House Preparations
The fifth of six levels of preparedness
What Will You Prepare For?
Unfortunately perhaps, there is no shortage of possibilities. I recently wrote in my post We Have Made Lies Our Refuge, about threats to the U.S. Dollar as “world reserve currency” and “petrodollar;” this eventuality would be life altering, and not in a good way. Preppers have to consider the threats that they are preparing to defeat; for example, it could be a hurricane in the Southeast, an earthquake in the Southwest, tornadoes in the Midwest; it could be a man-made electromagnetic pulse, or a Carrington-type event, it could be civil unrest locally, and so on. Each of these is more or less probable, and each of these has a greater or lesser impact when and if it does occur. If I think back to say the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when we were still an agrarian culture, what would those farmers have prepared for; crop failure for sure, natural disasters, power outages, or more likely a life lived entirely without electricity as the Rural Electrification Act did not become law until 1936. In my view a long-term loss of electricity, regionally, or nationally, is a worst-case scenario. There are many possible causes of such a loss, more than one of the aforementioned threats, including the Carrington-type event.
…researchers from Lloyd’s of London and the Atmospheric and Environmental Research agency in the United States estimated that a Carrington-class event impacting Earth today would cause between $0.6 and $2.6 trillion in damages to the United States alone and would cause widespread — if not global — electrical disruptions, blackouts, and damages to electrical grids.
Cascading failures of electrical grids, especially in New England in the United States, are also particularly likely during a Carrington-class event. Power restoration estimates range anywhere from a week to the least affected areas to more than a year to the hardest-hit regions.
Electronic payment systems at grocery stores and gas stations would likely crash, electric vehicle charging stations — that rely on the power grid — would likely be unusable for some time, as would ATMs which rely on internet and/or satellite link to verify account and cash disbursement information.
NASA Space Flight (NSF), Carrington Event still provides warning of Sun’s potential 161 years later
So let’s just say this, there are threats, and they are real; what you do or don’t do in the face of these threats is entirely up to you. We have chosen to insure our lives and lifestyle against some of these threats. Conceptually, the notion of “insurance” is a good way to think about these adverse situations we might find ourselves in, not unlike insurance against a house fire or flood, a car accident, etc.
Layers of Preparedness
This post addresses layer 5.
Go-Bag, Get Home Bag, or 24/72 hr Bag (that’s just a few of the names)
House
Homestead
The House and Home
We rely on our homes for a great deal, and culturally we’ve come to believe that the need for water, food, and shelter will always be met. Not to mention sanitation and security. We’ve come to take all of this for granted.
“If only I had some grease I could fix some kind of a light,” Ma considered. “We didn’t lack for light when I was a girl before this newfangled kerosene was ever heard of.
“That’s so,” said Pa. “These times are too progressive. Everything has changed too fast. Railroads and telegraphs and kerosene and coal stoves -- they're good to have but the trouble is, folks get to depend on 'em.”
Clearly, this tendency of coming to “depend on ‘em” goes back a long time; now kerosene is one of our backups for lighting in the case of a loss of electricity!
Our Dependence on Large Scale Systems in General, and Electricity in Particular
What was once convenience, is now necessity. And in fact, we depend on large scale energy delivery systems for our very lives. For heat we depend on heating oil, or natural gas, propane, or electricity; the last three also for cooking our food. We depend on electricity for preserving our food in refrigerators and freezers. We depend on electricity to pump our water, and our fuel. Most of us depend on municipalities for filtering and treating our water, and to rid ourselves of waste water, gray and black. We depend on electricity to pump fuel for our vehicles. Our connections to the world; TV, radio, internet, cell phones and so on, are powered by electricity. We depend on mass transportation systems, be they planes, trains, trucks, ships, electrical transmission lines or fuel pipelines, or some combination of the foregoing, for virtually everything we need to stay alive. And unfortunately, all of those transportation and transmission systems are themselves dependent on electricity.
Indeed, everything that supports modern civilization requires electricity; or said another way, electricity is the Achilles’ Heel of civilization.
