Government Prepping Ancillary

Being Creative is little more than common sense and with a little ingenuity you can make things that are useful and the first thing would be a stainless steel plate as this can be put on a mesh over an open fire or over the embers of a barbeque and you have an instant grill and you can cook basic flatbreads to burgers if you have them and many fabrication companies have offcuts they will usually give you for a pack of biscuits.

If you have a generator you keep your freezer running and if it is full you do a simple thing and that is to set it to its coldest setting as once cold it will remain frozen for several hours if you don’t open it so stop children going in at random and as it becomes empty you fill containers with water and freeze them and you only power your freezer once every four or six hours and it may run for around 10% longer but it saves your generator fuel. If you have solar panels and an inverter it allows the batteries time to recharge.

If you have a local waterway such as a river you check and see if it has been invaded by the American crayfish and if it has you have another source of food so you can make some small pots and bait them and find a place to covertly put them and you will get some crayfish and while they may be fiddly, hunger and fresh fish negates fiddly and you prepare them. You can buy secondhand fishing tackle and catch your supper and while it may not be cod or haddock it will make a meal.

Make your own compost heap so you have a growing medium and remember you grow in soils and compost merely refreshes the soils and adds vital nutrients to it, you can also get blood, fish, and bone to replenish many nutrients and you can steam soil to kill bacteria and mix it with steamed soil and add blood fish and bone and put this into large containers and seal, you now have growing medium on stand by.

Keep seeds you can grow indoors on a window sill as cress can be grown on wet kitchen roll and things such as mustard and many other things can also be easily grown.

If you have a log burner then use this, if you throw a stainless steel sheet on top you have the basic hot plate which you can utilise to make basic flat breads using the heat from the log burner, additionally you can also use the heat to pre heat things such as soups or water before finishing it off on your cooker, thus saving gas/wood and making it last longer.

If it rains get into your shorts or bikini and get outside in the rain and take a bar of soap and shampoo with you and take the opportunity to have a wash and often a cold shower is just what the doctor ordered and livens up your metabolism which livens you up.

If you have a tarpaulin then get it out and let it catch rainwater and drain it straight into a water container and you can boil it instantly and let it cool before filtering it through your filter and storing it and adding treatment tablets to store it for several years.

If you can capture more rainwater, but not in water containers for drinking water, you have grey water and boiled it can be used for washing pots or watering gardens or cleaning solar panels, windows, and any cameras you may have still working or you can add a little bleach and wash things down and disinfect them.

If you catch rainwater and boil it you can add some soap powder and clean clothes and you can put them on the line in the rain and the rain will rinse them and you can take them down until it stops and then hang them out to dry.

Being creative is not about breaking any pots as it is all about exploiting any situation to your advantage and getting something from it and if you can get something from it then do so as if you don’t, someone else will.



Make an emergency bag has many benefits and the obvious one is to buy you time and in a SHTF situation time is often the key as the unprepared will panic and begin grabbing everything they can and honestly, let them scramble around in the dark while you sit, think, and act logically.
What do you need? Ideally this would include foods such as energy bars and/or biscuits and some form of dried or canned/bottled foods, bottled water for drinking and cooking or hydrating dried foods, torches or lanterns for light and possibly a head torch to allow you to work hands free. Fire lighting equipment for lighting a log burner or open fire if you have one and potentially a rocket stove so you can cook or heat water and a basic first aid kit, Paracord or similar and some small fire wood such as twigs and fire starters to make fires.

Basically it should be designed to last three days as three days of not running round like a headless chicken gives you time to prepare and get ready for the longer term and you can get yourself set up as you may need to get gas cookers out, put some foods in an accessible place for easy access and to cook and to get your rocket stove out and prepare your log burner timber by cutting it up, so work out what you want and implement it. You will need your lighting out and if it candles, then matches or lighters and potentially connect your generator or maybe get out blankets and warm clothing. Be assured these few days will be busy and to an extent it depends on the time of year, so you are fully prepared.


Run a shake down test and this is little more than surviving for a few days on the equipment in your pack and in this time you will often have to do a lot of work and this would begin with getting the essentials out and setting them up, you need water and while you have plenty stored it is never enough so you need to capture some and this means your water filter, then of course you need food so your cooker and if this is gas, or you have a rocket stove this needs preparing. You will need wood for any log burner or open fire and in wetter months this would benefit from being inside to dry it out and this would be kindling and logs and any fire lighting equipment you have for heat followed by lighting, for a couple of days lanterns may suffice but for longer your generator or battery packs would need to be used and if you have a generator your freezer would need connecting every 4 or 6 hours to cool it down and of course you would need lighters to light a fire or rocket stove and potentially any candles or oil lamps you have. Now you need to get into a rhythm and this means working through things logically and work in a specific order.
How have you stored your survival kit and why have you stored it in that order as at night the first thing you need is light so you can see to get to your water or cooking equipment; while during daylight this would not be the case and do you get your generator first of check your solar panels are charging your batteries ready for your inverter, and what power do you need at home and when do you light your fire or log burner, and how much wood so they consume and how much heat do they produce and is it better to pre heat some foods on the log burner.
Running a shake down test is basically running off grid for a couple of days, or possibly a week and will be the most valuable experience you will have as it will highlight your deficiencies and give you time to correct them, and to refine your systems to be as seamless a transition as possible from having a fully working grid to a grid down situation.

