Tag Archives: empirical data

ConSci twenty years on

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As I may have mentioned before, I’ve been doing some major cleaning and re-organization in my basement. Since I’ve been squirreling away stuff down there for the last thirt years, there’s gonna be a rather interesting collection of stuff down there. And some of it is goes back those full thirty years. Thing is, things change over thirty years… Technology, manufacturing, etc, all changes to some degree. So, what artifact from the the pre-Y2K days do we have today? Why, it’s the ConSci Power Pack:

Very simply and succinctly, this is a manufactured version of the classic battery-in-a-box

The ConSci power pack is a 12v battery (and associated electronics) encased in a .50-cal ammo can to keep everything protected and water tight. It featured a pair of female 12v ‘cigarette lighter’ sockets to allow use of common 12v items of the era. Here’s what it looks like:

This thing has been sitting in my basement, plugged in and charging, for over twenty years. So, I decided to see how well it would work. Remember this lamp from my how-long-will-it-run experiment? The answer to the question of how long the ConSci would run the lamp is two-and-a-half-days of continuous use. Thats about a week of use if you used it for eight hours per day. This is less than what results were when I performed this experiment with the battery jump pack I purchased at CostCo.

The battery in the ConSci is smaller and less capacious than the one in the battery jump pack, so I suppose it isnt a truly fair comparison. And thats fine. What is important is that after twenty years this thing will still perform admirably for most emergencies.

The ConSci was discontinued a long time ago. But the whole battery-in-a-box concept has been done to death on the internet. There are all sorts of websites that give you an Amazin shopping list of everything you need to build your own version. Or, as I’ve done, pick up one (or two) of those battery jump packs and leave them plugged in and ready to go. The newer ones have built in inverters and USB ports. I’d take one of those over the ConSci for its capacity and greater versatility.

Nice to see, though, that this thing still work and the battery hasnt cooked itself after being left on the charger for twenty years.

MH – 25 years later

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There used to be a gun/outdoor store in this town that did a ”sidewalk sale’ every year. They would set up tents in the parking lot, put tons of merchandise out there, and have a sale. Problem was, when the store closed at night you couldnt just leave all that stuff out in the parking lot unprotected. Thats where I came in. I would sit out there all night in a lawn chair keeping an eye on the stuff in exchange for store credit. I then took that store credit and cleaned them out of some of their leftover Y2K Mountain House inventory. Mind you, this was all around 2000-2001.

So, I have a bunch of MH in #10 cans that I have been sitting on for about 25 years. In the time I’ve added to my MH stash quite considerably, so it’s not a hardship to pull out one of those cans, crack it open, and see how it fared.

I am not the first guy to do that. Friend Of The Blog(tm) [And friend of Gun Jesus] Joel, over at his blog, cracked open some old MH and had mixed-but-generally-good experiences.

I’ve no doubt that this stuff is going to be just fine but I have a chance here to do a little empirical data-gathering so why not? Lets go!

The sales tag on it indicates that it was put out for sale sometime in 1999, which makes sense since it was part of that stores attempt to cash in on the Y2K thing. The date stamping on the bottom of the can confirms that, yes, this stuff is a quarter century old.

Grabbing a can opener and removing the lid shows….ghostly white pasta. The pasta, being larger than the other components of this meal, sit on the top of the can and the smaller components have migrated to the bottom.

So, lets dump the whole can into a bowl and stir it up.

The contents of the can appeared just fine and smelled unremarkable. The powdered cheese and tomatoe mix had caked a bit at the bottom of the can but it broke up easily.

The instructions call for 3/4 cup of boiling water to one cup of food, and then letting it sit for 5 to 10 minutes. Okay, lets do that.

The final result, after five minutes, was this. I really should have let it sit for ten minutes but I figured I’d follow the instructions at their minimum.

The big question: how was it? It was fine. It wasn’t as spicy as the modern spaghett-with-meat-sauce that MH has out these days. It had a very faint ‘tinny’ aftertaste but I think thats actually the normal flavor. Was it edible? Yeah, as best I can tell. I mean, I guess I’ll have to report back in 12 hours. The taste was about what I expected… pretty much on par with your average Chef Boyardee product. After a long day of hanging looters, manning the roadblocks, and digging out of the rubble, this would be a fine meal.

So, yeah, it seemed to hold up just fine. The can had sat on a shelf in my basement since Y2K. The temperature down there was fairly consistent…never getting below freezing in the winter, and never getting over 70 in the summer. It was, pretty much, kept in the classic “cool dark place”.

The tag on the can indicates that it was about $32 for this can back in ’99. I’m an MH dealer, so I can see that todays dealer price for this same product is currently $29.50 per can. Amazon shows it for about $53, which is pretty close the 100% markup on MSRP for Mountain House cans. If you want to amortize it, it comes out to about $1.28 per year to have it sit there all this time.

What was i expecting? Actually, pretty much this. I’ve read reports from people opening even older cans of MH and finding it just fine. It really does appear that the 30-year shelf life on these products is pretty much spot on.

I’ve added more recent production MH into my supplies over the last few years so I have no probem ‘wasting’ this, one of my oldest cans of food. Its quite worth it to me to confirm what I’ve believed all along about the longevity of the MH products.

So, there you go, guys. Buy the cans and you can be pretty certain of at least 25 years of life…although I have no doubt that it’d be just fine for at least another five or ten years on top of that.

Lightsticks over the doorway II

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A fairly common survivalist practice – setting a lightstick on top of the doorway to a room so its always there if you need it when the power goes out. Nothing special there. But, like all things on a long enough timeline, those lightsticks have an expiration date. Based on my personal experience, I usually ignore that expiration date…as long as the lightsticks were in a cool dry place (like the inside of my house) they should be fine. But, lets test that.

Heck, only 19 years past expiration……….

I did a round up of lightsticks and pulled a few out of the pile to try out. They foil packages were dusty, but everything seemed okay on the inside.

No leaks. Nothing broken. Vials inside the plastic tubes are fine. All looks good. Other than chemical degradation over almost twenty years, there shuldn’t be any reason these shouldn’t work.  But, I didnt come all this way for theory. Lets crack these in half and see what does (or does not) happen:

As I 99.99% expected – they work fine. I suppose I should revisit them in a few hours and see how much life they have left in them but for my uses these are strictly short-term illumination devices. I use them to find my way to a real flashlight or lamp, or theyre for marking something.

I ordered some newer ones of Amazon a few days ago and they got here today, so I’ll be replacing these (much) older one. But its nice to know that after sitting in situ for almost two decades they work just fine. YMMV, of course, but I’m confident that these things will last far beyond their prescribed expiration.

I also keep a couple of these in my larger first aid kits, my generator supply box, and anywhere I think I might some lighting in an emergency when nothing else is available. These things are never a first choice, but for a source of light that is explosion-proof, water-proof, wind-proof, and will work when batteries have self depleted ten years ago.good choice. Cheap insurance for about a buck and a half each.

ETA: keep in mind, not all lightsticks are made by the same people. If you buy some Made In China lightsticks versus, say, the actual  Cyalume product, you may get different results.