Tag Archives: fuel

Fuel can tags

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I looked for it but couldn’t the post I had about the tags I use for fuel cans. So…let’s do that again.

Here’s the thing: I store my fuel cans outside. Usually under some type of cover, but always outside. Since I try to rotate fuel on a fairly regular basis, I need to know when a particular can of fuel was filled. Any written paper tags would disintegrate from moisture, plastic tags would crack and fade from sun and UV, chalk marks are wildly temporary, and that really leaves only one option – metal tags.

Here’s what I do. It works for me, it might work for you. YMMV.

Tools and materials:

  • Pointy thing..nail, screwdriver, etc.
  • Empty pop/beer can
  • Pair of scissors you don’t mind getting dull
  • A few inches of paracord

I cut up a pop can and get myself a piece of aluminum about 1″x2″. Pick a size that works for you.

Put the aluminum flat on a firm but somewhat yielding surface…a piece of wood, a phone book, etc. Using the pointy object, scrive the date into the soft aluminum. Punch a hole in the tag youve just created and loop the paracord through it.

Tie tag onto fuel can.

End of story.

I’m sure someone is going to say “I just write the date on a piece of duct tape with a Sharpie and slap it on the gas can. Works fine because I keep my fuel cans in a garage/shed/bunker/etc.” Well yay for you. Thing is, you don’t know with absolute certainty those cans will always be in that sheltered location until such time as you use them. You may have to hurriedly heave them in the back of your truck at 3am on some rainy night, or leave them sitting in the snow for a few hours as you shuttle them to another location, or you may have to store them outside for some reason. Point is, to my way of thinking it makes sense to plan around the more-worse case scenarios. I keep my gas cans as covered and protected as possible…but the real world has a way of throwing a monkey wrench into plans…so, for me: metal date tags that are impervious to sun,UV, moisture, snow, etc. And, yeah, I could ziptie them to the gas cans but then we’re bag to the UV/sun/freezing damage that occurs to plastics…paracord works for me although a true suspenders-and-a-belt guy will use a twist of wire to affix the tags to the can.

This has been your DIY tip for the week.

Pipeline musings of things to come

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‘Tis the weekend, so its time to go grocery shopping. Realistically, there is very  little I need from grocery shopping these days…the house is full of food. I t ink I picked up some butter and that was really about it. :::shrug::: Food is money in the bank.

Speaking of money, I saw that the pipeline fiasco back east wound up with people getting paid off after all. Wanna bet that the oil company will quietly either get a $5m tax deduction or .gov quietly paid the $5m ransom for them to prevent major chaos? Either way, a buncha guys in a basement in Russia just inspired everyone on the planet to get into the hack-the-infrastructure business.

The days of having to cripple a country by carpet bombing and boots-on-the-ground are waning. A buncha guys in the Utah desert can fly RC planes over Iran, and a buncha basement dwellers in Minsk can cut off a fuel pipeline in the US. Push-button warfare indeed.

You know the saying about how amateurs talk tactics but professionals talk logistics? That tells you that logistics is just as paramount as everything else…heck, even Napoleon agreed when he famously stated that an army marches on it’s stomach. The Germans tried it WW2 by torpedoing every supply convoy it could find.You don’t have to get your hands terribly bloody to throw a country into turmoil these days…you just cutoff the pipeline valve controls, lock the floodgates open, turn all the traffic lights to green, shutoff all the runway lights, and power down all the telecommunications relays.

I suspect we’re going to experience more of that sort of thing although we probably won’t hear about much of it. Heck, for all I know we’ve experienced it a buncha times recently and it was dismissed in the media as something else. After all, it doesn’t do the .gov any good for the people to know just how vulnerable the systems really are. They  might wana know why their tax money isn’t going towards keeping things secure.

So, the lesson here is that when people can bloodlessly shut down a system from halfway across the planet, with minimal risk to yourself, and a potentially huge payday, you’re going to see a lot more of that sort of thing. So..be prepared for it. It took only a couple days for people to turn into savages fighting in gas lines. Why be there if you don’t have to be? Store enough fuel to meet your needs for at least a couple weeks. I keep about two months worth of gasoline on hand, based on my average usage.

But, most importantly, this is a harbinger of things to come. Compromised infrastructure that leads to calls for .gov to ‘do something’ and the next thing you know Uncle Sam is keeping his thumb down even tighter on ‘public services’.

