(Continued from Part 2.)
5. TOILET
Now that we have a warm house, food, water, and a way to defend it all, we need a workable sanitation system. Many preppers won’t have enough water to waste it flushing toilets so an outhouse or composting toilet will be necessary. Regardless of whether you have a flush toilet or something else, find a way to save the urine. Not only is it the best garden fertilizer, it will also speed up the composting process as well. Best of all, fertilizing the pile with urine allows us to add things which we can’t currently compost. This includes all of our waste paper and cardboard, and high-carbon organic matter like straw, sawdust, and cornstalks. The composting bacteria need lots of nitrogen which urine provides.
Unlike feces, urine is sterile when it is first excreted so there’s no bacteria to worry about when handling it. If we’re just composting our kitchen waste without some of these high-carbon organic materials, at the end of a year the final amount of composted humus will be surprisingly small. Compared to today, our kitchen waste will be even less when we’re needing to get every molecule of nutrition we can from what we eat. No more trimming the tops off carrots, peeling potatoes, trimming the fat off meat, and no more leftovers. When breaking virgin soil to create or enlarge a garden, we’ll need a large compost pile to provide the necessary humus to speed up the soil-improvement process.
If you have an outhouse, separating out the urine will also reduce the outhouse smell. Once it leaves our bladder, the urea in urine begins converting to ammonia which is the main culprit causing outhouses to smell so bad. Guys, the easiest way to divert urine from toilets is to make a direct deposit on the compost pile when possible. The second best way is to pee into a jug which is later dumped on the compost pile or diluted for fertilizer. (Ladies, you’re on your own on this one!) Urine diverters are available online. A tube in the bottom of the diverter routes the urine elsewhere so it stays out of the outhouse or composting toilet.
Camp toilets and emergency ones consisting of a 5-gallon bucket with a seat on top are great for a three-day power outage but aren’t durable enough to have a TEOTWAWKI-time warranty so be sure to prepare adequately toilet-wise. When it comes to a reliable long-term sanitation system, you don’t want to find yourself literally up S Creek after the S hits the fan. At least one backup toilet seat would be a good idea as well.
I’m a big fan of a simple DIY composting toilet referred to as the “loveable loo.” Mine cost $50 to build and I’ve been using one on my homestead for the past 13 years. It’s essentially a kitty-litter box for humans that uses a sturdy 5-gallon food-storage bucket and the excrement is covered with sawdust (or soil, compost humus, dry ground-up tree leaves, etc.) after each use. Unlike a camp toilet, there’s no actual weight on the bucket so it will easily last 10+ years.
IMO, compared to a simple composting toilet, an outhouse is an inferior choice with its offensive smell, waste of organic matter, and having to literally freezer your a$$ off in the wintertime. When it’s uncomfortable in the wintertime to defecate, some will hold it instead of making the trip to the meat locker to relieve themselves. Holding it is unhealthy and when held on a regular basis can cause long-term problems.
A composting toilet is more sanitary, has no or very little offensive smells when used properly, no freezing-yer-buns-off issues, and adds organic matter to the compost pile. For those who are thinking, “Yuck!” here’s my article (Part 1, Part 2) on the subject explaining how I got past the yuck stage and advanced to the better-informed this-is-great stage.
A workable toilet is one more thing that needs to be prep tested before Day 1 arrives instead of having a nebulous plan on how to deal with our sewage. The best alternative of all is to continue using the flush toilets most are currently using. This would require a source of running water as described in #2 above. Like everything else discussed here, prepare for the New-Normal stage, not just the emergency stage.
6. COOK STOVE
This is another area where perhaps too many are planning for the early survival stage of TEOTWAWKI without giving due consideration to the New-Normal stage. Cooking our meals over an open fire in the backyard for the duration of TEOTWAWKI just isn’t feasible. While some top-10 lists omit cooking altogether, most have things like Dutch ovens, propane camp stoves, backpacking stoves, Weber grills, solar ovens, and alcohol stoves to name a few. For a short-term event, these are great but for a grid-down world, none of these methods are sustainable or practical. Cooking up some chicken and potatoes in a Dutch oven in the back yard is a great way to spend a Saturday afternoon, but as a full-time cooking method it falls way short.
Rocket stoves are a feasible alternative for those who have no other options. They’re easy enough to DIY even without using any man-made components. I have an upcoming article on a rocket oven my daughters and I built over a three-day weekend. Even with a propane stove for post-SHTF cooking, a rocket oven is an excellent way to save propane when it comes to baking.
The two most practical ways to cook food on a long-term basis are with wood and propane. While propane isn’t sustainable, it can last long enough that sustainability isn’t a big issue.
