Tag Archives: storage

The utility of vacuum sealers

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Fella I know, who is getting started in the realm of preparedness had his birthday earlier this month.  I got him what I think is one of the best gifts you can get a fellow survivalist: a vacuum sealer. For the record, the best gift you can probably get for a survivalist is a huge chunk of land in the middle of nowhere. For this survivalist, the best gift you can get is a slightly drunk and mildly self-esteem-challenged Jennifer Lawrence. Or, if you’re on a budget, her body double.

Thing is, most people have a very narrow view of what a vacuum sealer is good for. In fact, the gift was met with a ‘my freezer is already full’ response. A lot of folks, in my experience, don’t think creatively about the uses for one of these things that have nothing to do with food. So, lemme mention a few of the non-food things I do with mine and maybe it’ll send you down a new road of thought in regard to using yours. (Or getting one.)

  •  Compressing high-loft items of clothing so they take up less space in a pack
  • Preventing powdered items from clumping – The cleanser that comes in the cardboard cans? I put each can into a bag and vaccuum seal it so that after years of sitting on the shelf it hasn’t drawn moisture and caked into a rock-like consistency.
  • Water bottles that get left in the vehicle in the winter are vacuum sealed in a bag so if the plastic bottle does explode from freezing (which almost never happens) any leakage is contained. And the water is still potable.
  • All the fire-starting materials in my hunting/bushwhacking packs are vacuum sealed to keep them dry, clean, and in one place.
  • Small first aid items get vacuum sealed for rather obvious reasons.
  • Critical documents are vacuum sealed so they are protected from moisture, wet, etc. For example, my birth certificate(s) and passport(s) are sealed up and sitting in the safe. (Uhm..yeah…plural….I know a guy…)
  • In the Pelican case I keep in the winter vehicle kit there is an an entire change of clothes that has been vacuum sealed to consere space and keep the clothing clean and dry so that in an emergency it’s ready to use.
  • Bulk first aid gear that would normally take up space gets vacuum sealed to allow me to pack more of it in a smaller space, as well as to protect it.
  • Have a dog? Dog food MRE’s. Phydeaux’s kibble and treats packed into individual servings.
  • Toilet paper that you keep in the truck or at the cabin. If you’re putting together a bugout bin or kit you really, really wanna make sure the TP is protected.
  • Medications in tablet form. Most pills come in plastic bottles that offer good protection, but a lot of stuff comes in blister packs and although you’d think those foil and plastic sheets would offer good protection…not always. So, into the sealer they go. Try to keep stuff in original packaging when you do this…last thin you want is a little vacuum sealed bag of unidentified pills laying around with nothing to tell you what they are or how much to take. And the cops really get curious when large quantities of pills are loose in a plastic bag.
  • Bars of soap. Bar soap seems to ossify over time. Seal ’em up so theyre still useful years later.
  • Road flares. Seal ’em up, wrap in cardboard to protect the integrity of the plastic bag, and tuck ’em away in your vehicle. Wet flares are the literal damp squib at a rescue.
  • Small electronics that absolutely need to be protected. Handheld radios get vacuum sealed with dessicant and then tucked away in a protective case of some kind. Suspenders and a belt, perhaps… but its an extra step that costs virtually nothing and makes sure that you have communications when you really, really need it. And thats worth pretty much anything.
  • Batteries. Water and batteries do not mix..at least, not in a good way. I store batteries in plastic tubs but I also vacuum seal the large CostCo-sized bulk packs of batteries.

The list goes on, but I think you get the idea. And, yeah, they are also handy for food as well. If you haven’t bought one already, do yourself a favor and don’t cheap out. Yeah, there are some models that are $50-$75. Skip them. This is not the kind of item you want to cut corners on. Get the Foodsaver brand, not the Cabelas, not the Walmart, not the other brand you’ve never heard of. Get the Foodsaver branded rolls of material as well. Plan on spending about $200. I absolutely promise you that it will be the best $200 you can spend on preparedness gear. Do it.

 

Article – The Food Expiration Dates You Should Actually Follow

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From the NY Times. If you can’t get to it because of a paywall, try clearing your browsers cache and then try the link again. Or open a different browser and cut/paste the link.

With most of us quarantined in our homes, chances are you’ve been reacquainting yourself with the forgotten spices and fusty beans from the depths of your pantry. But how fusty is too fusty? When is the right time to throw something out? And what about fresh ingredients? If I’m trying to keep supermarket trips to a minimum, how long can my eggs, dairy and produce keep?

Here’s the first thing you should know: Expiration dates are not expiration dates.

