Monthly Archives: August 2012

Goal0 lights

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Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

For my birthday, a lovely gal I know got me one of these (Goal Zero 24001 Light-A-Life LED Lamp) off my Amazon Wish List. I had been curious to try one of these out since it looked like it had a lot of the things I was looking for in emergency lighting – runs on 12 v., doesn’t use much electricity, uses long-life LEDs, and lent itself to be operated off several different forms of power supply. So, with one in hand, I started playing with it.

The light comes with a connector to plug it into the proprietary batteries the company sells. However, they also send along an adapter to allow you to run it from anything that has the usual ‘cigarette plug’-style outlet. I happened to have an old ConSci portable power pack laying around and hooked it up to that. (And, to go off on a tangent, that ConSci PPP is pre-Y2K and still seems to run just fine for a little battery-in-a-box portable power supply. Very rugged, very durable…so, of course, it appears to be no longer available. No big deal, easy enough to make your own similar device.) The light gives of the usual sterile cold white LED light but it gives enough to light up the bunker enough to get around. A nice touch is that each light has nine feet of cord and a socket to daisy chain more lights. Well, that certainly sounds interesting..let’s explore that.

Turns out that this week the local CostCo is having Goal0 as one of their visiting ‘roadshow’ products…you know, they clear off a section of floor, the sales rep sets up a little kiosk or something and starts shilling his product. So I went up to CostCo and price checked. On sale at CostCo for $26.99…that was about ten bucks off what Amazon had them at. Ok, I picked up three more and brought them home, giving me a total of four. I daisy-chained ‘em all together and strung them across the length of the house. Killed the lights, flipped a switch on the ConSci PPP and -behold- light. Not just light, mind you, but good light. See, you stand in a dark room and stick a flashlight or other small portable light int he corner and the room looks…stark…and downright brutal, like some sort of interrogation chamber. But, two, three or four lights spread around the room actually lights it up so it looks rather homey. I was quite pleased with how these lights worked. I need to get a few more and then need to start doing some battery math. Ideally I’d want a battery that could run five lights for eight hours a day, for several days, without needing to charge the battery. Hmm..actually, let’s see how this would go… each light is 3 watt at 12 v. so it’s .25 amp. Five lights = 5 x .25amp= 1.25 ah. Run those five lights for eight hours a day comes out to 10 ah/day (8 x 1.25). Run those lights for five days would be 50ah. If I didn’t want to discharge my battery below 50% I’d need a 100 amp battery. Or a 200 amp battery if I didn’t want to discharge below 75%. That sound right?

After playing with these lights for the last couple of days I gotta say I’m pretty pleased. The ability to daisy-chain them together is a huge, huge plus. For setting up a small, self-contained, ‘renewable’ emergency lighting system these things look like the way to go. I need to scale up the battery to some sort of low-maintenance, non-venting type, set it up somewhere out of the way, get a decent solar panel to keep it topped off, and I think that’ll do it. As I said, I just need to sit down and figure out a buncha battery math.

Link – Hazlitt’s ‘Economics in one lesson’

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Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

Hazlitt’s ‘Economics in one lesson’ is, I think, an excellent book. It’s very dated material, since it was written shortly after WW2 when the economy was very different than it is now, but it’s one main message remains: “…the whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.”

Long-term thinking….yeah, I’m a fan.

Anyway, here’s an online copy for you to read at your leisure. You may not agree with it, you may think it is simplistic, dated, or biased in some areas, but it does get you to think.

How does this relate to preparedness? Well, first of all, looking at the long term effects of things is definitely in the realm of preparedness. Secondly, understanding why some things in the economy happen the way they do is also a big advantage…forewarned is forearmed, and all that.

I’d be interested in hearing the opinions of those of you who read the whole thing.

Article – Survivalist congressman is ready for doomsday

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Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

Deep in the West Virginia woods, in a small cabin powered by the sun and the wind, a bespectacled, white-haired man is giving a video tour of his basement, describing techniques for the long-term preservation of food in case of “an emergency.”

