There are plenty of survival or SHTF scenarios in which you could lose access to the grid. The gas to your home could be shut off, or the power could be cut.
Between heat waves, blizzards, hurricanes, and other nasty storms it is common to lose power for days or even weeks. I know people in TX that recently went three weeks without power, and people in Puerto Rico that went more than a year.
The four pillars of survival are food, water, fire, and shelter. If you want to be able to eat safely, you need to have the ability to cook foods to the proper temperature for consumption.
If you have no gas or electricity, this makes things difficult. In addition, during a survival scenario, you may not want other people to know you are in the home. Attracting attention to yourself in a survival scenario can be a death sentence.
In this article, we will cover different ways you can cook without gas or electricity from the grid.
Fireplace or Wood Stove
For survival purposes, I suggest that all homes have either a fireplace or wood stove if at all possible. For thousands of years, man has used fireplaces or wood stoves to heat their homes and cook their food inside their homes.
If your utilities are out, these are two of the best ways to cook in your home.
Fireplaces are designed to give you a safe place to start a wood fire inside your home. The bricks or rocks around the fireplace contain the embers so that the fire is safe.
The chimney helps pull in fresh air for the fire, and also pushes smoke out of the house.
Without this feature, you would inhale too much smoke and carbon monoxide for it to be functional.
The fire itself heats the home and provides flames and coals for cooking. In addition, the bricks or rocks used to build the fireplace will absorb heat and continue to stay hot for hours after the fire is out.
Related: How to Get a Year Supply of Firewood for $10!
With some practice, you can cook anything in a fireplace that you would normally cook on the stove or in the oven.
Wood stoves are typically made of cast iron and can be installed anywhere in the home. They also contain the embers for safety and push smoke out of a metal tube that acts as a chimney.
One benefit is that wood stoves normally have spots on top to set pans for cooking.
This flat surface does make cooking easier than working with a fireplace.
The only downside to these options is that they put out a good amount of smoke. If you are trying to keep a low profile, this might not be the best option. People can see the smoke from your chimney at a good distance, and they would know you were home. This could potentially put your family in danger.
To keep smoke to a minimum, let your fire burn down to coals and then keep using the coals until they go out. Coals put out less smoke than flames. You can also resort to just using the fire after dark as smoke is harder to see at night.
Generators and Solar
One option that may be obvious is using a fuel or solar powered generator to power your electric cooking appliances.
Related: 25 Powerless Appliances for Your Homestead Kitchen
If you are really prepared for this scenario, you will have one of these two set up at your home.
We have looked into solar and just have too much tree cover for it to work, but we did purchase a fuel powered generator.
If you have solar set up at your home, a power outage on the grid would not affect you.
If you have a generator and fuel, you would just need to switch it on once the power goes out. This would allow electric stoves, ovens, microwaves, and toasters to work fine.
While these options eliminate smoke as a concern, there is one potential issue. Most generators are pretty loud. The sound would be a dead giveaway that people were home and probably have supplies to steal.
Outdoor Cooking
While we would all prefer to cook inside, it doesn’t always work out that way. If you must cook outside, you could be seen by other people.
Propane powered cooking appliances are ideal for this scenario as they do not produce smoke.
We have a big propane grill, a propane flat top, and several small propane cook stoves.
With these we can cook just about anything we need.
You just have to keep plenty of propane tanks filled. We normally have four in storage.
Cooking on these is actually sometimes faster than cooking in a functional kitchen.
Charcoal or wood smokers and grills are another option. I have three different types of smokers that use both charcoal and wood. They produce a ton of smoke, so there is no good way to hide.
Related: How to Build a Clay Pot Smoker
However, they produce some delicious food. You can set up a smoker first thing in the morning and let it run all day without having to worry about it.
If you don’t have any of these appliances, you can still use a fire pit or rocket stove. You can easily build these with bricks, or you can buy a portable one.
This would basically be like cooking in a fireplace, except that you must cook outdoors. If you have a variety of cast iron pots and pans, this method of cooking can work just fine.
Even for minor inconveniences, I like to have a variety of different ways to cook in our home.
In the last year we have had our stove top, our microwave, out toaster, and our instapot all crap out and need to be repaired or replaced. During the time that these appliances were down, we still got by just fine because of the other ways we could cook.
Just take the time to think about how you could add a few more options to your emergency cooking plan, and you will be that much more prepared.
You may also like:
How To Deal With Neighbors And Friends That Come Begging For Food At Your Door In A Crisis
This Hidden Survival Garden Will Keep You Well Fed When SHTF (Video)
How about a good quality Solar Cooker and a Straw box retention heat cooker? Maybe a Dakota Fire Hole to use a few twigs to bring to boil your pot, CAREFULLY place the boiling pot into the Straw box to cook for hours like a slow cooker. Very little smoke, very little Smell to attract the hungry.