Decent article explaining what most of use should already know: those dates on most foods (though not all) are fairly meaningless. Speaking as someone who routinely eats canned/dry/frozen food that is years old, I can tell you that anything other than high-acid foods (pineapple, tomato products, etc) will last a lot longer than the date on the can. A lot longer. Like, several years.

However, that is no substitute for rotating through your stocks just to keep everything topped off and fresh. For canned goods, I use these and have find them quite handy.

Inventory

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A genuine sign of the apocalypse: I had to cut my own hair. Turns out, I look good in a ball cap. It occurred to me that if I can’t find a haircut because my barber is closed up, then there must be a lot of chicks out there who can’t get their waxing done. Now theres a crisis. #welcometo1987
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Government setting up internal checkpoints and tracking your movements, standing in line for toilet paper, rationed healthcare, economic freefall, empty grocery shelves, neighbors ratting out neighbors to the police…it’s like a free 30-day trial of socialism.
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I’ve been using some of this downtime (which for me isn’t very much) to streamline a few processes. Most notably, my inventorying system. I know that there are still folks who use a clipboard and pen but I find Excel to be the shiznits for this sort of thing. Formerly, I used to keep a very simple, sortable list. As of late I’ve changed it up. I recognize that having less than the desired amount of something is not necessarily the same as a ‘go replace it immediately’, situation. Lemme give an example.

I like to keep 210 rolls of TP on hand. Thats seven of the CostCo 30-packs. Formerly, my spreadsheet would subtract the amount on hand from the amount desired and whatever the difference was is what I needed to go get. Or, put another way, I want 210, I have 208, so in theory I need to go out and buy 2. And thats how I rolled (heh) for a number of years.

As of late, I’ve changed the system to something I find more fluid and flexible but still allowing me to keep inventory numbers up. Previously, anything less than 100% was “running low”. I’ve adjusted my numbers and reformulated the spreadsheet so that if I have 90% of an item or more, I’m at an acceptable level of readiness. Anything below 90% is the trigger to immediately restock back up to 100%. Under this paradigm, if the supply of TP drops from 210 (100%) down to, say, 200 (95%~)…no immediate action required. But if it drops below 189 (90%) then it’s off to CostCo. In short, I figure that I am content with 90% of my desired amount of an item in case things suddenly go off the rails.

This did mean making some adjustments to what my desired levels are on some things. It meant assuming, worst case, I would start the apocalypse with 90% of what I thought would be the perfect amount. Some things I was cool with that (TP), some I was not (rice) and so those items had their amounts bumped up.

I’ve got it set now so that anything on my spreadsheet that is at more than 90% shows up in green, and anything below 90% shows up in ‘warning yellow’. Anything below 75% show up in ‘danger red’. So, at a glance, I can see by color code what needs attention and how soon.

I’ve been plugging a few holes in my list lately and, surprisingly, with the exception of 25# bags of long grain rice, anything I need thats on my list is available somewhere in this town. Tell you what, gang…this is the slowest moving end-of-the-world I’ve ever seen. Where’s the cannibal army? Where’s the rogue military units? Where’s the plucky survivor who rallies the townies? Where’s Charlton Heston?

Ah, but seriously… I suspect it’s going to get worse before it gets better, and the getting better part won’t necessarily be the same as ‘back to normal’. Much how things never got ‘back to normal’ after 9/11. But, for now, I’m just watching the news and my local scene, wondering when the real crapstorm is gonna start.

Monovaults…a do over

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I was puttering around in the basement moving some stuff around and one of the things stacked in the corner with the ‘this pile is for the secondary location’ is a couple of Monovaults.

I had done a lengthy post on the Monovault back in 2013 but when the website crashed I lost about a years worth of posts and that was one of them. A shame too, because it was actually a pretty informative post about what I thought was a very good product. So much so, in fact, that I’m going to go through the tremendous pain in the butt of retaking the pictures and reposting about it.

Succinctly, the Monovault is a large diameter plastic tube designed for storing (and burying) whatever items you feel need to be tucked away somewhere. The tubes have a Gamma Seal lid closure at one end, and then a ‘burial cap’ that goes over that to make retrieval easier. The tubes come in several different lengths and diameters depending on what it is that you want to tuck away.

Remember those cylindrical weapons/supply containers from WW2 that we’d see in movies? It’s pretty much a very modernized version of that.

WW2-era airborne supply drop tube. These things still turn up once in a while when someone treks out into the dense forests and swamps over in Europe.