“We don’t really think of those today, because it’s so convenient to go to the supermarket,” he cautions. “But you know, you’re planning because the supermarket may not always be there.”

The electrical grid could fail tomorrow, he frequently warns. Food would disappear from the shelves. Water would no longer flow from the pipes. Money might become worthless. People could turn on each other, and millions would die.

Such concerns are typical among “survivalists,” a loose national movement of individuals who advocate self-sufficiency in the face of natural or man-made disasters, gathering online or in person to discuss the best ways to prepare for the worst.

What is atypical is that the owner of this cabin is Roscoe Bartlett, the longtime Republican congressman from Maryland. Over the past two decades, he has developed a following as one of the country’s premier proponents of preparedness against impending doom, even urging the more than 80 percent of Americans who live in urban areas to relocate.

Not as terrible an article as the MSM usually paints for guys like him.

Why it pays to compare prices

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Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

The local K-mart is going out of business. For the last couple weeks everything has been marked down further and further. I’ve been stopping by once a week to see if theres anything I need that has got a ‘must buy’ price. So, I go in there today and trot over to the first aid aisle. Can never have too much gauze, Neosporin, band aids and rolled gauze. I’m something of a snob, so I priced out the Johnson and Johnson stuff. Everything was 20% off the lowest marked price…okay, thats a fair discount but nothing to jump up and down about. I noted down the prices and figured I’d check and see what the other places in town were getting…so I could see if I was getting 20% off of an already good price or if I was getting 20% off of an overly expensive price. Headed over to Walgreen’s to compare prices and found that with the 20% discount from K-Mart the prices were pretty good….except that, as it turns out, this week Walgreens has buy-one-get-one-free on J&J first aid stuff….which essentially comes out to a 50% discount. So, even with the original price at Walgreens being slightly higher than K-Mart’s base price, it still comes out to a better deal going with the BOGO instead of K-Marts 20% off lowest price.

Which means that if I had given into my impulses and bought the stuff at K-Mart rather than check prices elsewhere, I’d’ve gotten less value for my scarce greenbacks.

Moral of the story: shop around, it pays.

Now….off to an ATM, and then to Walgreens to stock my lovely Hardigg Medical Chest.

MH and that non-existent ‘big government contract’

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Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

You guys remember about a year or so ago the folks at Mountain House told their small time dealers to go pound salt because MH was dedicating it’s output of #10 cans to other, larger vendors? The rumour at the time was that MH had a gigantic .gov contract that made MH put everyone else on the backburner (which would explain MH’s multi-million dollar capital improvements in manufacturing capacity) but denied that there was a big .gov contract that caused all this drama.

I, of course, didnt believe the denials.

And then I read this:

Many things were discussed, such as the void in the marketplace they left early last year when they slowed production of Mountain House to fulfill other private brand orders, including the military. They have since changed their focus and philosophy on order fulfillment, with the consumer Mountain House brand taking priority over all other orders.

So, yeah, there was a large .gov order alright. I knew it.

Look, in business you go where the money is. Guy wants to spend a couple hundred million bucks with you on one sale, well, the guys as Steve’s Camping Store might get their order pushed to the bottom of the list….but MH really froze their small dealers out with virtually no apologies or explanations. MH makes some great stuff, and I’ll continue to buy it as I need, but I’n, spreading my net further to other brands.

But, it’s nice to know I was right.

Fuel rotation musings

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Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

Another weekend, another five-gallon fuel swap. I dunno how you rotate your fuel, but here’s how we do it around here. All fuel is in the ‘Euro/NATO’-style cans. The fuel is treated with stabilizer. The cans are tagged with the date of storage. The cans are then stored in a safe outdoor location. After more than a year, the fuel is rotated into the vehicle’s regular fill ups. Head to the gas station, put one can of gas in the rig, top off with fresh gas from the pump. The empty can is then refilled at the gas station and fuel stabilizer is added. Back to base, and the can is tagged, dated, and stored.

