Discussions
Reply to: Preparing for CLO induced bank failures? Posted 2 weeks ago

I suspect the article is correct, however I’m not changing anything about my asset allocation. A large fraction of my net worth is in index funds. They will probably tank if that article’s predictions come to pass, which again I think is likely. But, as they say ‘time in the market beats timing the market’. In other words, a market-average return from index funds is likely to yield a higher long-term rate of return than moving money in and out according to whether I think it will go up or down (because I will frequently be wrong). Also as a relatively young person from the perspective of my retirement savings (which I won’t use for decades), a huge recession just means something I buy every month (stocks) is on a big sale and I get more for my money. Now if the value of my index funds goes to zero, our civilization has ended and I don’t think it will matter if I moved my stocks (index funds) to gold, cryptocurrencies etc. Not to say you shouldn’t have assets in those things, just that you shouldn’t reallocate heavily into them due to fear of some impending event. At that point, you will be relying on assets like long-term food storage and water purification systems. Maybe one percent of your net worth into physical preps seems like a great diversification to me. No one has ever paid me for my financial advice, so I guess I’m not a professional and yadda yadda yadda disclaimer yadda yadda yadda.

Reply to: Digital preparedness Posted 2 weeks ago

I have two apps that I think would be very useful in a variety of ‘grid-down’ situations. One is MapFactor navigation. You can download the open-source maps (OSMs) for as much of the globe as you want. I have down to street and individual building maps for all of North America on my phone. Not quite as good information as Google (and may not have complete detail in some more remote areas), but Google doesn’t let you download a copy of their entire North American map. As long as the GPS satellites are still up, you can use MapFactor to navigate by GPS. Even if they’re not, you still have exhaustively detailed, searchable maps on your device and you can navigate by landmark. The second is Kiwix, which allows you to put an offline copy of Wikipedia on your device. Yes, all of Wikipedia. The version with pictures is a lot bigger, but I thought worth it. Again, searchable etc. in a complete grid-down. I have it on my phone and my laptop. Lastly, you want to buy a huge (and legit) microSD card to store all of this data on; the internal storage in you phone won’t be enough. I have read that a large fraction of the larger microSD cards on marketplaces like Amazon are fakes, so buy direct from the manufacturer. I think it’s pretty incredible that I can walk around with detailed maps of a continent and the world’s largest encyclopedia in my pocket, as a afterthought to a device I already use for a bunch of other things. Tech is really pretty incredible when you stop to think about it.

Reply to: Best water purification tablets (and other portable purifiers) Posted 2 weeks ago

Why no discussion of membrane filters (such a Sawyer Squeeze)? For my camping/bugout system, I run the water through a membrane filter, then blast the filtered water with a UV pen (such as SteriPen). I sometimes pre-filter by letting the water settle or pouring it through cloth if it’s really high turbidity (cloudy, muddy), but usually that’s not necessary. That two-stage system covers pretty much everything besides chemical contamination, and is a belt-and-suspenders approach for most things (either alone should be sufficient for bacteria, for example). The water is ready to drink right away, has no unpleasant chlorine taste, and as long as you can recharge your UV pen, you aren’t going to run out of anything (both the membrane filter and the UV pen are rated for an absurdly large amount of water). Really, the only downside is having to make sure the water doesn’t freeze inside the membrane filter (if it freezes in there, the ice crystals can puncture the membrane).