To run such a test is best done in summer as the long days mean less light is needed and little heat is needed and the only time you would light your fire or log burner is for cooking and you can do that with your rocket stove if you have one; you can see how long your wood lasts and how long your batteries last in your torches or lanterns and how much or little water you consume and lust how realistically you can cook your food.
In simple terms it is also the opportunity to test your systems robustness and for how they work together and for robustness, let me explain, if you have a generator and a basic solar panel battery charging system you can see how long it takes to charge both or all of your batteries and once you remove and use a battery, how long it takes to recharge it which means you may be able to use an inverter to run your freezer or switch to a generator if you have one. In the same vein you can see how much fuel your fire takes to run and for how long it will run and essentially how hot it gets on top so you can stand tinned foods or food in saucepans on there to heat them up, or if it will actually cook them and save gas on your gas cooker, or wood for your rocket stove if you have one. What it does give is ideas of how your systems work together and just how much flexibility you may or may not have and this gives you your weaknesses and the time to address them, if you go through wood too quickly in summer you need more for winter so you can get some more pallets and break them up into boards and store them along with their blocks to give you more fuel and more flexibility to have a fire or a lit rocket stove and if you go through food too quickly you may need more.

How to run a shake down test, begin on Friday evening and at a prescribed time (e.g. 6pm) you switch your consumer unit off and your electric OR gas central heating will go off as will your fridge/freezer, your lighting and everything electrical, connect your generator correctly and remember your switching sequence and set your fridge/freezer to their coldest settings and let them run until they stop and prevent anyone going into the fridge or freezer.
Get any water you may need from your stored water and stand it for at least 30 minutes and pour it from container to container to aerate it before drinking it; next your meal and what are you going to have as it would be wise to drop to two meals per day and plan what they are and never pander to children’s whims as in a meltdown scenario they either eat it or go hungry; it’s that simple and now you have to select your cooking method and this may be log burner, rocket stove or gas cooker as each has benefits and liabilities. Do you light your log burner to heat food? Not really in summer as you don’t need the heat and if you have a gas cooker and limited gas supplies this leaves only your rocket stove as this uses the least fuel and cooks quickly so you light your rocket stove and cook on that and once you have cooked you can put a pan of water on for boiling to use up the wood already on your rocket stove and not waste it. You can put some aside if you have caught it for pot washing while it is still warm and filter the rest to replenish your water supplies as its all relative.
Note all problems and issues and work out a resolution and a working order and remember a failure is only a failure if you don’t rectify it and every failure is a valuable learning experience.

Heat only one room and have blankets, fleeces, or sleeping bags ready and if your room has an open fire or log burner then it needs lighting in the evening unless it is extremely cold and you have the wood to do it, and you keep the heat in that one room.

Note your storage solutions and remember that at night you need light in a power outage and in the day you don’t so keeping lights around your home may be a better option than keeping them all in one place you cannot get to easily in the dark.

In an emergency scenario you will be on your own and nobody is coming to save you and your family and you are dependent upon you and you alone and you will not get accurate information and what you get is what the Government want you to know which will be sanitised and you find this out the hard way, so be prepared and think; and use this as a useful starting point or guide and work yourself out.