The details:

‘Euro/NATO’-style cans – Ive used the plastic cans, I’ve used the metal Blitz cans, and I’ve uses the NATO-style cans. (I haven’t used the Scepter plastic cans but I’m really leaning away from plastic fuel containers.) In my experience, the NATO cans are the best choice. I dont bother using a spout with them, I paracord a $2 gas funnel to each can. The NATO cans get painted every so often if theres signs of rust or chips in the paint. The cans seal up tight, are easy to handle, and used to be fairly inexpensive. Seems like the source these days is off-road/expedition specialty websites. The cans aren’t cheap, but whats it worth to you to have gasoline in a crisis?

Stabilizer – Two names top the chart: Stabil and PRI-G. I went with PRI-G after reading some reviews and first-hand reports. I have stored gas with the PRI-G stabilizer for almost two years and when that gas was finally used I noticed no change in vehicle performance. Stabil is easier to find, but for my money I’ll make the extra effort and get the PRI -G. Buy the big jug that treats 512 gallons. Why? Sometimes this stuff can be hard to find (like after their facility in La. got wiped out in Hurricane Katrina, so have enough on hand that you dont need to buy any for a few years.
.

Date tagging – Here’s the post about it. TL;DR? I cut a square from an empty pop can, scrive the date on it, and paracord it to the gas can. Since the tag is metal, and the date is carved into the metal, there is no problem with the date tag disintegrating or becoming illegible due to weather and sun.

If you don’t store extra fuel and don’t know how to go about it, this might be useful to you. It may not be the best way, but it’s how we do it around here and it seems to have worked pretty well so far. So: buy the good quality cans, fill with fuel, treat with stabilizer, date the cans, store them out of the weather (in a corner of your yard in a ‘doghouse’ structure would work great, and rotate with fresh gas when you fill your vehicle.)

As I said, I haven’t been as diligent as I should about gas rotation and the gas in storage was around two years old….but treated and stored properly it appears to perform just fine. When we need to outrun the zombies, or buy gas at 3AM when all the stations are closed, we’ll have that extremely valuable resource available to us.

And, before I forget, I want to repost something I think is extremely important about fuel rotation in a non-crisis:

The trick to this whole process is that you dont fill the truck from the cans until you are at the gas station. Why? Because if you fill it up at home you’ll be tempted to take the empty cans and throw them in the corner and say “Ah, I’ll fill them up next time” and then the world comes to an end and you’re starting your apocalypse three five-gallon drums short. So…fill the truck at the pump using the cans and then refill the cans at the pump. At least, for someone with my lack of self-discipline I find that to be the method that works best.

Seriously, man….there should never be an empty gas can in your world.

 

Search engine results and other stats

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Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

For the last couple months, I’ve been tracking a bunch of stats on the website. When I upgraded to the new version of WordPress I went and added Google Analytics as well, which gives me tons of information. One interesting thing I’ve noticed is that there are two search queries that are consistently in the top ten for search results that bring people here. The first is “are guns good investments’ , or some similar phrasing, and the other is “HK flare pistol”.

Both of these posts are from several years back, yet they are always in the top ten of searches that brought people here. (Other search terms on that list are “commander zero”, “notes from the bunker”, and other obvious hits.)

Some other interesting stats – hits from the US account for 94.23% of traffic. Of that, Texas is the largest percentage of hits (10.76%), followed by California, Florida, Washington and Virginia.

Biggest referrers? Prepperwebsite.com with 17.23% of referral traffic coming from them. Followed by Survivalblog.com, offgridsurvival.com, and suburbansurvivalist.

After the main page, the post that gets more traffic than any other is this one, making up 2.6% of all posts read by people. (That doesnt sound like a high percentage, but with over 1300 posts on the website the fact remains that this particular post is seen by more people than anything other than the most recent post at the top of the blog. The next most popular draws less than half that amount of attention.)

And the thing I get asked about most in email? Where I got the new header graphics for the website. We’re steadily decliing into a Third World economy and this is what people ask about..’whered you get those cool pictures?’ (They were turned up in some late night random Google surfing.)