Purpose? Nominally, they are sold as burial vaults for whatever it is that you feel needs to be buried. And, that makes sense. But I’m a bit of an outside-the-box kind of guy and while I’m sure these would work just fine for burial, to me they are more of an ideal cache container. While burying is certainly an option, the qualities that make a container suitable for burying (waterproof, airtight, durable,etc.) also make them perfect for enplacing in above-ground environments – hidden in attics, under porches, buried in brush piles, sitting in the corner of the basement, under the gravel pile on the back forty, etc.

I wound up with two versions of the Monovault which were supplied to me by the fine folks there. (We actually did a bit of trading back and forth.) Being me, I wanted the biggest one they had (the #248)  and a midling sized one – the #130.

The #130. Fits a folding 10/22, a daypack, boots, water, food, radio, flashlight, batteries, and a few other things that might make a big difference to you when you discover that your world has suddenly taken a turn for the sideways.

Gamma Seal lid and ‘burial lid’ cover. Still enough room in there to pack the essentials that would give you several orders of advantage over the rest of the herd. Pack wisely.

The #130 seems like the perfect size for the “I want to keep some essentials around in case I have to leave in a hurry”. A folding (or takedown) 10/22 will fit in there [as will the new takedown Ruger 9mm carbine] along with a frameless medium ALICE pack (or your favorite daypack), along with room for comfortable shoes, a jacket, radio, pistol, water, and a few other goodies. If you were stuck in an office building on 9/11 and had to walk your way out of Manhattan, one of these would have held pretty much just what you needed – water, shoes, radio, flashlight, weapon of choice, and that sort of thing.

The #248 is where the real action comes into play. Large enough that hauling one full of gear to a burial or cache sight might be a two-man job, it’ll hold everything you need to get your immediate life back on the rails. A full size rifle like a 20″ AR or HK .308 will fit inside with no dificulty. If you pack a smaller or broken down rifle in there, theres room for a backpack, military sleep system, freeze drieds, and a bunch of other gear. My checklist for packing for this sort of thing is ‘it’s the middle of winter, dead of night, and I’m dropped naked in the middle of nowhere. What do I need right now?’. However, if you want to have a bundle of gear dedicated to a particular purpose….exclusively gunstuff, exclusively food and water, exclusively gear, etc, these things would be good choices for that.

Big enough to handle the larger rifles. When you’re done filling this thing up, it’ll be heavy so plan accordingly.

Although I use a large Pelican case for storing my winter vehicle gear, one of these would make an excellent container for that task. Especially since you could just leave it in the bed of your truck (secured, of course) and it’d be impervious to snow and wet. Also, it’s long cylindrical nature lets it take up less room.

For storing guns I prefer the Pelican rifle cases. They’re very good at that job and, as you might expect, theyre also fairly expensive. Problem is, unless you get into the really specialty Pelican cases (which are even spendier) you can’t really stuff a goodly amount of gear in a Pelican case along with your rifle. The Monovault lets you do exactly that. In fact, if I were storing some gear hidden away at the Beta Site I’d probably tuck the guns in Pelican cases and the gear in the Monovault. (Although, if I wanted an all-in-one solution it would all, gear and rifle, go in the Monovault.)

Pricing is about comparable to what you’d pay for a Pelican case, so it’s not too outrageous. Like a Pelican case, the annoying part is paying the shipping for a large bulky item.But…when it’s 2am, the snow is coming down, and you finally bring your exhausted vehicle to a stop at your bugout location what’s it worth to know that your food, guns, radios, camp stove, and winter gear are all dry and clean tucked away under the floorboards waiting for you?

I’m not driving in that

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So it’s about -2 outside, which is bad enough but the wind is insane. And the roads are slicker than Mikhail Baryshnikov at a Wesson oil party. No real reason to risk limb and lira out there on the roads. BUT….I’m trying to clean my kitchen and while I have plenty of fuel for the flamethrower I am out of dish soap. So…do I risk losing momentum and halting my kitchen cleaning? Or do I go driving on the frigid skating rink and risk everything for a $6 bottle of Dawn? Well, neither…

One simply trots down to the basement, peruses the shelves, and finds a half dozen jugs of the stuff sitting patiently on the shelf.

In this particular case, about eight years ago I tucked this guy away in case I needed it. And that foresight is keeping me from skidding through intersections and into traffic this very evening.

The point? Well, we stockpile things against that uncertain future when the zombies rise or the economy crashes. But those same preps have a happy way of coming in handy at opportune moments. In this case, I can completely eliminate the risk of heading to CostCo on a freezing, icy, winter day.

Because this stuff is one of the things I stocked up on (mostly for economic reasons), I can wait until the weather is nicer before I have to go up there and replace it. Sure, stocking the usual guns & freeze-drieds is important, but stockpiling the incredibly mundane day-to-day stuff pays off too.