One thing I would advocate is doing your research correctly and this leads to marketing B/S which is designed from the outset to use language designed to confuse you into buying a product and people have to see through it and make informed decisions, let me explain, I have a large pond or small lake which means I have water. This pond is fed from multiple springs, some with potable water, and this means I have running water and running water is another form of energy which I exploited as I have it, we designed compact water turbines in conjunction with 2 universities and I designed a vortex accelerator which leaves the turbines requiring a very small head of water, 1 metre in this case so I installed several turbines and gave myself free electricity.
Everyone assumes solar as it is the go to because people have been taught think solar and not taught think options and people need to think options because your individual situation may offer a different solution or answer and if we get away from solar we see we have water power and if we look around the UK we also have wind power so are water or wind more suited to you?
Several years ago I tested both solar panels and wind turbines and got some interesting results as often the wind turbines out performed the solar panels and this was for good reason, solar only works with sunlight and with no sunlight you have no power generation and in winter when you need most house light you get the least power generation. By comparison compact wind turbines produce less peak power but produce a more consistent power and they produce 24/7 and do not need daylight, winter is generally more windy and they are more attuned to the conditions and needs of people as winter is windier than summer generally so you produce less power from wind turbines, but for a lot longer.
One comparison tests in summer saw a solar panel produce an average 4.2 amps for 7 hours and it then tailed off and in a full 24 hour day it produced 36 amps of power; by comparison a small wind turbine averaged 3 amps per hour but for 24 hours and this gave a total of 72 amps so let’s calculate.
36 amps X 12 volts = 432 watts of power from the solar panel and we have 72 amps X 12 volts = 864 watts of power.
When exactly the same tests were done in a windy winter things changed and the solar panels gave 17 amps for the day so 17 X 12 = 204 watts for solar and the wind turbines produced a massive 8.2 amps average per hour or 196.8 amps for the day or an impressive 2361.6 watts for the day, so things are not always as they seem.
This alone gives you the option of using two systems and if we assume a basic battery charging solar system AND a small wind turbine you have the best of both worlds and have two different types of power generation which work at their best as they cover your scenarios and solar works well in summer and wind works well in winter, so both options are covered and if you lose one system the other system backs it up.
If you have access to water from a spring, stream, canal, or other water source, you can tap this with larger diameter pipes and reduce them down in diameter if it is downhill and the height of water is called “the head” and as water weighs 1Kg per litre the more water in your pipes and the higher the head means you can get more power at the nozzle end to drive a turbine; and while this may only be 12 volts (14V) for battery charging, you can produce a design and build it. You won’t get it right first time and you can look on the internet as some excellent ideas abound and remember a system running 24/7 is running while you are asleep and charging batteries.

Foods are another misnomer and many foods are not what they first appear to be and a full understanding of which foods have a long date is a necessity as many foods people ASSUME have long dates don’t actually have long dates; then storage arises as many foods come in cheap packaging not designed for long life so you need to identify foods with a long shelf life and store it correctly so it is in prime condition when you need it.

Lighting is something where you need as many options as possible and the most basic are torches and ideally a zoom tactical torch should be included along with a head torch as well as your ordinary torches and you need a lot of lanterns as they give omnidirectional light which lights a room with one lantern in one location which can run from dry cells or rechargeable cells, or be rechargeable themselves. Next is the humble lighting festoon and a 12 volt circuit installed in your home means you can run several lights installed in key areas such as the designated living area and kitchen with secondary lighting in any passages or areas where you store your kit so you have light to see. I always advocate leaving torches or lanterns at designated places around your home as most people have mobile phones with torches and can switch them on to get to a torch at the nearest home location to them to give them light to initially see. If you have rechargeable cells you can recharge them from a 12 volt source such as your 12 volt batteries or a 5 volt USB port and as most charge controllers of both PWM or MPPT types for solar or wind have them you can recharge some batteries or torches and have working lights. If you have a large 12 volt leisure or car battery system you can connect them to your solar or wind system to recharge them and ideally they should never be allowed to run flat so you charge them every day, during the day so you are replacing some or all of the capacity you have used and if you have dry batteries then make sure you have lots of them.

Getting and storing wood for a log burner or open fire and potentially a rocket stove often means going out and collecting it and competing with everyone else and this is why you should have plenty of wood on stock and when you do go out collecting it you collect the small pieces as they season quicker and you have some time to season it if you have wood on stock. In many cases you can collect it and should collect it as seasoned wood will be very valuable as it heats and cooks and often people throw decent wood away and many wooden fence posts are 4” x 4” or larger and they only really rot where they go into the ground or have things attached, collect these and cut the rotten wood off and the majority of it is good for burning so cut it down to lengths and build your stock. Many houses being renovated have lots of wood removed and a roofer will remove the old roofing laths and many older ones are 1” x ½” or 25mm X 12mm and potentially been on a roof for over 50 years and are well seasoned and ideal for rocket stoves; similarly, old wooden floorboards re also well seasoned and often ripped up and thrown away and once again they can be cut up and stacked as can old wooden stair parts such as treads or banisters as they all burn and if they have paint on, who cares as in a meltdown situation people will have bigger issues surviving than bothering about a bit of smoke from your chimney. Cut timber down into manageable pieces and this is done while you have electricity and if your fire or log burner accepts 9” pieces of timber then cut them into 8 ½” lengths so you know they will fit your fire and are ready for burning and stack them to maximise your available space as if you have a hand saw you can cut boards to length to make kindling to start a fire or into lengths for your rocket stove, so why a hand saw? Electric saws are fine in normal times as nobody notices but as soon as the electricity grid goes down people become a lot more astute and if they think you have something useful they will want it, this is why you stack boards in full lengths and take some into your shed and cut them as needed as nobody hears a hand saw. Fire up a battery saw and everyone hears it and knows what you are doing and you suddenly become visibly on many peoples radar.