Page hits is about 1000 a day, which is kinda sad considering how long this blog has been running…but thats cool since I really post for myself and not for the fame and notoriety. (Although, to be honest, from time to time I’ve gotten some cool stuff out of it.)

Anyway, I thought I’d share a few of those stats since I find them interesting.

 

 

Article – Injured dog rescued from mountain, owner wants it back

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Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

About 13,500 feet above the ground, among the snow-capped peaks of Mount Bierstadt in Colorado, Scott Washburn and his wife, Amanda, found an abandoned, dying German shepherd dog.

Washburn and his wife this past Saturday, Aug. 11, were on a leisurely hike up Mount Bierstadt in Clear Creek County, a 14,000-foot peak near Denver that is categorized as a “14er” because, as Washburn said, “the peak is over 14,000 feet high and considered a Class 3, meaning it is not the most difficult – but it’s too difficult for a dog to be on it or an inexperienced person.

“We were hiking to this ridge and we got off course and I was a little ahead of my wife,” he said. “She called out to me and said, ‘Hey I found a dog,’ and figured I misheard her ’cause there was no way a dog was where we were.”

This is reprehensible and intolerable behavior from the owner of this dog.  This guy takes his dog where he shouldn’t have, leaves the injured dog behind, assumes it is dead and doesn’t even go back for it. Meanwhile the injured dog is slowly dying. Happy ending is that some folks got together and rescued this dog. Happier ending would be the dog not being returned to the sack of crap that abandoned it. Best ending is that sack of crap getting a beatdown to the point he has hysterical flashbacks if he ever comes near another dog.

How someone can do this is beyond me. A dog is willing to do anything for you, follow you endlessly, take tremendous abuse, and still die to protect you. You don’t abandon it at the first sign of trouble and you definitely don’t leave it for dead if there’s even a chance its still alive. When I got Nuke I made it clear that there was a contract between us…we were all part of a team and we do not abandon each other. Ever. He trusts me to take care of him and I trust him to always be there for me. Thats how it works with dogs.

Grrr…now I really wanna go to Colorado and kick this guy in the nuts.

 

ETA: Oh look, he has a Facebook account. With a picture of his dog.

How’s that marker panel look?

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Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

Okay, time to play “Find the multicam hunting pack”. Ready? Go!

Ok, now lets try it with the marker panel in place.

Cool, huh? That’s the marker panel that was mentioned a few posts back. Here’s a comparison picture. Obviously, any object that is a bright day-glo orange is going to jump out at you. What I’m liking about this is that theres a velcro patch on either sidfe for glint tape for night/IR visibility, theres paracord loops at the corners for easy attachment, and the whole thing weighs less than an ounce and folds up to about the same space as a matchbook. When hunting season gets here I’ll definitely have this on my pack to keep my visibility high. And, as I said, it’s also handy for just marking where you left the dang camo gear that has a tendency to disappear into the background when you put it down and get about fifty yards away from it. I’m curious to see how long the color lasts before it fades away into a pale tangerine color. Given its use during the brief hunting season and the infrequent wilderness emergency, it shouldnt be spending enough time out in the sun for it to fade, but you never know. Like what I see so far, though. Definitely gonna stuff this into my hunting bag this fall.

Source: Battle Systems

 

Charging the smartphone

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Originally published at Notes From The Bunker. You can comment here or there.

I’ve become rather convinced that, for me anyway, the smartphone-type device has a definite bit of utility in preparedness. Currently, I have an iPhone. (I actually like the BlackBerry but given the enormous amount of support for the iPhone product it made more sense on a logistical basis than the BB.) I’m not going to really beat the topic of why I think it has utility, I’ve done that elsewhere, but I want to discuss one of the logical issues about these smartphones – how do you keep them charged when the power is off?