Building Resilience in Key Systems
This will in some sense depend on where you live; we live in a temperate climate, which is to say we experience all four seasons, at 42° north latitude. Living in the woods as we do, power outages are a too frequent if irregular occurrence. From my perspective, there are a few key systems we need to allow us to stay in the house:
Water. Of course we need water to drink, but water is also necessary for cooking, cleaning, and in modern civilizations, sanitation; you cannot use flush toilets without water. As with electricity, we’ve come to depend almost entirely on municipal sewage systems, and if there is one thing that plagued, literally, earlier civilizations, is was inadequate sanitation.
Heat. Without heat the house is borderline uninhabitable, and if it is cold enough for long enough, physical damage to plumbing systems is also possible.
Food. Most of us get our food from a grocery store, which is at the terminus if you will, of a very large scale system. As we saw in 2020 at the outset of Covid, any breakdown in that system, from distant farms to your table, can result in food shortages. This includes energy for food preservation and cooking, which in our case is electricity and propane respectively. If we don’t have propane cooking instantly becomes more than a little inconvenient, and if we don’t have electricity food preservation will become a problem in a few short days.
How do you establish which systems are key in your situation? Of course you can simply perform a thought experiment, but you will probably miss something. The best and quickest way to establish your key systems list is to simply turn off electricity to the house. It can be a fun weekend experiment of say 72 hours, though if you go just 24 hours you will learn a lot. Think of it like a camping trip. If you are on city water and sewer you will still have both water and sewer, but since we are on a well , a lack of electricity takes out the water supply, too, including our toilets; I mention that as just one example of a difference in situation.
Implementing Backups to Key Systems - Water
The first system we took on was potable water, not by design, but because the pipes froze under a bedroom with en suite bathroom. The CPVC piping was completely shattered; there wasn’t a single foot of it that was not destroyed. That led ultimately, over the course of two and a half years, with the replacement of every stick of piping in the entire house. We used PEX, which is essentially unsusceptible to freeze damage, and which is very easy for a DIY’er to install.
Since I have already documented these upgrades in some detail, I won’t repeat myself here; see for yourself:
In priority order then, how do we obtain water:
Electric well pump
Absent electricity short term, backup generator
Absent electricity in the long term, or in case of well pump failure, hand pump
Loss of the handpump for whatever reason, buckets from the lake
Implementing Backups to Key Systems - Heat
The second system we took on was heat, and some of this happened in parallel with work on the potable water systems. I also documented some of this work in posts which I have now republished on substack:
We made one more significant improvement, the installation of a “fireplace insert” in the original fireplace, which delivers 77,000 BTU to the house with no electricity. And, I still have work to do in heat loss prevention, specifically with respect to the bathroom vents, which are nothing more than chimneys accelerating the waste of heat.
Again in priority order, how do we maintain heat in the house:
Outdoor Wood Boiler, wood being the source of heat energy, but the boiler requires electricity for both blowers and pumps
Propane-fired furnace in case of a boiler breakdown, the furnace also requires electricity
Absent electricity short term, backup generator
Absent electricity in the long term, or in case of boiler failure, fireplace insert
Food Production and Preservation
I can’t say that we are weak in this regard, relative to most folks that is, but we are still weaker than I’d like to be, principally because we are overly dependent on electricity and refrigeration for food storage. Having said that, we have a lot of food walking around on the hoof, including but not limited to goats and chickens. I have often said that the best way to store carbon (energy) is on the stump, i.e. trees; likewise, the best way to store food (and protein particular) is on the hoof. Protein is need #1 in the human diet, and we plan to use animal proteins to satisfy that need for a variety of reasons.
Still, if I had my way, we would dry more food than we do. We have some dried grains and beans, but those are not foods we typically eat in large quantities. Literally, grains are starvation food. Geri is very good at canning vegetables from the garden, and more of that would be better. More dried meat would be better.
It occurred to me the other day that we seldom go to the grocery store. Very seldom. And almost never for foods we cannot live without. That is a solid indication that we are on the right track.
Future Steps
There is progress to be made in every area I’ve discussed. If you read the Newsletter you know that we are currently focused on commissioning a whole-house solar system; that will save money, insulate us from costs we cannot control (principally energy in the form of propane and electricity), allow us to live our usual lifestyle in the face of occasional power outages, protect our ability to provide water and heat to the house, and protect our food storage. It is the biggest and most costly improvement we’ve made to date.
Aside from that, there are innumerable improvements that can be made to our food preparations, and several significant improvements that can be made in the Heat and Water categories. As I always say, there is no end to the work, and that’s a good thing.