SCP Survival

Best Survival Gear and Supplies

How to Purify Water with The CWater Desalinator

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When travelers are lost, stranded or in an emergency situation, one of the most difficult parts of waiting for help to arrive is finding fresh, potable water.

Although tales abound of shipwreck victims finding novel sources of drinking water, there might be an easier way to stay alive if you ever find yourself in an emergency.

This design, called CWater, by Chinese engineer Chao Gao uses a simple solar purification method to transform just about any source of water into potable liquid. With a readily available source of fresh water, survivors have a better chance of staying alive and relatively healthy until help arrives.

The CWater is lightweight and small enough when compressed to be carried on life boats or in backpacks. Its innovative design could easily be applied to places where clean drinking water is scarce, or even used in disaster relief efforts to keep refugees and survivors healthy until permanent living situations are arranged.

The design took second place in the recent Incheon International Design Awards. The ingenious design requires only that the foldable device be placed on the ground or directly on the water. Water vapor collects in the chamber and is purified solar rays. A batch of clean, drinkable water is ready in just shy of two days.

If you haven’t fully created your emergency water plan, it’s important to do so. Remember, a solid plan includes options for water storage, purification, and resupply.

Slow-Cooker Carnitas [Recipe]

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This isn’t really a soup, but a successful experiment that would work well in a thermal cooker, as well as an electric crock pot. Amazing flavor, not much work. I saw a menu item called “Beer-Braised Carnitas” on a website, and wanted to try it without slow-cooking in melted lard. :)

  1. I found a 3 lb bone-in chunk of pork butt (shoulder) on “reduced for quick sale.”
  2. Sprinkle  with a little salt and pepper.
  3. Leave the fat cap on.
  4. Brown heck out of it on all sides in oil (This step can probably be skipped, but it makes it taste better)
  5. While the meat is browning, stem and seed a couple dried Ancho and Pasilla chiles. These are not at all “hot” – kinda fruity flavor.
  6. Toss them in your slow cooker along with handful of dehydrated onion flakes, ground cumin, some minced fresh garlic,  some dried oregano leaves, and about 2 bottles of beer (I’d go for a dark-ish lager. Yuengling Light was what was sitting around, and it worked admirably)
  7. Put your pork butt into the slow cooker and add water or chicken stock to cover the meat about 2/3 of the way. (I had some that needed to be used in the fridge)
  8. Either bring it to a boil and put it in the thermal cooker, or turn your slow cooker to High for about 4 hours, then go to low and ignore all day.

Shred up the meat – it will fall apart but still be moist and tasty. Great tacos/burritos/etc. Wonderful in omelettes or other dishes. Blend up the beer and veggies as a sauce or soup/stew base.  There’s nothing stopping you from adding onions, carrots and potatoes if the cooker is big enough, for an incredible stew.

The only downside? I have to go out and get more tortillas.

Easy Bread and Rolls [Recipe]

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I’ll pass along my mother’s bread recipe. My mother taught me this probably 35 years ago, and it is so simple to remember that you don’t even have to write it down.

It basically uses ‘1’ of everything, and with a little common sense, it’s easy enough to remember 1 of what.

You Will Need:

Bread and Rolls Recipe

For each normal loaf of bread, or pan of rolls, use the following:

  • 1 Cup  Water
  • 1 Pkg  Yeast    (or teaspoon, if you use something other than the packets)
  • 1 Tablespoon Honey   (or sugar, if you prefer)
  • 1 Tablespoon  Butter  (shortening, whatever you prefer to use)
  • 1 Teaspoon  Salt
  • 1 Egg
  • However much flour it takes

Directions:

Mix the water, honey and yeast and let it sit for a bit in a warm place before adding the egg, salt and butter and starting to mix in the flour.  We always mix it, knead it until it feels right, let it rise in the mixing bowl, punch it down and knead a bit just to get the air out of it, form it into loaves or rolls, let it rise again and bake it.

For anyone with any bread baking experience at all, this is probably the simplest recipe you’ll ever find and it works perfectly every time.

(submitted by Randy Bock)

Two Book Reviews of Mike Oehler’s Books

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I bought Mike Oehler’s book The $50 & Up Underground House Book back in 1978 when it was first published. And yes, I lived in the panhandle of Idaho at that time (where Mike hails from).

My homestead was on the north facing slope and just not suited to an underground home even though I have always yearned for one. Well, my house burned and that book went with it, but Wyzyrd just sent me these two books. I am still totally a believer!

The $50 & Up Underground House Book is a classic in the alternative building world. If you have ever been interested in the advantages of earth sheltered building this book is a must!

New to me is The Earth-Sheltered Solar Greenhouse Book by Mike. LOVE THIS BOOK! Even read a recent newspaper article from Minneapolis, where a couple up there is harvesting fresh vegetables year around in the city using this method.

This book has a good index, lots of drawings, some full color photos and takes you from his first experiments to the conception and development of the earth-sheltered solar greenhouse.

How impressed am I?

Well, I’m considering building one off the side of my house. I don’t have a south facing area that is not blocked from the sun by something, but I do have an east side that I believe would not only produce vegetables, but assist my home with solar heat and where I could put my koi, chickens, pigeons and rabbits in the winter.

We’ll see what happens, but I have been drawing, thinking, redrawing, thinking more, and pretty sure I have a plan that may just work – heat sink and all!