I received, as birthday gifts (thank you!), two different hand-crank chargers. Both use the same technology and have similar uses, although with slight differences. The first was the Freeplay FreeCharge and the other was a similar device marketed as Etón American Red Cross Clipray. Both are basically hand-crank generators with DC output at 12 v. The Eton has a USB port since it seems aimed specifically at USB-style devices, the FreePlay has a 12 v. ‘cigarette lighter’ plug. The Eton is less bulky and also supports a built-in rechargeable LED flashlight…a nice touch..along with a carabiner-style clip to affix the unit to a piece of gear.

Handcrank charger -> smartphone. Yeah, it might work but it’s not a really great Plan A. Beats being in the dark, though.

Here’s where the problems come in. There is no free lunch in power generation. Not only do you have to sit there and crank a lot to recharge a cell phone, but the amount of energy you produce fluctuates wildly unless you keep a steady pace that is rather difficult to maintain. In short, don’t think youre going to plug your phone into one of these, crank like a madman for five minutes, and get a charged cellphone. Nope. You’re going to appreciate how much physical effort is required to generate electricity and develop a new understanding of why hydroelectric turbines and other mechanical-energy-to-electrical-energy systems are so wonderful. Plus, since your electrical output is so wildly varied, your sensitive electrical device is going to freak out in a major way and start giving messages about ‘device not charging’ and that sort of thing.

Solutions? Matter of fact, yes. In the comments/reviews on Amazon a fella noted this problem and said what was needed was some sort of regulator between the charger and the device…a buffer to capture the erratic electrical output and hoard it until there was enough charge to be smoothly and uniformly discharged. A battery. Enter this device: Duracell Instant USB Charger with Lithium Ion Battery. Normally you plug this little rechargeable unit into a USB port, on your computer for example, and it charges the on-board battery for use later when you plug your phone into it. All well and good, but for our needs you plug the battery into your handcrank device and use that to charge the battery as you have your smartphone charge from the battery. The battery smooths out the uneven output from your cramp-inducing flurry of handcranking and your smartphone doesn’t freak out at the uneven voltage.

Handcrank -> rechargeable battery -> smartphone. Better, but there’s a lot of time involved with turning that crank. Battery evens out the uneven output from the handcrank.

Now, as I said, once you try recharging any device with one of these handcrank units you are going to really come to appreciate things like wind and hydro turbines and…small solar panels. Personally, when the apocalypse happens I’m not going to have the time to sit around endlessly cranking a little geegaw to charge a battery so I can use my smartphone to read TM’s, take photos for historical purposes, calculate food rations, track consumables, etc, etc…I’ll be too busy doing all the other things that need doing. So…would my Goal0 Nomad 7M Solar Panel suffice to charge the little Duracell battery USB charger? As it turns out, yes. So, rather than sit around cranking away for hours to get my smartphone charged up I just plug the Duracell USB battery into the panel, lay the panel out in the sun and let it do the charging for me. Tedious, repetitive, physical exertion vs. passive solar charging…..no contest. Let me just lay the panel in the sun and get back to hanging looters.

Panel -> battery -> smartphone. I like this setup. The battery charges as the phone charges, and if the weather is uncooperative I still have a charge in the battery to use to charge the ‘phone. Plus, I don’t have to sit there turning a crank.

Does this mean that there’s no point to the handcrank generators? Not at all. Sometimes there just isn’t any sun to be had. And, sometimes you don’t need to charge a battery..you just need to run a light for a few moments or something similar. Certainly it doesn’t hurt anything to have these options available. Day may come where you’re holed up in your basement for a week with nothing better to do than charge small batteries by hand as you wait for water levels or radiation levels to recede.

Of course, if you’ve got yourself a nice solar panel array already in place, or a happy little min-hydro in your yard, then you can pretty much skip most of this and just add a regulated USB port to your system.

One other thing that I haven’t had a chance to try, and wouldn’t mind some input on, is bicycle-mounted USB chargers. I’ve seen some commercial models that are similar to the old bottle-shaped dynamos that we used to use to run headlights when I as a kid. There aren’t as many out there as I would have thought, but there are a few and also a few DIY plans. I’d be  interested in hearing of anyone’s experiences with ‘em.