Nuqneh - Member - The Prepared

Reply to: Altoids First Aid Kit Posted March 2, 2024

I have an Altoids first aid kit similar to yours, it fits great in my purse or camelback for hiking. We get OTC meds in the single dose packs, so I’m able to add some anti-diarrhea pills.

Reply to: Framework for Prepping Posted September 28, 2023

Years ago I heard in a podcast (sorry I don’t remember the name!) that you should prepare for when things go wrong, but also for when things go right. I believe the example given was to not spend all your retirement savings stocking up on ammo, but the advice extends to other non extreme situations. I think it means balance your life, and don’t let prepping take over. My daughter wanted to take archery lessons and I quickly signed her up, but she also wants to learn to play golf, so I signed her up for that too. As another suburban mom, I also have to assess what will work for me and my family and what won’t. We will never have a fully self sufficient homestead. I assess what disasters we’re likely to face – power outages, extreme heat and cold, tornadoes, wildfires, supply shortages – and how to minimize if not fully mitigate them. With my preps I can live more comfortably and if there’s a disaster I can wait patiently for services to be restored.

Reply to: Prepping books Posted September 28, 2023

I highly recommend “The Resilient Gardener” by Carol Deppe. It focuses on only 6 crops – beans, corn, potatoes, squash, and eggs – to maintain nutrition and calorie needs. I feel like everything else in the garden would be for tastiness and variety (which is also important!) It also provides a lot of advice for maintaining your crops when you have a personal disaster – you’re injured or just getting older or have to care for someone else and can’t prioritize your garden.

Reply to: Don’t forget the smaller everyday safety items, even when you prep for the big ones Posted February 15, 2023

Mine isn’t a life or death prep, but it’s a handy one. My husband gave me a tiny (but powerful!) flashlight that I hung on my work lanyard. There was some kind of power interruption a few weeks ago, and the big windowless building I work in went black. Granted, the emergency lights came on after a few seconds, but the darkness was long enough for everyone to wonder how they were going to find the doors, stairs, and exits.

Reply to: How would you prep with an EV? Posted November 6, 2022

So my truck can power another EV, it’s just sloooooooowww. There are companies working on adding recharging to roadside assistance. They aren’t quite there yet, but I’m of the opinion that the best way to build infrastructure is to create a need. Necessity being the mother of invention and all. 😊

Reply to: How would you prep with an EV? Posted November 6, 2022

My family recently went all EV. We’ve had a Tesla for four years, and we just got an F150 Lightning. Driving the Tesla for so long has helped us overcome our EV anxiety. We have chargers on the house, and the vehicles are set to charge overnight. So we wake up each morning with a “full tank.” We have charging adapters and accounts for all the major charging networks, so if we have to evacuate we have multiple options to recharge. We can also recharge at RV parks or camp grounds (which is what we do when we go camping.) Our house has solar panels and Tesla Powerwalls. We could recharge from the solar, but we have a small roof with a small array. On a good day we generate 25 kWh, and the car full is 75, the truck 135. The truck is advertised as having the ability to power our house (and has more storage capacity than the Powerwalls), but our electrician looked at our current set up and backed away. The city says we’ll likely need a commercial rather than residential electrician. We can run an extension cord to the truck from the house, haha. I live in Texas, and we’re all still shell shocked from the week without power 2 years ago. The most asked question we get is what will we do if it happens again. Well, gas stations don’t work without electricity either, and either of my vehicles can make it to Oklahoma if Texas’s grid crashes. I also don’t have to worry about the next manufactured gas shortage when another hurricane hits the refineries in the Gulf

Reply to: AC Apocalypse. Whatcha gonna do? Posted July 13, 2022

We keep a spare capacitor for the AC in our pantry. Our neighborhood experiences power surges fairly regularly, and those will blow out the capacitor. This year it happened on July 2, when temps were over 100 and everyone was closed for the holiday. Took my husband 20 minutes to replace the capacitor and get the AC back up and running. This is probably the 3rd or 4th time it’s happened in 5-10 years. Capacitors are cheap, and the electrical connections straightforward.

Reply to: You can never stock too much _________ Posted April 8, 2022

Band-Aids. I make sure all the first aid kits are stocked with gauze and tape and things for more serious injuries, but the majority of the time I just need a Band-Aid. When my daughter was a toddler, she loved the fun character band-aids. Her godmother got her over 400 for Christmas. We finally had plenty of band-aids, even with my daughter using them as body stickers or for toy first aid. Character band-aids are now my go-to toddler gift.

Reply to: What can we learn from the war in Ukraine? Posted March 6, 2022

My BOB is a backpacking backpack, but for travel I have one of those backpacks that has wheels, so I have the option of wearing it or pulling it behind me like a wheelie-suitcase. I was thinking of turning it into my BOB so if I did have to abandon my car, I could take a break from wearing the bag. Of course, the wheels would only work on paved roads, but its at least an option.