I have literally not left the house all weekend and I can be perfectly content, fed, warm, clothed, entertained, and secure without exposing myself to ‘The Vortex’. Prior planning pays off, people.

ETA: Since I’m cleaning my kitchen, and scrubbing the floors for the first time in…well…ever. I decided to resort to some…force multipliers. Check out this BAMF:

Man is a tool-using animal, baby. And this tool was AWESOME. My bathtub is so smooth and clean now that I might actually slip in the tub now. And this sucker did some major work on my kitchen floor. Recommend.

Battery storage stuff

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So the general consensus, it seems, is that leaving non-lithium batteries in a device for any appreciable length of time is a recipe for trouble. As I mentioned earlier, on the devices that I do leave batteries in, I’m instituting a periodic inspection schedule to make sure things don’t spiral out of control.

But, really, the solution is to not have batteries in the device until such time as that device is needed. Makes sense, right? The problem is that anytime you have two items that need to be combined together to be effective, and you keep those two items separate from each other, you introduce a potential point of failure. The very easy example is keeping a loaded magazine separate from the gun.

So, to my way of thinking, the solution is to keep the batteries separate from the device to avoid damage, but near enough to the device as to be available for immediate use. So, with that in mind….

What we have here are, essentially, shotgun-shell holders for batteries. Here’s the link to the manufacturers information, and, of course, I just snagged ’em offa Amazon:

The shotgun shell analogy is pretty accurate. There are two tabs, such as youd fend at the end of a magazine tube, that hold the batteries in place. They’re quite secure. The more astute of you will notice that this thing doesn’t provide any environmental protection…that is true. But what it does do is give you a secure storage for batteries that can be lanyarded to your device of choice.

You could argue, I suppose, that you simply keep the lantern and the batteries in the same box in storage and that obviates the need for this sort of thing. True, but preparedness is about removing or mitigating as many potential problem points as possible. For me, having the batteries lanyarded to the device gives me the virtually the same benefit of the batteries being left in the deivce but without the attendant risk.

No doubt the poverty-preppers will say that the same effect could be achieved with a small plastic bottle scrounged from the kitchen garbage and a little duct tape. May be. But my career goals have hit the point where I can insulate myself from future risk without resorting to using garbage. When its oh-dark-thirty and the power goes out in a blizzard, I don’t mind having spent ten bucks for the security of having the batteries where I need them when I need them. :::shrug::: Your choice.

If you really wanna go full Burt Gummer, the guys over at County Comm have battery safes that will do the PERFECT job but be prepared to pay a bit more than what you might feel comfortable with. I actually use the County Comm ones to keep two lithium AA-batts in my Bag O’ Tricks.

Anyway, thats the direction I’ve decided to go in in regards to not keeping batteries in devices while still keeping the batteries close at hand. YMMV, but to me it seems a good solution.

Money v. goods

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I ran out of dish detergent yesterday night an thought “No big deal, I’ll trot downstairs and grab another jug of the stuff.” To my chagrin, that was the last one. Bad survivalist! Sure, the end of the world is not going to be made worse by a lack of dish soap, but it’s the principle of the thing: shoulda had it, didnt.

So, that got me to thinking that January (or, really, late December) should be my evaluation period for purchasing “a years supply” for the coming year. I’ve made a list of a few things I’m just going to go ‘heavy’ on and see if they do indeed last me the year. This should make for some interesting looks from the guys running the registers at CostCo when I pick up a dozen drums of detergent.

And as I said, the end of the world experience will not be greatly affected by a lack of dish soap. But a ‘localized’ end of the world..such as a job loss or similar, ‘personal’, disaster will be somewhat eased if I can reduce the number of things I have to buy until I”m back on my feet.

Think about it. Pretend you lost your job and its going to take you three months to get another paycheck coming into the household. Every dollar is going to count, right? So the less money you’re spending on toilet paper, paper towels, soap, food, clothes, etc, is more money you have to stretch for other necessities. This is why I try to keep as much long-term-storage-friendly consumables on hand as possible.

I have the storage space (mostly) to go deep on stuff like that, and even if the world doesn’t come to an end I’m still ahead, inflationwise. There is an opportunity cost, I suppose, to tying up that money when it could be doing other things. That brings up a much bigger quandary: cash or goods?

Let’s say I spend $100 on toilet paper to store for the year. Assuming inflation runs around 4%, that means it would take $104 to buy that same toilet paper at the end of the year. By buying it upfront, I ‘made’ 4% on my money. But what if I simply took the $100 and put it in an envelope in my desk? At the end of the year it only buys me $96 worth of toilet paper. BUT…it can also buy me a host of other goods, whereas if I had spent the $100 on TP all I’d have is TP. In other words, $100 worth of TP vs. $100 cash. $100 of TP is just TP…but $100 cash can become $100 of TP, food, fuel, ammo, shoes, etc. So, it might make more sense to store the cash, rather than the TP.