The news just gets more and more interesting, doesnt it?

FlexSeal and gas cans

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This is turning into quite the series of posts, isn’t it? I’d mentioned that I’d used a spray-coating on the bottom of my gas cans in order to protect the base of the cans from paint-removing scrapes and the resultant rust that would occur. I had done this before the arrival of Flex Seal which is, basically, spray on rubber coating. Seemed logical to go ahead and try it out on the new cans.

So, we take a new can and do a poor job of taping off the edge of where we want to spray:

Hit it with a goodly amount of FlexSeal and let it dry:

Seems to be just what the doctor ordered.

We can haz can

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This was in the comments earlier.

Well, two is one so four must be two, right? I ordered up a four pack, w/ gasket and spout, for $241, w/ ‘free shipping’. (In quotes because, really, shipping isn’t free…they just fold it into the price.)

Anyway…ordered up this afternoon and had a FedEx tracking number four hours later. So..fingers corssed, but looks like a decent deal that is good to go.

Since I’m beating the topic of fuel cans to death with these last few posts, lets get all the fuel can related stuff done:

Spouts v. Funnels – I don’t usually bother with spouts. Unless they fit and seal perfectly 100% of the time (which they never do) they are just a bother. I use long, plastic funnels that you can usually pick up at an automotive store for five or six bucks. I buy one for every two fuel cans and paracord them onto one can so they are always there. (I am told, but have not tried it, that you can improvise a funnel in a pinch from a plastic pop bottle.) Some people prefer to use a siphon pump of some type, and they certainly have merit if you have trouble holding a 40# jug of gas at sternum height for the time required to fill your tank. I don’t have that problem (yet) so I just use a funnel.

Date tags – Anything you write on is going to fade in the sun and rain. I cut a small metal tag of soft aluminum from a pop can and use a nail to ‘engrave’ the date on the tag. Tag gets corded to the can so I know how old the gas is. Its worked quite well for me.

Can preservation – the bottom of the can comes into contact with the ground, concrete, truck bed, etc. That constant contact, impact, and friction will wear and chip the paint away after a while exposing bare metal. I bought a spray can of that rubber coating they use for ..well..whatever you normally rubber coat…and sprayed the the bottom third of the cans all around. (Didn’t have it when I originally did it, but FlexSeal would probably work well for this.)  It doesnt change the dimensions of the can enough to cause problems fitting in a gas can rack or holder, but it protects the bottom of the can from damage and moisture.

Lock and cable – Gas cans will walk away under the most benign and peaceful circumstance. In a crisis, when everyone needs fuel, they’ll fly outta your truck the minute your back is turned. I use a bike cable and a ‘Sesame’-type padlock to keep things from going away. I dislike keyed locks because the keys are a failure point. Yes, these types of locks are susceptible to picking but so is a keyed lock. When I need to grab fuel and go, go, go, I don’t want to be scrambling for keys. And don’t say “Just keep the key on the same ring as the truck key”. There are plenty of scenarios where I’d need the fuel but not the vehicle, so having the truck keys with me at that moment is not a sure thing. Or I have the keys and am elsewhere and someone needs the fuel outta the truck. And its easier to tell someone a combination in texting or over the phone than it is to arrange a key drop.

Cover – Up to you, but a cover of some type to protect things and perhaps conceal them a bit might be in order. Google “jerry can cover” and you’ll see a nice mix of ideas and products. Getting outta Dodge, in your Dodge, is a lot easier when the five jerry cans ratcheted against the tailgate in the back of your truck are obscured or hidden from view by some type of non-gas-can looking cover.

STFU – When it really comes down to a crisis where people are desperate for fuel, you really don’t want everyone in the neighborhood knowing you have some tucked away. It doesnt have to be TEOTWAWKI….even something as mundane as a blizzard or hurricane can put your neighbors on your doorstep asking (or demanding) ‘just a little bit’ of your fuel. Only you know the level of discretion and camouflage youre going to want. What you don’t want is every idiot in the area coming by because they bought a generator ‘just in case’ and completely neglected the fuel side of things.

Stabilizer – I’ve gone over this a buncha times but short version is: I use PRI-G. Stabil probably works just as well but I’ve read more good things about PRI-G than I have Stabil. Really, either one will work but I’ve used PRI-G and since I’ve never had any problems, even with six year old gas treated with the stuff, that’s good enough for me.

