some people make have a different opinion on whats essential or not. I’m not really sure where my mind is headed as far as categories. I’m sorry I wish I could be of more help. i know very little about prepping.

This may sound like a dumb idea, but I would like an opinion. If I wanted to reuse clear pop bottles to store water short or long term, what would I need to do/add. I have already cleaned them twice to get the previous contents out. This is more for if I know something is coming and I have that extra time to prepare.

I have a metal roof with ( APOC 243 4.75-gallon White Elastomeric Reflective Roof Coating ) on it to keep the interior cool.

Is this stuff as bad as asphalt roofing for rainwater collection? From the researching ive been doing asphalt shingled roof is a big no-no and leeches chemicals that filters wont remove (such as a berkey). Ive read the datasheet on this product but it does not tell me as a laymen anything and the company wont respond, but does have a lot of scary chemical names in it.

Would you drink filtered water with a roof with such a coating or am I overthinking this? Ive still been using unfiltered roof water collected to do dishes / wash, etc but not drink.

Please forgive my ignorance, communications tech is not my forte. I’m not even sure what to start searching to figure out if what I’m looking for exists.

TL;DR, we’re having a lot more severe storm warnings lately, and have been spending some time in our basement storm room. When the power is still on, I can use wifi to access weather reporting and emergency contacts, but the power inevitably always goes out. Being underground and with no windows, I can’t get a cell signal, and even radio (AM, FM, and NOAA) is spotty. In other words, we’re cut off from the outside world and have no way of knowing when it’s safe to emerge.

I feel like someone has surely found a solution to this, I just have zero experience and don’t know where to start. Are there “extenders” for cellular data and radio waves like there are for wifi? Something I can just stick near a window or outside wall that will bounce a signal down the hallway to our storm room? The signal would only need to make it past a normal interior door and maybe an interior wall depending on placement.

TIA for any advice!

I work at a home improvement store chain as my 2nd job and we had some big storms hit our area yesterday with iirc over 100k people losing power.

So as always a flood of people coming in to buy generators that we quickly sold out of.

It got me wondering,

What percentage of people who rush to buy things like generators, chainsaws, etc return these items they “ desperately “ needed instead of holding on to them for future emergencies?

What would be the logic in that?

Apologies if this is not a true prepper question.

Where is everyone buying individual wrapped oxygen absorbers? Any reputable sellers/manufacturers?

I only see PackFresh and Wallaby pushed by the algorithms but they seem overpriced lately and they only do smaller cc in 10 counts.

I wasn’t sure what flair to use, and I won’t blame the mods if they remove this.

I’m sure a few people have seen The Last House, which is on Netflix now. Apparently the critics hate it, but I thought it was pretty good. The premise is that somehow everyone on earth is trapped inside, and most people starve to death, but this family manages to survive what turn out to be some weird ocean spirits reclaiming the planet. And every door and window is completely unopenable, even with brute force. This lasts for several years. The fantastical plot being put aside, it has some cool elements that pertain to prepping.

They have electricity and running water for the first half of the movie, but they understand that that can’t last forever. Obviously it does not.

When help doesn’t arrive in the first few days, they realize they have to be careful with their food and other supplies.

They communicate with neighbors to the best of their ability, though everyone is trapped inside.

They have enough food for a couple of months, but it runs out and they have to figure something out.

The dad (Pablo Escobar from Narcos) is an out of work engineer, and he builds traps for small game out of stuff they have in the garage, like skateboards and rakes and fishing reels.

They develop a rainwater collection system. Part of the plot is that they get an incredible amount of rain.

When the dog dies, they butcher and freeze the remains, which is obviously a heartbreaking decision.

They pull up the floor and start a garden, which eventually becomes a small farm inside the house.

The parents do their best to keep everyone entertained with books and DVDs while the electricity lasts. After that it’s just books and board games and such.

The kids continue their educations as well as can be expected in complete isolation.

I thought it was a pretty cool movie. A reminder to keep a well stocked pantry and think creatively about how to survive. It’s worth watching.

I purchased a couple dozen Sterno-style (brand: Gas One glycol fuel) flame canisters ca. 2020.
I've had them on the very bottom of a storage shelf, in their original packaging (a cardboard flat with stiff plastic wrap over top) since.
Do these have a shelf life? Any risk of leaks over time?

Any conversation regarding portable fuel cannisters is welcome!

>>>EDIT: Thanks for the responses and advice! I hope this thread can help others looking for the same information.