As I said, my buying power is reduced by inflation…Assume TP was $1 a roll, just for round numbers. $100 gets me 100 rolls in January, but in December it gets me 96. But if I invested that $100 at something that made more than 4%, that would mean I could buy at least 100 rolls in December. The stock market, yearly, returns upwards of 10% on average, right? So, in theory, I park $100 in January and in December I buy 110 rolls of TP.

But…risk, scarcity, and self-discipline come into play. The investments may go down and my $100 may get cut to $75. So..75 rolls of TP in December. Or scarcity may come into play..the TP crop could get TP weevils and the price shoots up. Now my $100 can only buy 50 rolls in December as the price doubled. Or inflation may go past 4%. And, finally, self-discipline – can I stare at $100 sitting on my desk for a year and not touch it? Mmmm…

And often the bird in the hand is worth the two in the bush, y’know?

So…goods. This isn’t to say I don’t keep money stored away. I just keep it where I can’t see it or get to it without a conscious, purposeful effort.

All this to say that next payday I’m going to pick one item off my list of ‘Go Heavy’ and stock up for the year. At the end of the year I’ll review if the amount purchased was indeed a years supply. That’ll give me a good metric of what a years supply constitutes around this house.

This mental exercise in frugality, preparedness, and cost/benefit has been brought to you buy writers block, an empty soap container, and un upcoming sense of dread.

Craigslist shelving

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Looking through Craigslist for a particular item is like shopping for hookers… there’s a lot of scary, weird, scuzzy choices but once in a while you find Julia Roberts.

As I mentioned a ways back, CostCo has replaced the wire shelving I normally buy with, what is to me, an inferior replacement. Specifically, my main criticism is the lack of reinforcing rib running the along the center length of the shelf. The shelves I have can get loaded down with some heavy goods pretty quickly…I don’t want substandard shelving.

So, I trotted over to Craigslist and found someone selling four of the shelves (not a complete unit, just the shelves) for twenty bucks. And they had the reinforcing rib. And they were willing to deliver! (I had them drop it at a neighbors place a few doors down from me…y’know…PerSec). Score!

So for $20 I got enough shelves to allow me to use the S-hooks and a couple leftover uprights to add another column to my existing run of shelving. Go me!

Moral of the story: sometimes you can find exactly what you’re looking for on Craigslist.
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And, just for the sake of consistency, I shall continue to flog the 10/22 mag deal until someone cleans me out on these things.

Shelf issues

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So I’m up at CostCo, minding my own business, and as I’m walking down the aisle I notice that the wire shelving I like for storage is marked down by about 30%. Well, that’s a pretty good deal, right? So I look at the shelving and the box is different than the one that normally comes with the shelving I’ve previously purchased. Hmmm. Let’s look at things a bit closer.

Take a good look at this unit of shelving:

Compare and contrast with this one:

Notice a difference? There’s no reinforcing rib running along the center underside of the shelf. This is a bad thing. For the amount of weight that you’re going to wind up putting on these things, you very much want that reinforcement. More importantly, if you just noticed the price change and thought “Wow! Discount!” and bought two or three units you’d have wound up with a buncha units that were not as good as the one you already had.

So…no more Costco shelves utill they bring back the good ones. In the meantime I’ll have to hit Lowes or Home Depot or Walmart and see if they carry the ‘good’ ones. So..caveat emptor, baby.

Spring cleaning

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So we’re now at the stage where the days are getting shorter instead of longer. Man, where did this year go? When I was a kid the days just crawled by…now they whip by so fast. :::sigh:::

Summer is, for the most part, here in Montana. Now’s the time for the warm weather tasks that need doing. Most importantly its time to do some spring cleaning and get stuff neatened up. It’s alot easier to do that sort of thing when you can leave the doors open so you can haul stuff out of the house… can’t do that when its ten degrees out.

I had to shuffle alot of stuff around to accommodate the plumbing adventure a few weeks back and it just emphasized that I really need to get rid of junk thats been piling up. Broken power tools, scraps of lumber, things like that.

I envy people that can have an entire building or two on their property to dedicate to storing stuff. Someday I’ll have a place like that, but for now it’s a bit of a challenge utilizing space as efficiently as possible.

My weekdays are a hot mess, but the weekend should give me a chance to get stuff moved around if I can get my butt out of bed nice and early.

I suspect theres a couple more sets of wire shelving from CostCo in my future.