First, let’s talk about wood. A full-blown wood cook stove like our pioneer grandmas had is certainly an option for post-SHTF cooking. But for most of us it’s not the most realistic solution, mostly due to cost, weight, and pre-SHTF usability. They’re available online to purchase new with prices starting around $3,000, or used from sites like Etsy and eBay. Learning to Cook on a Wood-Fired Stove is one of many articles on the subject from the SurvivalBlog archive stick which can give us an idea of how these old-fashioned stoves work.
Some home-heating woodstoves can also double as a cook stove. While an inferior method, for many preppers this would seem to be the best overall sustainable option for the TEOTWAWKI homestead. Serving two purposes, there’s no need for a heating stove and a cook stove in different locations, requiring two separate chimneys. There are two types of these woodstoves, those with one or two removable plates on top so the pots have direct access to the flames, or the more common flat-topped versions lacking removable plates. I’ll leave it to the reader to research this topic in more depth but here’s a link that’ll give you some ideas.
This subject is way too broad to cover in this article but doing a search on “small cooking woodstove” and clicking on “images” will give you an idea of what’s available. This article “How to cook on a wood heat stove”
will also give you a glimpse of the possibilities.
The upside of a wood-burning cook stove is its sustainability. The huge downside is that it’s already hot enough in the house in the summertime without adding more heat from a wood-fired stove. Having a second wood cook stove outdoors on a covered deck or patio, or a cookhouse like some of our great grandmothers had, could not only help solve the problem but also provide a backup woodstove for the heating the house if needed.
So what’s the best way to cook food after the SHTF? The overall best option for cooking is a regular propane kitchen stove, a large propane tank, and the common sense to know what to limit the propane use to: cooking only! Cooking is a necessity, hot showers are a luxury, and it takes ten times more propane to heat enough water for a shower than it does to cook dinner. Suck it up buttercup! Either find a better way to heat water or take cold showers. Heating a post-SHTF home with propane would be a crime based on how quickly the propane would be used up (weeks or months) vs. how long it would last for cooking (years). Propane should only be used for heating if Day One occurs in the wintertime and only until the woodstove you have tucked away on that pallet in the garage is installed.
If I had to make an educated guess, I’d say that on the first-year anniversary after the SHTF when survivors are sitting around the woodstove eating the recently-discovered stash of Thin Mints and Little Debbie oatmeal pies, when discussing things they’d do differently if it were Day One again, better propane management will be near the top of the list. Number two will be a larger stash of Thin Mints and Little Debbie snacks.
We’d all agree that cooking, and especially canning, is done most efficiently on whatever we’re using right now as a cook stove. You turn the knob and heat starts immediately, and with a flick of the wrist the same knob can instantly regulate the amount of heat.
Even though propane won’t be a sustainable resource after the SHTF, if managed properly it can last for years. My seven tanks are all portable and I only use propane for cooking. A few years back I wrote the start date on one of the tall upright 100 lb tanks. It lasted two weeks short of two years. A large 500-1,500 pound propane tank could potentially last for 5+ years for a full household if reserved for cooking only. We can further conserve propane during the cold months by doing at least some of the cooking on the woodstove we heat the house with.
For those with natural-gas stoves, it won’t take long after the grid shuts down before the gas quits flowing. You can however, plan ahead to switch the stove over to propane. By law, gas stoves have to be shipped with the natural gas orifices in place. Stoves come with the propane orifices enclosed in the envelope with the owners manual. They resemble a small bolt with a hex head and can be changed out in just a few minutes. Be aware that natural-gas and propane orifices are not interchangeable. When using propane, a pressure regulator must be used which is the same kind used on propane grills, camp stoves, etc.
Ever since pilot lights were mostly outlawed as a danger to mankind, most natural gas and propane stoves must be plugged into the wall and use a glowing metal heat plate to reignite the oven as it cycles on and off during baking. The electricity also powers the igniters which light the burners. When off-grid, the burners can be lit with a match or a wand butane lighter. The oven however, wouldn’t be usable since there’s no pilot light or glow plate to reignite the gas as the oven cycles off and on during baking. I’m not aware of any solution to the problem other than using a stove similar to the Premier brand I have which uses 8 AA batteries instead of a 120-volt connection. The batteries provide the electricity for the spark which ignites the burners, and the oven burner never quite turns off so it acts as its own pilot light. Check around for pricing and other stoves which may be designed for off-grid use. Search “Premier P30B3102P” to see an example of the one I use.
For those already using propane to cook with, to be prepared an extra pressure regulator ($10) or two would be a good investment.
As I mentioned, cooking will be a very important thing to plan for in a realistic way, not a nebulous idea to use something like a camp stove or that Weber grill on the back deck. Again, we should be planning for the New Normal phase of TEOTWAWKI, not just the emergency and survival phases, and we should be testing our preps.
(To be continued tomorrow, in Part 4.)
Read the full article here