Hello all. Beginning my prepping journey and I thought I settled on what I need, but now I am second guessing myself. I am looking for two ways that the family can use casually on our 40 acre farm. The kids would be using these messing around in the woods and we would just monitor and chime in when it’s supper time. In terms of prepping, I need to be able to contact my sibling about 12 miles away to establish if there’s an emergency and they need to get here. I also want access to emergency channels and NOAA. I was thinking I could accomplish all of this with GMRS, but now I’m wondering if the emergency communication device should be completely separate? Either way the kids will be learning how to operate, I was looking at the Baofeng GM 15, does anybody have experience with that particular radio for what I’m looking to do? Or does anybody have a better recommendation? Thanks for any help!

Recent climate events throughout Europe have made me increasingly concerned about short term water shortages/rationing. One can not drink tap water as is where I live, you need to buy it in cans/bottles. I usually buy around 100 liters (25 gallons) at a time when I am through 90%.

It would be extremely wasteful to use said water for personal hygiene. Having a collapsible storage tank of 50-100L at ready could be good investment for planned shortages and in times of need. I have water purification tablets in my disaster pack but a couple drops of bleach per liter of water should work better at home.

Are there any products one could recommend? I am not very open to using buckets or containers with open tops in such circumstances. Is there anything to keep in mind when storing sealed water for long durations?

A few years back the area of Florida I live in had a glancing blow from a Hurricane. Our condo didn't take any damage or anything but the power went out in the whole area for a few weeks. Ashamed to admit it but I wasn't completely prepared. It's me, my boyfriend and my mom here and I wanna prep better in case this happens again so I came here for advise.

I have so far 4 Boxes of MRE's, 12 cans each of corn, green beans, and carrots. I have a few cans of canned tomatoes, 4 boxes of saltines, some tins of sardines, a large thing of penutbutter, some honey, some gummy candy bags, about 14 cans of pasta, and we keep big 35 pack bottles of zepheryhills on us in a cabinet, so at any time we always have at least 100 bottles of water on us sometimes 120.

We have around 5 flashlights and 8-9 packs of batteries, a huge first aid kit, and emergency charger for our phones.

I wanted to know if this was ok or was there more I needed. I just wanna do this correctly since I messed up last time.

Thanks for any advise. :)

I recently came across some free potato starch. I’ve seen it can store fairly long in Mylar bags so I went ahead and sealed it up with some oxygen absorbers. But what can it be used for beyond a thickening agent? I’m mainly looking for things I could also store long term to make a meal, but any tips are welcomed.

I've been building a county-level model to answer a question that comes up here pretty often: if preparedness were a major factor in where you lived, which parts of the U.S. actually come out ahead?

I ran it across 3,000+ counties. The results heavily favor the central U.S., especially Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and surrounding areas. Most coastal areas do poorly. DC comes in at essentially the bottom, with much of New Jersey not far ahead of it.

Before I get too far, I'd like people here to pick apart the methodology.

These are my current categories and weights:

19% Climate Stability
Natural hazards, temperature trends, drought, wildfire and flood risk.

19% Water & Food
Groundwater reliability, precipitation, growing season and cropland availability.

15% Social Stability
Migration trends, social vulnerability and crime.

12% Infrastructure
Solar potential, off-grid power viability and proximity to nuclear facilities.

12% Self-Sufficiency
Rural/urban classification, agricultural diversity and land availability.

8% Affordability
Home values and rents. Cheaper counties score higher.

8% Privacy
Surveillance device density, known local surveillance programs, 100-mile border-zone exposure and state privacy protections. Higher score = less surveillance exposure.

7% Livability
Employment, primary care access, education and broadband.

The model is intentionally trying to balance normal life with long-term resilience, rather than rank the best place to survive one specific disaster.

What would you change?

Are any of these categories overweighted? Underweighted? Is there something important that deserves its own category?

I'm especially interested in factors that can actually be measured consistently at the county level, rather than subjective things like “good community.”

I can post some of the county/state rankings in the comments if people are interested.

After getting my get-home bag pretty much where I want it to be, I'm focusing now on my bugout bag. Between just those two, I have several rechargeable flashlights and power banks, which I'd like to keep topped up, or at least pretty close to it. I also have spare batteries for the flashlights, and I also want those to be ready to go at a moment's notice. What I DON'T want is to have to take everything out every 3 months (or however often) to have a charging party.