For more timeless survival wisdom and ideas, check out these survival guides and PDF downloads.

Solar Cooking with The Sun Oven (My Honest Experience)

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Sun Oven

Since Bev has asked, I’ll add my own experiences with my Sun Oven…which I adore!  As I’ve mentioned (I’m sure) I love my Sun Oven. We were somewhat new at this type of thing so we just bought what we believed was the best and at the time we had the funds to do so.

So far we haven’t taken it camping because we don’t want to leave it unattended…someone might think it would be a good thing to put in their truck or the trunk of their car and you never know about racoons. I’ve also not cooked in it during the snow etc….yet, but have been assured by the manufacturer and others who have, that it cooks just fine although you may have to rotate it to keep it in the direction of the sun.

sun oven pic

As for my experiences, I’ve just set it on top of a small table in the back yard, without any legs to tip it forward etc., and then let the sun do it’s thing. I haven’t had to rotate it or anything, just let the sun shine in :-)

I’ve only used my graniteware in my solar oven, but have got a couple of small bread loaf pans that are very dark colored and I plan to try them out for bread. I use several different sized roasters with lids, and since I use graniteware in our RV I have several pie tins, plates, cups and a coffee pot. Everything will fit into my solar oven except my coffee pot, but that’s okay…it’ll cook quicker on the outside grill :-)

The picture at the top is of a raw pork roast that I put into my solar oven along with vegetables etc. that took about 4 hours to cook thoroughly and was absolutely fork tender & so moist you wouldn’t believe it, but I’m sure it wouldn’t have burned if I’d left it all day. The only thing I’ve learned is that I DO NOT have to add water. So on this particular occasion, I just took the juice that it created and made gravy out of it.

Because of my solar oven, our Coleman 2-burner cook stove with an oven that fits on top, and lots of propane, and a single burner butane stove (like they use in chinese restaurants etc.) I’ve been slow in approaching other sources of cooking. We do plan to purchase a StoveTec-type stove though because we believe it would be safe to use inside with gel candles, t-lights, votive candles etc. It’s also easy enough to move outside to burn wood or charcoal, perhaps even some wood chips.

Either way we look at it, solar is about the cheapest source of cooking and supplementing your heat there is. Right now, we’re not too interested in providing electricity via solar. The Roost is small enough and not situated in the right direction, for us to install panels on it’s roof…and in a SHTF situation would be a signal that we have some sort of power, as well as if we set up panels outside they’d probably get stolen or deliberately damaged. Same for our solar oven, don’t want to set it out even at the Roost where it could be stolen.

As a ps…we also own one of the “oil less” cookers (electric) that’s also another great addition to your cooking alternatives and can also dehydrate…as long as you have electricity of some sort. What’s that old saying?  “try it you’ll like it.”

p.s. if you like the idea of cooking with the sun, but are on a “DIY” budget, check out this awesome DIY solar cooker. 

Fitness: Nice to have or a necessity?

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Fitness for Survival

A comment on a prepping forum said: “I’ve always been overweight. … That being said if a project needs doing, it gets done. We may be sore at the end of the day but we can accomplish just short of anything. I don’t consider being physically fit a prepping necessity, more of a nice to have.”

I’m afraid I have to disagree with this writer. If you are overweight by definition you have inflammation or you wouldn’t be overweight. If you are overweight you have a chronic medical condition. This goes for me as much as for anyone else, so I’m not picking on the writer. It’s just a fact. If a person has generalized inflammation leading to fat deposits where its not healthy to have them then they will also have other inflammatory processes going on such as pre-diabetes, inflammation in the heart arteries, auto immune disease and/or pre-cancerous changes to cells.

As a prepper I don’t think it is sufficient to think its OK  just because I can get a project done if it needs doing. If we are not improving our health we are in the process of degeneration. If we cannot get a task done now without being sore we are going to be a problem to those we share our lives with and also to ourselves when things get really difficult.

Imagine that we are in a severe financial crisis and you can’t afford to both run a vehicle and feed yourself so you have to walk – a lot… or… you are stranded somewhere, there is chaos all around and home is at least an eight hour brisk walk away in good walking shoes… or… you are in pain because you have had an accident trying to do something you had to try because there was no-one else to do it.

Now add deteriorating health to this. Your obesity and inflammation has progressed because it was only nice to have, not a prepping necessity. Now you have one of those scenarios alongside the health problems of having bad knees needing a replacement/ gut problems with severe diarrhea which means you need to stay within a few minutes of a toilet at all times/ you have cancer or heart disease which leaves you very fatigued.

Now being physically fit can go hand in hand with any one of those diagnoses, but it is less likely to have gone down that route than if you are obese and unfit. If we are fit and exercise we cut our chances of some cancers (eg breast) by 50% and though I’m not sure what the figures are for heart disease I know that physical fitness will reduce the chances of having a heart attack enormously.

So a nice to have but not essential? Or an essential if we are to be self responsible and a contributor or are we to be a drain on our support network? For me it is essential.

“But… but… I can’t exercise much, because it makes me even sicker than I am at the moment. If I do too much I will get a flare up of my medical condition.” That might be so, but that is a different issue. Just don’t try to pretend that you don’t need to be fit in order to better cope when the SHTF. Fitness, flexibility and mobility, in my book, are primary personal responsibilities for a prepper.