Inspection – You absolutely must do this. Must. MUST. I’ve had surplus military cans that were quite serviceable but had a dent or two here and there. After a couple years of expansion/contraction from being out in the heat/cold there would sometimes be a pinhole leak develop if the dent exposed the metal, it got rusty, and time went on. Inspect every can, especially the bottoms. Try to store them on a surface that lets air flow beneath them. If at all possible, store them in a manner that protects them from weather exposure and ground moisture. Heck, build a little ‘gas can coop’ or something. I built a rack out of 2×4 that is nothing more than a crib that holds five cans side-by-side a few inches off the ground. I cover them with a vinyl shower curtain and use a couple bicycle inner tubes as giant rubber bands to keep the vinyl wrapped around them,. Cover with a camo tarp and call it a day.

And although it is only tangentially related, when it comes to fuel for your vehicle, I always give a 50% margin. For example, if I have 10 gallons of gas and my vehicle gets 15 mpg, the math would say those two five-gallon cans will get me 150 miles of distance towards (or away from) whatever I need. I err on the side of extreme caution and calculate 50% of that… I figure between idling in traffic, having to backtrack, take detours, getting lost, having to ‘take the long way’, and all the other possibilities of what could go wrong ‘bugging out’, I’ll be using a lot more fuel than I would in ‘peace time’ to cover the same distance. So..I build in a 50% margin.

I’ll post about the arrival of the cans when they get here. Pretty confident these will be just what the Zero needs to continue the relentless slog towards resilience, but we’ll know for sure this weekend. (Assuming FedEx does their part.)
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#NotAHypocrite

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Well…actually…I am a hypocrite on far too many things. But, this time I took my own advice:

Two brand new gen-you-eyn Wavian ‘Euro/NATO’ fuel cans. Why? Because there was literally, to my mind, no good reason not to. Availability of the cans is spotty, prices ain’t gonna go down, no one is ever sorry to have an extra ten gallons of fuel onhand, the world still isn’t getting any safer, and I had the cash available. So….yeah. It’s one of those purchases that I will have absolutely zero regrets on.

Gas rotation

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With the uncertainty about just how severe the Wuhan Flu would be last year, I laid in a bit more gasoline than normal. As it turns out, so far, gas was’t a problem in my region. So…time to rotate….half a tank  of stored gas (vintage June 2020), half a tank of fresh gas, and we’re good to go. The stored gas gets replaced with fresh gas and a dose of PRI-G (which I recommend highly) and gets tucked away for the upcoming apocalypse.

As an aside, there are some folks who say that fuel treatments like Stabil and PRI-G are snake oil and that your fuel, if stored in a sealed metal can with no air in it, will store just fine. Perhaps. But for just a few pennies I don’t feel taken advantage of by using a fuel stabilizer that may-or-may-not make a difference. Five AM on the side of a highway during a rainstorm is no time to discover that the spare gas in the back of the truck is bad and you ain’t goin’ anywhere. I have used gas that was as old as six years with no ill effects. Maybe it’s snake oil, but it’s not worth the headache for me to find out empirically.

Also, as I’ve mentioned repeatedly, for storage where having good fuel means the difference between a disaster and an inconvenience, always go for the ‘Euro/NATO’-style cans. The real ones. Not the Chinese crap. They are wildly expensive but when you need gas to get you and your family to safety it’s gonna be cheap, cheap, cheap.

Don’t cheap out and get plastic gas cans. Don’t cheap out and get bargain “NATO-style’ cans made in China. Don’t cheap out and get metal Blitz cans. Spend $75-90 per can and get the real deal. Here’s why:
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I know that a lot of people use the Scepter cans, or they’ll swear theyve never had a problem with the Blitz cans. You do you, I’ll do me. For me, I won’t store gas in anything other than one of the high-end NATO-style of cans. I want to avoid as much risk as possible and if that means paying $85 for a freaking gas can….I’m cool with that. Why? Because if its something that my safety, security, well-being, and maybe even my life is going to depend on…why would you try to cut corners? I don’t buy discount parachutes, I don’t buy plastic gas cans.