Reply to: Best portable solar chargers Posted 3 weeks ago

Thanks for doing this testing! A few thoughts/questions: 1. How did you measure cell area in order to calculate efficiency? 2. Commercial (non-camping) solar panels are tested at standardized conditions (1000 w/m^2 and 25 degC). That’s pretty close to irradiance you get at a cloudless day around noon in many parts of the world, at the equator it’s more. You lose a bit from the panels typically being warmer, but not that much. So you really should be able to get rated power out of these panels, especially when you first brought them out and they were cool from the AC. It’s honestly a bit disturbing that you can’t; that kind of exaggeration is not tolerated elsewhere in the solar market (if anything, commercial panels usually outperform by a few percent when tested; a 20W panel might actually go to 21w under ideal conditions). 3. I was curious how my own panel from my own bag would perform by this criteria. I ran a sloppier test, it was still enough to give me a pretty good ballpark. I have the renogy 5w (basically 1/2 of the 10w folding panel you tested). I hooked it up to a usb powerbank, through a datalogging usb meter. Clear day (cloudless for vast majority of the test) temps in the 70’s F, I adjusted the tilt every hour or two, and got a pretty consistent output in the range of 2.8 to 3.3 watts (4.7+ volts, 0.5+ amps) throughout the peak hours of the day ~10 am to ~5 pm. The record of mAh accumulated was consistent with the power staying in that range when I wasn’t watching it. So pretty good, but you’re correct, it’s a bit more than half of what they promised. Still I’m pretty happy overall with the renogy panel; I haven’t field tested it all that much, but it’s built like a tank as you say, and even a 5w panel puts enough into my powerbank in a day to keep my phone topped up for two or three days.

Reply to: Minimizing bug out bag weight Posted 4 weeks ago

My go bag is just under 40 lbs fully loaded with food, water, and fuel (which is how I store it), and although I am in good shape, I would agree that I couldn’t carry it very far. That being said, if we have to bug out, plan A is leaving by car (or train or bus or some other form of transit). While we also store some supplies in the car, but my point is that the backpack form factor is maybe for plans C or D or E. Maybe also for going short distances (like from the train station to a bus station). I have worked hard on cutting bag weight (believe it or not), but I also don’t think bugging out is likely to resemble ultralight wilderness camping. If it’s the actual apocalypse everywhere, there’s no point in travelling. Short of that, you end up relocating to some place that was less hard hit. If that place is hundreds of miles away, and foot is the only way to travel (roads, trains, buses, boats, planes all blocked and I can’t ride my bicycle either for some reason?) I’m not making it regardless of pack weight. If you are a highly skilled ultralight through-hiker, maybe you can, but for me that’s not realistic. OK, forgive my ramblings, here’s something that’s you might find more useful. I have my go bag organized by theme into smaller bags (such as these https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MQXLKS9/ and these https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007KJU022/). Not only does that make it much easier to find things in the dark when you’re tired and stressed (all the water filtration stuff is in one particular bag, and it’s blue), it makes it easy to ditch stuff. If I do have to walk 20 or 30 miles to get out of a disaster zone, I can remove the least-relevant kits in seconds and lighten my pack weight by 5 or 10 lbs.

Reply to: Knowing who has what skills Posted 4 weeks ago
Reply to: Knowing who has what skills Posted 1 month ago

Survival Related: Foraging: intermediate. I know how to ID and prepare/cook about 80 wild or feral plants in my area. Water filtration: intermediate. Training as an environmental engineer, a little practice working with both individual and community scale water purification. Food storage: low. I’ve done some research and stored my own grains/legumes in mylar bags. Backcountry camping: low. I’ve gone a few times on one or two night trips in fairly mild weather conditions. Off-grid solar power: intermediate. I used to run a small business manufacturing micro scale solar lighting and power systems, but I’m probably a few years out of date at this point. Other: Teaching: intermediate-high. I’ve taught hands-on skills for a number of years. Fabrication/making: intermediate. Lots of experience with CNC machines like 3D printers and laser cutters, misc. other shop equipment. Also a decent amount of bike repair. Environmental Engineering: intermediate. Degrees, licensed, but haven’t practiced in a while. Environmental Engineering focuses on filtration, purification, remediation, pollution abatement. Logistics: intermediate-high. I’m pretty good at organizing complex systems and keeping track of details. I know this is kind of personal and may feel like bad opsec, but I think we can offer each other a lot more if we have an idea of each other’s strengths.