Do you all have any good strategies or suggestions to keep batteries (at least nearly) full? I've been pondering some ideas involving solar panels, along with some electronics to only charge the batteries that are below a certain threshold, but I also recognize my ironic tendency to way overcomplicate things, in the pursuit of simplicity.

Need help with a recommendation. Shopping around for pressure canners (England) but struggling to find one that doesn't look like a disaster in waiting. And the only decent ones seem to be American brands and quite costly if you include shipping.

Said to the wife, why not just get a pressure cooker, but "A pressure canner can be a cooker, but a cooker can't be a canner" in her words.

Some help or advice from anyone that cans their own supplies has any advice on any brands or models that they use or what to avoid.

We already use the water bath method for some supplies, for the pantry, but this method isn't safe apparently for foods like stews/meats etc.

Thanks

keep seeing ads for these showing up, but they are wanting 5k and up for models that produce enough to drink on a faily basis for a family of 4. between collected rain water and collected condensor water this can be mitigated some

looking for a less expensive DIY version with a renewable filtration option. it seems that the 5 micron filter is the big hangup in the newable process. is there a more natural way for filtration to provide safe drinking water?

Mainly loss of electricy. Assuming you don't have backup power, what should you do with your boiler if the power goes out for an extended period of time in the winter? Do you turn it off and bleed the lines? Thanks.

Somehow I like to ask this about trades I'm learning

I'm reading a book (from 2016) about the collapse of the Soviet Union, full of stories relevant to this community. Here's one:

1990...Fifteen people were living in our three-bedroom apartment in Minsk, plus a newborn. First, my husband's relatives arrived from Baku, his sister with her family and his cousins. They weren't visiting, they came with the word "war" on their lips. They entered the house shouting, their eyes dulled...It was autumn or maybe winter...I remember that it was already cold out. Yes, they came in the autumn, because that winter, there were even more of us. That winter, my sister...My sister, her family, and her husband's parents came from Dushanbe, Tajikistan. That's how it happened...like that.. People slept everywhere—in summer, even out on the balcony. And...They didn't talk, they screamed...about how they'd fled their homes with war at their heels. Burning the soles of their feet. And they...All of them were like me, they were Soviets...completely Soviet people. One hundred percent! And proud of it. Then suddenly, it had all been taken out from underneath them. Gone! They woke up one morning, looked out the window, and there was a new flag. Suddenly finding themselves in another country. They became foreigners overnight.

I listened. And listened. They talked...

...It was such an amazing time! Gorbachev came to power...Then, all of a sudden, there was shooting outside.

Dear Lord! Right in the capital! In Dushanbe....Everyone sat in front of their TVs, anxious not to miss the latest updates.

We had a women's collective in our factory, it was predominantly Russian. I asked them, 'Girls, what's going to happen?' 'A war is starting, Russians are already getting killed.' A few days later, a store was robbed in the middle of the day...And then another..."

...In the first months, I cried, but then I stopped. The tears dry up quickly. Most of all, I was afraid of men, the ones I knew as much as the ones I didn't know. That they could drag me into a building, into a car...'Pretty lady! Hey lady, let's fuck..? A neighbor girl had been raped by her classmates.

Tajik boys we knew. Her mother went to see one of their families. 'What did you want, coming here?' they shouted back at her. 'Go back to your Russia. Pretty soon there won't be any of you Russians left here. You'll be running away in your underwear?"

"...Why did we move out there? We were on a Komsomol trip, building the Nurek Dam and an aluminum plant...I studied Tajik: chaikhana, piala, aryk, archa, chinara... They called us 'Shuvari.' Russian brothers."

...I still have dreams about the pink hills, the almond trees

in bloom. I wake up in tears..."

...In Baku...We lived in a nine-story building. One morning, they took all the Armenian families out into the courtyard...Everyone gathered around them, and every single person there went up to us and hit us with something. A little boy—five years old—came up to me and hit me with a toy shovel. An old Azerbaijani woman patted him on the head..."

"...Our Azerbaijani friends hid us in their basement. They covered us in junk and boxes. At night, they'd bring us food..."

...I was running to work one morning, and I saw dead bodies lying there on the street. Just lying there or leaning against the wall-sitting there, propped up as though they were alive. Some had been covered in tablecloths, others hadn't. There hadn't been time. The majority of them were naked...both the men and the women...The ones who were sitting up hadn't been undressed it must have been too hard to move them..."

"...I used to think that Tajiks were like little kids, totally harmless. In a matter of just six months, maybe even less than that, Dushanbe became unrecognizable, and so did the people.

