We reached our first milestone on Facebook, 50 friends! To celebrate, we gave away $50 in store credit to one of the first 50 to sign up. Next up, we’ll give away $100 once we reach 100 Friends! To participate, just look up ‘Advice and Beans’ on Facebook and hit ‘Like’.
Thanks y’all!
Quick update!
After much ado, our 5 mil 2 gallon bags are now in stock, and can be found here! We created a combo kit as well, with 20 5 mil 2 gallon bags and 20 1000cc oxygen absorbers (use 1 per bag). We are thrilled with the feel and strength of the bags, our supplier has done an excellent job as always! This is just the start of our move to carry every bag size in a 5 mil or greater thickness, so look for more sizes later in the year.
Secondly, we signed a UPS contract. This will allow us to ship some things that we couldn’t before based on our USPS-Centric shipping strategy. For example, starting next week, we will offer 4-packs of Gamma Seal Lids for those who don’t need a full case. If anyone thinks we should be carrying something in particular, as always let me know! I love ordering small quantities of nearly anything to test the market, especially if I have order commitments from folks who want something. This allows you to get something at a discount that you know you want, although it may take some additional time for us to source the item.
For those who have asked, I have small quantities of both our Vacuum Sealer and a clamshell Heat Sealer which are due to arrive next week. I have pre-orders for 2 of the vacuum sealers and 1 of the heat sealers already, so it’ll be first come first served on the rest. I am working on setting up a permanent supply chain for these items. My apologies for the delay in getting these, but the last order with one of our suppliers took over 2 weeks to negotiate, blech.
At the same time the sealers come in, we will also have 2″x3″ Zip Seal Mylar Bags, of the same thickness as our 20″x30″ bags, so they’ll be heavy duty! My wife made me order these, as she wants to use them for putting up medicines, spices and seeds. We got a great deal on them so we will be able to offer them to y’all at a great price.
Finally, our food storage calculator is out to bid with several programming companies. Looks like it will be a bit (ok, a lot) more expensive than I thought to get it up and running with all the cool features I want to add for y’all. I’m going to put up a donation button on the page where it will live when its finished, and hope that if you find value from it, you’ll consider donating. Any donations above and beyond the cost of the programming will be used for upgrades you want to see!
That’s it for today, stay cool everyone!
Be praised, My Lord, through Sister Water; she is very useful, and humble, and precious, and pure.
-Francis of Assisi (1181-1226) Canticle of the Sun circa 1225
The chirp, chirp, chirp of a running ram-pump is soothing to me. While stored water is necessary for any survival plan, a ram-pump system represents life beyond the most meager of existence.
As a bare minimum, FEMA recommends 1 gallon a day per person for 3 days as a survival necessity (12 gallons for a family of 4). When compared to the average person’s ‘normal’ usage of water of 80-100 gallons per day, you can imagine how challenging it would be to subsist on that tiny quantity. Think about how fast the dishes would pile up, the clothes would smell, or how the inability to flush a toilet would make you feel.
Our preparedness group has 20+ members, counting children, and none of us want to imagine having to live without fresh water in a disaster. Over the course of a year, we came up with the SurvivalClub Water Plan to ensure adequate supplies of fresh water (for at least one location) should we ever need it. At capacity, the system will actually provide more than 100 gallons per day per person, leaving sufficient water after drinking, cleaning and sanitation to grow a garden, water a lawn, or give to others who might need it as well. Our total system costs will run around $2500, and provide approximately 1,168,000 gallons of water per year. If my math is right, that is about 1/50th of a penny per gallon, whereas my city water costs me around 10 times that. Even if we used it for nothing but grey water to run a garden or water a lawn, the cost/benefit is amazing. Even if our system costs double or triple as we factor in expenses we haven’t considered (extra filters, replacement parts, etc), the price per gallon is still almost insignificant. And that is only the water provided in 1 year!
The heart of our system is a hydraulic ram pump. In a simple sense, it uses water to push water, and is an inefficient system. I estimate the majority of water is flushed off as excess to run the system, while only a small percentage (in our case, 2.3 gallons per minute) being moved uphill to its destination. However, that is more than enough for our purposes, and the fact that it runs without electricity and has only 2 moving parts, makes it potentially the best solution for preparedness needs.
When complete, our ram pump will reside at the bottom of a small cliff. Upstream of the cliff is a stream that runs all year round, though at some points much heavier than others. We will have a steel trough at the point where the water flow is greatest, which will collect the water. From there, it will run from the trough through 1.5″ pvc pipe downhill to the ram-pump (total drop 30′), which will push water uphill, around 150′ vertically and 400′ horizontally. At the top of a slope, the water will collect in a 1000-gallon cistern, which will be above roof-level to the home on the property, allowing us to gravity-flow the water to the house. We are still determining whether to create a large charcoal/sand filter system, or to use a different mechanism such as a Berkey filter to create potable water.
This is a video of our first test of the ram-pump to ensure it actually worked. The water is running down the PVC piping from a 55-gallon drum, into the ram-pump, which is then pushing it through the hose down a small incline, and then back up to above the level of the water source. Next time, I’ll talk about the work required to prepare the ground for the completed system. We’re probably still several months away from a working system, and I’ll keep you apprised as we get more complete!
