity of water, but some is better than none. What this method does is essentially distill water out of the soil.
Solar energy will turn this setup into a miniature greenhouse and solar distillery. Water in the soil will evaporate and condense on the inner surface of the plastic sheet. When enough condensate accumulates, drops will form, which will then run down the slight slope produced by the weight on top of the sheet, and then drop into your open-top container.
To get the water collected, you’ll need to take the plastic up, which will let all the hot, moist air out of your makeshift solar still. So it is best to leave it as long as possible to collect the most water you can. Perhaps building it early in the morning and collecting at twilight or late evening would be best. If you are in a desperate state of thirst, you can always use a small-diameter tube as a straw, placing one end in your container and routing it out of the hole under the plastic sheet.
The amount of water collected will depend on soil conditions. However, it may be possible to use this method to distill murky or contaminated water by pouring the unpotable water into the hole before covering it with the plastic.
Larger holes, and multiple holes, may be dug, limited only by the amout of clear plastic sheeting you have. Translucent sheeting should also work. Opaque sheeting may work, but likely not as quickly as most of the solar energy will be turned into heat in the sheet, instead of passing through into the soil.
If you wanted to get extreme in your water conservation, you could dig a hole big enough to live in, cover it with plastic, and live in the hole with your open container. The moisture in your breath would eventually be collected, as would water expelled in your urine and feces. Of course, you’d be living in a warm, humid hole with urine, feces, a cup of water, and no ventillation, so I wouldn’t recommend this. {wink}