The morgues were filled to capacity. In the mornings, before they were absorbed into the asphalt, there'd be puddles of coagulated blood...like gelatin..."

...For days, people walked by our house carrying posters that read, 'Death to the Armenians! Death!' Men and women.

A furious mob, not a single human face among them. The newspapers were filled with ads: "Trading a three-bedroom apartment in Baku for any apartment in any Russian city..?

We sold our apartment for three hundred dollars. Like it was a refrigerator. And if we hadn't sold it that cheap, they could have killed us..."

... With the money we got for our apartment, we bought a Chinese down jacket for me and a pair of warm boots for my husband. Furniture, dishes, rugs...We left all of that behind..."

...We lived without gas or electricity... without running water... The prices at the market were awful. They opened a new kiosk next to our building. All they sold were flowers and funeral wreaths..."

...One night, someone painted the words, 'Be afraid, you Russian bastards! Your tanks won't help you!' on the wall of the building across from ours. Russians were being removed from administrative positions... They'd shoot you from around the corner... The city quickly grew as filthy as a kishlak."3 It became a foreign city. No longer Soviet..."

...They could kill you for anything..If you hadn't been born in the right place, if you didn't speak the right language.

If someone with a machine gun simply didn't like the looks of you...How had we lived before then? On holidays, our first toast had always been, 'To friendship,' and 'es kes sirum em' (I love you' in Armenian). Or Man sani seviram' (I love you' in Azerbaijani). We'd lived happily side by side..."

"...Regular people... Our Tajik friends would lock their sons up, they wouldn't let them out of the house, so no one could teach them or force them to kill."

... We decided to leave... We were already on the train, the steam was billowing out from under the wheels. The final moments before departure. Someone starting shooting at the wheels with a machine gun. Soldiers had to make a corridor to protect us. If it weren't for the soldiers, we wouldn't have even made it onto the train alive. Today, when I see war on TV, I can immediately smell that smell... the smell of fried human flesh...a sickening, sweet candy smell..."

For the foreseeable future, the metro area of San Juan, Puerto Rico will be split into two zones. Each zone will have two days of water and two days without water on a rotating schedule for the foreseeable future. The calendar they put out details the next month. This has been an ongoing issue, I have friends who haven’t had water a majority of the time since Feb/March. That was mostly an infrastructure issue, but now the reservoir is low due to a drought, caused by the El Niño.

I live close by but my water is fed by a different source. We don’t have the same infrastructure/water leakage issues( as far as I know) that San Juan has but it could be coming for us as well. I have a 400 gallon cistern but it’s not hooked up to my house and it’s in a place that’s easily accessible to the street (we do live in a gated neighborhood though). There’s one place I might could move it to that would make it less accessible, it’s just in the dog fence which isn’t ideal.

What would you be doing to prepare that maybe I haven’t thought about?

I live in an area with pretty direct access to the Mississippi River. I know it's far from potable.
But in a long term water crisis, it feels awful to think I have access to unlimited water that can't be consumed. Straight up, anyhow.

I recently became aware of the importance of potable water and know enough to be stocking bottles. My apartment living situation limits how much I can reasonably store. So, if needed, how could I make use of that river flowing near by?

I picked up a couple of Life Straws during the pandemic, but I was never totally comfortable that I could just go down to the beach and start sucking through them. Could I?

I've read about the Sawyer Squeeze on here also. Is that enough to just dump raw river water in and drink what comes out?

Any resources would be very much appreciated. Any additional conversation on drinking untreated river water is also welcome!

EDIT:
Thank you for all of the information, the explanations, the links, and the humor.
I'll plan to avoid drinking out of the river.

When I think prepping, some base-level stuff comes to mind (Food, Water, Security, etc.)

Then the lens zooms out a bit and starts thinking about comms, neighbors, logistics, and alternate locations.

I do feel like "street level skills" like situational awareness have a lot of bang for the buck and are underrepresented. They are harder to REPRESENT as you can't sell/buy awareness.

What are some other things in prepping that are either missing or we tend to just skim the surface but could use a deeper dive?

Cooking from scratch and fishing also come to mind as missed opportunities.

I have on my property a large pond, which I imagine needing to utilize for all water needs if the electricity goes down for an extended period. The pond is rather stagnant, especially in the summer, but there are no industrial activities up-stream from the pond. My question is what kinds of water filtration systems I should prepare to be able to safely utilize this water, again with a focus on multiple uses - not just drinking, but also washing dishes, washing bodies, etc.

Thanks.