Knowing who has what skills
7
14
Posted 1 month ago
Reply to: Urban preps for the concrete jungle: what are your hacks? Posted 1 month ago
Reply to: Newbie prepper Posted 1 month ago

I like to think about it in terms of priority levels. Start with the low-hanging fruit (cheap/easy, handles the more likely issues). For example, it was cheap and easy for me to to store water and water treatment to get through a week or two (maybe a month, tops) without water. There’s no point in buying a year’s worth of food if you have only two days of water. Get a month’s worth of everything covered before you worry about supplies for six months. Similarly a ‘go bag’ that has ID and backups of important documents, a few snacks and some other essentials will help you if you have to unexpectedly leave town due to a fire or natural disaster, and spend some nights in a hotel room in a different city. Worry about that before you worry about a ‘go bag’ that can get you through a week in the woods, cut off from civilization. Get some basic OTC medicines together before you worry about a trauma kit. I remember panicking when I first started prepping, what helped me was the realization that I might not be as prepared as I want to be, but I’m better off than I was six months ago, and the trajectory is positive.

Reply to: What were your best COVID-19 preps? Posted 1 month ago
Reply to: Do you buy honey locally? How and why? Posted 1 month ago

Honey does go bad, but it’s still edible for a very long time. Years? Decades? The main reason it doesn’t go bad quickly is the high concentration of sugar, which sucks the moisture out of microbes landing on it (due to osmosis). There are other factors as well, but the simple answer is that if you want the longest shelf life, get a bag of sugar. If you want to extend that even more, seal the sugar up in a mylar bag (no oxygen absorber). If you really want honey, not sugar, you should be able to get local honey at a farmer’s market. Make sure it’s a reputable one; some allow vendors to repackage stuff they didn’t grow/raise themselves. Also, keep in mind that local, natural honey can still be toxic if the beekeepers aren’t careful, as there are some plants that produce poisonous and/or hallucinogenic honey. Also, farmer’s market honey will be maybe 3x more expensive. If you really want honey and you have more time than money, you can fake it by making your own dandelion syrup, which looks, smells, and tastes almost exactly like honey, and is made from sugar (cheap), water (free) and dandelion blossoms (free). Hope that helps!

Knowing who has what skills
7
14
Posted 1 month ago
Reply to: Preparing for CLO induced bank failures? Posted 2 weeks ago

I suspect the article is correct, however I’m not changing anything about my asset allocation. A large fraction of my net worth is in index funds. They will probably tank if that article’s predictions come to pass, which again I think is likely. But, as they say ‘time in the market beats timing the market’. In other words, a market-average return from index funds is likely to yield a higher long-term rate of return than moving money in and out according to whether I think it will go up or down (because I will frequently be wrong). Also as a relatively young person from the perspective of my retirement savings (which I won’t use for decades), a huge recession just means something I buy every month (stocks) is on a big sale and I get more for my money. Now if the value of my index funds goes to zero, our civilization has ended and I don’t think it will matter if I moved my stocks (index funds) to gold, cryptocurrencies etc. Not to say you shouldn’t have assets in those things, just that you shouldn’t reallocate heavily into them due to fear of some impending event. At that point, you will be relying on assets like long-term food storage and water purification systems. Maybe one percent of your net worth into physical preps seems like a great diversification to me. No one has ever paid me for my financial advice, so I guess I’m not a professional and yadda yadda yadda disclaimer yadda yadda yadda.

Reply to: Digital preparedness Posted 2 weeks ago

I have two apps that I think would be very useful in a variety of ‘grid-down’ situations. One is MapFactor navigation. You can download the open-source maps (OSMs) for as much of the globe as you want. I have down to street and individual building maps for all of North America on my phone. Not quite as good information as Google (and may not have complete detail in some more remote areas), but Google doesn’t let you download a copy of their entire North American map. As long as the GPS satellites are still up, you can use MapFactor to navigate by GPS. Even if they’re not, you still have exhaustively detailed, searchable maps on your device and you can navigate by landmark. The second is Kiwix, which allows you to put an offline copy of Wikipedia on your device. Yes, all of Wikipedia. The version with pictures is a lot bigger, but I thought worth it. Again, searchable etc. in a complete grid-down. I have it on my phone and my laptop. Lastly, you want to buy a huge (and legit) microSD card to store all of this data on; the internal storage in you phone won’t be enough. I have read that a large fraction of the larger microSD cards on marketplaces like Amazon are fakes, so buy direct from the manufacturer. I think it’s pretty incredible that I can walk around with detailed maps of a continent and the world’s largest encyclopedia in my pocket, as a afterthought to a device I already use for a bunch of other things. Tech is really pretty incredible when you stop to think about it.