Cold weather musings

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The problem with having had a relatively mild winter is that when we actually get seasonably correct temperatures it feels so much worse. Case in point – this winter had been quite mild..I don’t recall it getting below 20 degreese at all. And yesterday..*bam!*…it was -1 degrees. And it felt like it.

Everyone want to live in a place like Wyoming or Montana or Idaho when they think about being a survivalist, but it seems not everyone thinks through the fact that it’s going to be bloody hard to stay warm during an apocalypse. Sure, you can have a couple 500-gallon propane tanks or 500-gallon oil tanks hidden away on your property, but at some point you’re going to have to think about staying warm using other resources hat aren’t dependent on a functioning system of infrastructure.

When I eventually get Commander Zero’s Bunker O’ Love And Lingerie Proving Ground built at the Beta Site it’s going to have to take this sort of thing into account. The obvious answer is a woodstove of some kind but, geez, thats gonna be a lot of wood to chop for a bad winter. Of course, the smart thing to do would be to optimize things so that while you may be burning wood you are at least doing it efficiently….good insulation in the building, an efficient stove, a system to move hot air around, a way to isolate unheated rooms, etc, etc.

I suppose if it truly is Ragnarok and all youre concerned with is just staying alive with no regard to style and normalcy you could just shut down al your household systems, pile into one small room of the house, and dedicate whatever resources you have to just heating that one room. I like to think that with a bit of planning, engineering, and thinking, I could come up with some sort of redundant systems to heat a ‘getaway’ cabin. But, I suspect the real efficiency and utility comes long before you start installing heat sources…it comes when you start building the structure and get in your insulation, ductwork, weather-resistant entry/egress points (doors,windows), etc. If I really think about it, I suppose the smart thing to do in any future construction is to design one of the rooms of the building to be the ‘lifeboat’ room…in a crisis it would be the one room to have power, heat, and water when the rest of the building has to be shut down.

Anyway, nothing like 0-degree weather to put on e in the frame of mind of “Hmm…how would I heat this place if the utilities went off today?” The answer, by the way, for me in the short term is kerosene. Long terms is a completely different story, but for the short term of a few days to a few weeks, I likes me the kerosene. Highest BTU’s of any fuel, stores forever with no treatment, can be used in stoves, heaters, and lamps, is portable, and won’t explode. Good stuff.

Propane and propane accessories

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Wanna start a nice little flamewar in a discussion group? .45 vs 9mm, AR vs AK, etc, etc. One that I’m curious about is, if you were going to build your middle-of-nowhere bolthole how would you power it? Gas? Propane? Oil? Turbines?

I really like the idea of propane since its shelf life is the same as the tank that holds it. It heats, runs generators, and can even fuel a vehicle. But, as someone pointed out to me, you can’t walk down the road with a five-gallon bucket and borrow/barter some propane from a neighbor like you can diesel or gasoline.

And, as Friend Of The Blog Harry would tell you…there’s that little matter of the guy with the propane truck navigating the jeep trail up to your place. I wonder if a fella could just mount the tank on a trailer and bring it to town once a year to get filled.

I suppose the smart survivalist would go with the whole Rule Of Three and set things up for propane, diesel, and some other third energy source.

What got me thinking about this? I was up at CostCo yesterday and as I was tooling around through the spring-is-here section of outdoor furniture and whatnot they had 20# barbecue bombs on sale. Hmm. I have two that I use for rotating on my BBQ but it’s never a bad idea to have more. So, in the cart they went.

I have only a few items that run on propane…a Volcano grill, the usual heater, and a little geegaw to let me fill 1# bottles.

Still, propane seems a convenient way to fuel a household without worrying about fuel degradation, algae, the caprices of wind and sun,  and that sort of thing. On the other hand, the ability to easily transport and redistribute liquid fuel has a lot going for it as well. Hmmm.

When I finally get Rancho Ballistica (aka Commander Zero’s Post-Nuclear Bunker O’ Love and Lingerie Proving Ground) up and running I’ll have to make some choices. I’ll have to decide on things by then. Opinions?

Kerosene and the ghost of Y2K

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Well, I think I’m pretty much done on buying kerosene for the rest of my life. Last time I bought kerosene was here. That was an awesome deal.

Was tooling through Craigslist (when? When will I learn??) and, lo and behold, a fella selling 14 5-gallon drums of kero. For those of you who went to public government schools, that’s 70 gallons. Or, if you’re in a country that never put a man on the moon, 265 liters.