First, I want to thank everyone who participated in our Article Contest. I know putting oneself out there is not always an easy thing to do. They say that public speaking is the 2nd biggest fear in the world next to death. I think that’s part of why I haven’t done any official Advice and Beans Youtube videos yet.=) (Though I do plan to in the coming weeks!) But you all did great, and I am honored you took the time to enter. I had some great email exchanges with many of you, and I learned a lot I didn’t know before. And a special thanks to Don, the first person to ever write me an email about the blog as well as entered our contest. I never even knew if anyone was there until he said something!=)
Because we had fewer folks participate than I estimated, I’m happy to announce that everyone will receive a cash value gift certificate to the store! (Of course, if someone wants some cool stuff from the Gear Department of Advice and Beans, let me know and I can do that instead! I have things like messenger bags, camp showers, paracord, drier lint and the like in the Gear Vault.)
Prizes were assigned using a random number generator (Basically, I rolled a die. I used to play D&D when I was younger, so I have all sorts of many-sided die hanging around! Yes, geek, me.)
So without further ado *Drum roll*, the winners are:
$250 – Laura
$150 – Tessie
$100 – Alan
$75 – Don
$50 – Tim
$50 – Rob
$50 – BKB
$50 – Teresa
I will have your gift certificates attached to your email addresses in the store by Tuesday morning so you can go shopping! Again, thanks everyone and a big round of applause!
Imagine a worst case scenario, something you would read in a Michael Crichton novel. After coming out of a period of minimal solar activity, the sun erupts with a solar flare of unimaginable magnitude. From this flare comes a silent, invisible Super-storm, called a Coronal Mass Ejection. This CME speeds towards the earth at over 500,000 miles per hour and washes across the earth’s magnetic field a mere 18 hours later. 50% of the satellites in orbit, those not protected by the body of the earth, shudder with the geomagnetic storm and then go silent, disrupting cell phone traffic across the globe end rendering much of the GPS network inoperable. On earth, the storm causes Aurora, much like the Northern Lights, that are visible as far south as San Juan. Energy is almost visible to the human eye as the atmosphere literally hums with the power. As the pulse touches down on the world’s electrical grids, no one can imagine the speed at which our fragile wire-based infrastructure collapses…a massive chain of transformer and power station explosions rock the country. The energy companies tell us it will take 20 years to restore power to 90% of the planet, due to the complexity and lack of capacity to build new transformers, if the parts can even be fabricated in our sudden electricity-less world.
Geomagnetic Storm Headed Toward Earth
Of course this scenario is unlikely, farcical even…or is it? The exact event I described, minus the effects on our current world, occurred in 1859, and is called the Carrington Event.
On September 1–2, 1859, the largest recorded geomagnetic storm occurred. Aurorae were seen around the world, most notably over the Caribbean; also noteworthy were those over the Rocky Mountains that were so bright that their glow awoke gold miners, who began preparing breakfast because they thought it was morning.[4]
Telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed in some cases even shocking telegraph operators.[5] Telegraph pylons threw sparks and telegraph paper spontaneously caught fire.[6] Some telegraph systems appeared to continue to send and receive messages despite having been disconnected from their power supplies.[7]
While I preach that our preps should be based real-world likelihoods, the fragility of our electrical grid would make a storm of similar magnitude to what occurred in 1859 a catastrophe of Biblical proportions. Most areas of the world in the 1800’s knew at least something about food production, carpentry, cobbling, coopering and a hundred other skills that we have lost in our specialized societies. While specialization has led to booming living standards, it comes at a cost…brittleness. Meaning, if everyone knows how to farm, the loss of any particular farming area or piece of equipment, while tragic, would likely be insignificant to the world’s food supply. However, imagine that our entire method of farming, from industrial fertilization to high-capacity farm machinery, is rendered a total loss to the collapse of our electrical infrastructure. That is another story entirely, and would require the remaking of our world.
Most here by now know I’m not a fatalist. I prepare for things like tornadoes, job losses, and floods, not for EMP’s, nuclear war, or Zombies. However, there is always a little tickle at the back of my skull that whispers of my lack of preparation in one particular area: water, and what would occur if something truly monumental occurred. You all know the deal with what I consider the 5 musts of preparedness: Water, Food, Shelter, Fire, Light.
However, while I’ve harped to my preparedness group (I affectionately call it SurvivalClub) for over a year about our lack of water preps, they are woefully inadequate. We have over 10 person-years of food stored, multiple locations we could head to for shelter (plus a dozen tents and tarps), 50 ways to make fire, probably 500 flashlights, candles, lanterns, torches, flares, glowsticks and headlamps. All that, and we have less than 10 days worth of stored water, and very little planned in ways to get more. Sure, we have water filters, ways to boil water, iodine, bleach, pool shock and several other ways to make water pure. However, unlike the other areas, we don’t have a real plan.
So, having gotten tired of listening to me, our group has finally taken the first concrete steps toward a real water solution. We came up with the SWP, the Survivalclub Water Plan. The plan had several requirements: it needed to work without electricity, had to be able to support 20+ people, and had to run with a minimum of moving parts that could break or wear down. I don’t remember which of us actually first read about a ram-pump, but when we all saw it, we knew that was the solution we were looking for.
Tomorrow, we’ll discuss the ram-pump, how it works, and the components of our complete system.