Reply to: Best water purification tablets (and other portable purifiers) Posted 2 weeks ago

Why no discussion of membrane filters (such a Sawyer Squeeze)? For my camping/bugout system, I run the water through a membrane filter, then blast the filtered water with a UV pen (such as SteriPen). I sometimes pre-filter by letting the water settle or pouring it through cloth if it’s really high turbidity (cloudy, muddy), but usually that’s not necessary. That two-stage system covers pretty much everything besides chemical contamination, and is a belt-and-suspenders approach for most things (either alone should be sufficient for bacteria, for example). The water is ready to drink right away, has no unpleasant chlorine taste, and as long as you can recharge your UV pen, you aren’t going to run out of anything (both the membrane filter and the UV pen are rated for an absurdly large amount of water). Really, the only downside is having to make sure the water doesn’t freeze inside the membrane filter (if it freezes in there, the ice crystals can puncture the membrane).

Reply to: Best portable solar chargers Posted 3 weeks ago

Thanks for doing this testing! A few thoughts/questions: 1. How did you measure cell area in order to calculate efficiency? 2. Commercial (non-camping) solar panels are tested at standardized conditions (1000 w/m^2 and 25 degC). That’s pretty close to irradiance you get at a cloudless day around noon in many parts of the world, at the equator it’s more. You lose a bit from the panels typically being warmer, but not that much. So you really should be able to get rated power out of these panels, especially when you first brought them out and they were cool from the AC. It’s honestly a bit disturbing that you can’t; that kind of exaggeration is not tolerated elsewhere in the solar market (if anything, commercial panels usually outperform by a few percent when tested; a 20W panel might actually go to 21w under ideal conditions). 3. I was curious how my own panel from my own bag would perform by this criteria. I ran a sloppier test, it was still enough to give me a pretty good ballpark. I have the renogy 5w (basically 1/2 of the 10w folding panel you tested). I hooked it up to a usb powerbank, through a datalogging usb meter. Clear day (cloudless for vast majority of the test) temps in the 70’s F, I adjusted the tilt every hour or two, and got a pretty consistent output in the range of 2.8 to 3.3 watts (4.7+ volts, 0.5+ amps) throughout the peak hours of the day ~10 am to ~5 pm. The record of mAh accumulated was consistent with the power staying in that range when I wasn’t watching it. So pretty good, but you’re correct, it’s a bit more than half of what they promised. Still I’m pretty happy overall with the renogy panel; I haven’t field tested it all that much, but it’s built like a tank as you say, and even a 5w panel puts enough into my powerbank in a day to keep my phone topped up for two or three days.

Reply to: Minimizing bug out bag weight Posted 4 weeks ago

My go bag is just under 40 lbs fully loaded with food, water, and fuel (which is how I store it), and although I am in good shape, I would agree that I couldn’t carry it very far. That being said, if we have to bug out, plan A is leaving by car (or train or bus or some other form of transit). While we also store some supplies in the car, but my point is that the backpack form factor is maybe for plans C or D or E. Maybe also for going short distances (like from the train station to a bus station). I have worked hard on cutting bag weight (believe it or not), but I also don’t think bugging out is likely to resemble ultralight wilderness camping. If it’s the actual apocalypse everywhere, there’s no point in travelling. Short of that, you end up relocating to some place that was less hard hit. If that place is hundreds of miles away, and foot is the only way to travel (roads, trains, buses, boats, planes all blocked and I can’t ride my bicycle either for some reason?) I’m not making it regardless of pack weight. If you are a highly skilled ultralight through-hiker, maybe you can, but for me that’s not realistic. OK, forgive my ramblings, here’s something that’s you might find more useful. I have my go bag organized by theme into smaller bags (such as these https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MQXLKS9/ and these https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007KJU022/). Not only does that make it much easier to find things in the dark when you’re tired and stressed (all the water filtration stuff is in one particular bag, and it’s blue), it makes it easy to ditch stuff. If I do have to walk 20 or 30 miles to get out of a disaster zone, I can remove the least-relevant kits in seconds and lighten my pack weight by 5 or 10 lbs.