20170801_101755The fella was asking way, way, too much for the stuff so I made him an offer. Wound up getting it for $200…a tad under $3/gallon. (ok, fine….$2.86/gallon).

I  love kerosene…it burns hottest of the liquid fuels, keeps forever with no special treatment, is safe to store, and has a nice market of stoves, lamps, and heaters out there.

My anticipated use? Well, it’s winter for a good chunk of the year here and it would be nice to keep the house toasty in the event of a power outage. Most likely these will go into storage with the last batch of 5-gallon drums I bought. There they will wait until the day when it’s dark, cold, and dreary and I shall have light, heat, and hot food.

Here’s the interesting part… I met the guy, a rather old gentleman who, sadly, was dying of cancer, and as I was moving the cans out of his rather neat and nicely stocked garage I asked him why he had so much of it. His reply was that it was his leftover Y2K stash. Apparently he’d gone long on Y2K stuff. I suspected as much as I looked around his garage and saw the rifle cases, cases of ammo, etc, etc. All the hallmarks of someone who is on the same page. We chatted a bit about the Y2K thing and about how we’d rather have it and not need it, etc, etc. I thanked him for the deal and assured him it was going to a home that shared his concerns and mindset.

I also told him that if he had any other Y2K leftovers he wanted to sell, to please keep me in mind.

So for those of you who wonder how you meet like-minded individuals, there’s another example.

I did the math to figure out how may gallons of kerosene I have in storage and I think I may have actually gone a tad heavier than I planned. I’m going to have to contact a few of the LMI and see if they want some…I don’t think I really need more than 100 gallons for any forseeable emergency.

 

Gas can fillup

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Im trying to fill the few empty gas cans I have before the ‘winter blend’ of gasoline hits the streets. There’s a couple gas stations around town that will, in winter, have blends that are free of the MTBE and other nonsense, but that gas is labelled as snowmobile gas or some such. Personally, I have no problem with buying untaxed gas since it’s mostly for use in my generator or other gas appliances anyway…but, you never know when that 5-gallon can is going to have to go into the truck rather than the snowblower.

Speaking of gas cans, I should probably suck it up and order another package of them from Lexington supply. Fifty bucks a throw isn’t cheap, but when you absolutely need fuel for your generator to get you and your family moved to safety in your truck…well, fifty bucks is gonna seem like a bargain.I hate the plastic gas cans, and the Chinese knock-offs (I’m looking at you, Sportsmans Guide!) are bad news. If youre going to drop a grand on a quality generator, even more money on the critical equipment to be powered by that generator, and the trouble and expense of storing all that…..why would you cheap out on gas cans when the difference is about $25~ per can? Do it right the first time, man.

I skip using the nozzles altogether on these things. For me, they just never seem to work right. I buy a handful of these funnels by Blitz, and para cord one to every other gas can. Works awesome. Dose the can with some PRI-G, fill with gas (in that order..so the gas mixes with the PRI-G), attach a weatherproof tag with the date of fillup, and you’re good to go. The stuff will be good for the next year or two. (I generally try to rotate every year.)

What about the Scepter cans? What about ’em? I don’t trust plastic cans for stuff that can explode. I have faith in the metal ‘euro-style’ cans.


When you show me a plastic can that can handle that sort of action, then I’ll consider it. until then..I’ll pay the money for the peace of mind.

How much gas to store? Depends on what you plan on doing with it. First and foremost, to me, gas=distance. If I think that its, say, 300 miles to a rally point, safe house, friends homestead, or other safe location, then I want 600 miles worth of gas. (Yes, I want that big a margin of error.) Assuming 15 mpg, thats 40 gallons or 8 fuel cans. In a perfect world, I’d get to my safe zone with just four cans used. But the world aint perfect, it’s doubly unperfect in a disaster…which is why I want a huge margin of error for detours, idling in traffic, turnarounds, switchbacks, and out-and-out getting lost)

Same story for the generator…calculate runtime per gallon, figure what your average need will be, and then factor in a whopping margin of safety.

Anyway…today was the day to get the empty cans filled before he changeover to that enviro-friendly crap. If you live someplace where they do a similar switchover, you may want to think about getting your stuff topped off.