Reply to: How we can teach children and youth prepping skills Posted March 25, 2021

My daughter is only 5, and she “helped” pack her BOB (or had a rave with the extra glowsticks). We’ve talked to her about why we have a tornado shelter, and about my cousins who lost their house in a wildfire. We answer all her questions, like “What will we do with the stray cat we feed?” and “What if I lose all my toys?” We’ve also explained the shortages at the grocery store, and why we can’t always go buy more milk. My parents weren’t preppers per se, but we lived in the rural Appalachians, so everyone was a prepper to some degree. I think the most impactful moment for me what when I was in high school, and a bunch of my friends and I were hanging out at someone’s house. A snowstorm came in, and none of us could drive home. The friend’s mom just shrugged and said she had a freezer full of pizza and a closet full of blankets and pillows, so we all ended up staying there for the next day. These days I impress my husband by always having all the ingredients on hand to whip up any dinner or dessert he suggests.

Reply to: Let’s talk Texas – how to prep your home for extreme cold Posted February 20, 2021

I think the most important thing I learned during this disaster is when to leave. We knew the storm was coming, so on Saturday we got groceries, brought extra firewood inside, fully charged the Powerwall, etc. We woke up on Monday with no power. Not unexpected, its a blizzard after all. We piled on layers and managed our battery power. We nailed blankets over doorways. We had plenty of preps for food and water. Our wifi went out when the batteries were empty, and cell service had also gone out. We got a ladder and broom to sweep snow off the solar panels to try and get some power for wifi. We were able to contact friends and family. My mother-in-law, who lives out of state, checked on the power outages, but there were no estimated uptimes. Some friends had power, some did not. The ones that did reported rolling blackouts that lasted 15 minutes, then 45 minutes, then their power did not return. When the inside temp was in the 60s, we built a fire in the fireplace. Our fireplace is designed to vent the heat up the chimney, but we could huddle around the hearth and play board games with our daughter. We piled extra blankets on the bed and the 3 of us piled in. I was confident the power would come back overnight, and Monday would just be an annoyance. We woke up Tuesday morning and it was 44 degrees in our house. Luckily a friend nearby had power, but no water. We took jugs of water to her place and stayed there. On Wednesday night, 2.5 days after the outages and blackouts started, while the temps were in the single digits, the power company gave an estimated uptime: days. People were advised to seek someplace warm. One friend moved his family into a hotel Monday morning, when he saw that the firewood he planned to use all day for heat was nearly gone by 11 am. He got one of the last rooms in the hotel. Friends who waited until Tuesday morning could not find any hotel rooms at all. Some had to drive over 60 miles, on snowy, icy roads, to stay with friends or family. Luckily they had gassed up their cars, because gas stations either had no power or were empty. As preppers we like to be self-sufficient, and we like to think we can handle anything. But sometimes the right move is to go find help.

Reply to: Let’s talk Texas – how to prep your home for extreme cold Posted February 17, 2021

I’m in DFW, and we have multiple warming stations. I’ve heard Houston has several as well. Of course the roads are still covered in snow and ice.

Reply to: Let’s talk Texas – how to prep your home for extreme cold Posted February 17, 2021

I’m in Texas, and as a friend said, I’m no longer leaning into this adventure. I’ve already been calling my elected officials from City Council up to Senator about this failure, and I’m attending a meeting this Saturday on lobbying the Legislature to enact ERCOT reform. I live in a suburb. My house is all electric, no gas lines in my neighborhood. My problem is heat. Our power was out for 34 hours, and the house got down to 44 degrees inside. Still warmer than some, but not good. We have a wood burning fireplace, but its built for ambiance and actually makes the room colder rather than warmer. We are planning on buying an insert this week to fix that. We have solar panels on our roof, and 3 Tesla Powerwalls that hold 12 kW each. We have a heat pump, but it only works above 40 degrees. It was around 2 degrees Monday, and our furnace pulls 15 kW per hour. We turned off the furnace and ran a couple space heaters, the fridge, and the wifi router, but the Powerwalls were empty after about half a day. After the storm ended, we were able to sweep snow off of half of the solar panels, and got enough to continue running wifi, but we didn’t even plug in space heaters. It was a cloudy day, and we were hoping to fill the Powerwalls up enough to run the heat for 10 minutes in the evening. Verizon’s LTE network went down, so wifi was our only communication. We’ve got blankets nailed over doorways, and we’re wrapped up in layers. I’m not really interested in storing propane for a space heater that we use once every 5-10 years. Any suggestions other than the fireplace insert?

Reply to: What did covid-19 expose as a weakness in your preps? Posted May 15, 2020

I typically just wipe down doorknobs and light switches and stuff with a microfiber cloth. The only disinfecting product I had approved for COVID was a half a bottle of Lysol Bathtub cleaner. I used it to clean the surfaces when we started lockdown, and all I’ve been able to find since is another bottle of the same stuff. I stocked up on food about a week before everyone started freaking out here, but I never thought of household cleaning supplies. Overall we’ve been very comfortable moving into quarantine and haven’t wanted for much. I do need to reconsider my duct tape supply though. My 5 year old has gone through 1.5 rolls building a cardboard fort in the living room.