Reply to: Knowing who has what skills Posted 4 weeks ago
Reply to: Knowing who has what skills Posted 1 month ago

Survival Related: Foraging: intermediate. I know how to ID and prepare/cook about 80 wild or feral plants in my area. Water filtration: intermediate. Training as an environmental engineer, a little practice working with both individual and community scale water purification. Food storage: low. I’ve done some research and stored my own grains/legumes in mylar bags. Backcountry camping: low. I’ve gone a few times on one or two night trips in fairly mild weather conditions. Off-grid solar power: intermediate. I used to run a small business manufacturing micro scale solar lighting and power systems, but I’m probably a few years out of date at this point. Other: Teaching: intermediate-high. I’ve taught hands-on skills for a number of years. Fabrication/making: intermediate. Lots of experience with CNC machines like 3D printers and laser cutters, misc. other shop equipment. Also a decent amount of bike repair. Environmental Engineering: intermediate. Degrees, licensed, but haven’t practiced in a while. Environmental Engineering focuses on filtration, purification, remediation, pollution abatement. Logistics: intermediate-high. I’m pretty good at organizing complex systems and keeping track of details. I know this is kind of personal and may feel like bad opsec, but I think we can offer each other a lot more if we have an idea of each other’s strengths.

Reply to: Urban preps for the concrete jungle: what are your hacks? Posted 1 month ago
Reply to: Newbie prepper Posted 1 month ago

I like to think about it in terms of priority levels. Start with the low-hanging fruit (cheap/easy, handles the more likely issues). For example, it was cheap and easy for me to to store water and water treatment to get through a week or two (maybe a month, tops) without water. There’s no point in buying a year’s worth of food if you have only two days of water. Get a month’s worth of everything covered before you worry about supplies for six months. Similarly a ‘go bag’ that has ID and backups of important documents, a few snacks and some other essentials will help you if you have to unexpectedly leave town due to a fire or natural disaster, and spend some nights in a hotel room in a different city. Worry about that before you worry about a ‘go bag’ that can get you through a week in the woods, cut off from civilization. Get some basic OTC medicines together before you worry about a trauma kit. I remember panicking when I first started prepping, what helped me was the realization that I might not be as prepared as I want to be, but I’m better off than I was six months ago, and the trajectory is positive.

Reply to: What were your best COVID-19 preps? Posted 1 month ago
Reply to: Do you buy honey locally? How and why? Posted 1 month ago

Honey does go bad, but it’s still edible for a very long time. Years? Decades? The main reason it doesn’t go bad quickly is the high concentration of sugar, which sucks the moisture out of microbes landing on it (due to osmosis). There are other factors as well, but the simple answer is that if you want the longest shelf life, get a bag of sugar. If you want to extend that even more, seal the sugar up in a mylar bag (no oxygen absorber). If you really want honey, not sugar, you should be able to get local honey at a farmer’s market. Make sure it’s a reputable one; some allow vendors to repackage stuff they didn’t grow/raise themselves. Also, keep in mind that local, natural honey can still be toxic if the beekeepers aren’t careful, as there are some plants that produce poisonous and/or hallucinogenic honey. Also, farmer’s market honey will be maybe 3x more expensive. If you really want honey and you have more time than money, you can fake it by making your own dandelion syrup, which looks, smells, and tastes almost exactly like honey, and is made from sugar (cheap), water (free) and dandelion blossoms (free). Hope that helps!