Solar Cookers come in Solar OVENS and Parabolic Fry Pan style cookers. Worth looking into as that Generator WILL Scream YOU have STUFF while your cooking, the fireplace will SCREAM you have stuff while smoke signaling.
Heck I’ve RUN a Slow Cooker off of 200 watts of solar power and a small inverter. Again LOW Signature to keep attention off your family.
Hey Michael
I’m thinking of of doing the Dakota Fire Hole to cook outside. It seems like a better option in some ways along with solar.
Where can I find more information on the Dakota Fire hole and thanks in advance.
DAKATO FIRE HOLE DEMONSTRATION: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlPSEfcz718
sorry but your article is missing one entire aspect of survival cooking – the aroma of cooking food at ground level will be drawing starving people from wide & far …
at that 3 week mark of post-severe SHTF the entire country is going to be filled with the wandering starvation sheeple – their senses will be soooo acute at that point they’ll be able to finding boiling water a block away …
for that early period post-SHTF you’ll need a fuel stove and be able to gather those cooking smells and channel them up above the rooftops …
I suggest you disguise your current kitchen for a con job – make it look like you’re out of food and cooking road kill & lawn grass …
have a covert kitchen and have the stove hood piped into the home systems that exit out your roof – should be a natural draft but a 12V fan wouldn’t hurt – also cooking in the early AM hours ….
I would add that you might consider cooking at night. In a SHTF situation without power, folks won’t be poking around as much in the dark without giving themselves away. If you’re inside, they can’t see the smoke or the fire.
Kinda off subject but does anyone have instructions on how to build a rocket mass heater that a 73 yr old woman could understand and build herself?
I have noticed people seem concerned about the smell of cooking food giving you away when the shtf? Without you are barbecuing in the yard, where it smells to high heaven. Someone smelling you cooking is going to be the least of your worries? If they are that close, you got a lot more to worry about!! Prepare as best you can? We are all in this clown show together, like it or not?
??? – you think the majority of preppers are living on a mountain top or bugging out to one? >>> VAST MAJORITY are suburban and/or small town and will have neighbors – can’t prep ignorant and throw up your hands to the obvious – prepping is IDing problems and preparing to conquer them ….
Watch some of these videos of people cooking outside on an open fire. This woman is amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpfYDzOm6us
Another item to consider adding to your Arsenal is a few good stainless steel “Thermoses.” Many foods can continue to cook in a prewarmed insulated jar once they’ve come to a boil. Some things may need to be reheated and poured back into the insulated container, but some can just “coast.” I’ve had good luck with hard cooking eggs and oatmeal overnight. And some soup mixes in half a day. Conserve fuel and reduce escaping smells.
There’s always the “Dakota Hole” that Native Americans used because it’s not a dead give away that you are cooking over and Open Fire!! they would dig a hole in the ground 12″ to 14″ or whatever size you’d like and then they would vent them from outside the hole at an angle to the bottom of the hole….Built a fire in it, then we put a medium BBQ grate over the hole and cooked on it. Works great!! You can find them on YouTube, so you can see what they look like and the instructions on how to make one….
If you have a direct sun large window into your home, how about using a Go Sun Cooker?
https://gosun.co/
Use it at an angle on the floor on a sturdy set of flat stones that is out of direct view, and unless someone is flying a drone, you can clandestinely solar boil or solar cook at least 1 or 2 meals during the day, depending on interior window sun access You will be able to do either in 30 minutes of sun (or less) and even on non-dark cloudy days. Not perfect, but it is a zero carbon emissions and zero fuel cost means of heat & serve. I have the Pro Sport, and highly recommend people check out & add Go Sun as part of their hiking and at home emergency prepping..
Ryan: Your article was very well done and contained valuable information for all.
Unfortunately it fell under the disagreeable and critical eye
of Illini Warrior. Don’t pay any attention to him. He is a sad
troll that roams from site to site telling everyone what is wrong with their article and trying to be relevant.
He would like us to think that he knows everything,but that
is my mother-in-laws job.I have heard of this type of behavior when someone is weened to early.
Actually I thought Illini Warror’s comments made sense, unlike your comment, NormalChuck, which added nothing to the discussion. Please try to make your comments positive rather than just negative blather or move to another list to troll.
As a result of first-hand experience in the Thomas Fire in SoCal two and a half years ago, locating the source of smoke is incredibly difficult. After the Thomas Fire, of course, everyone was very jumpy about the odor of smoke in the air. On the Neighborhood Watch list any time there was even a whiff of smoke in the air the list was filled with questions like “I smell smoke. Anyone know anything about it? Where is the fire? Why is there smoke in the air?”
I would suggest in an EOTW situation, lots of folks will be cooking outdoors with wood, charcoal, leaves, newspaper — anything that will burn and heat food. Locating the source of a single fire will be difficult at best.
Now, that said, If you are the only one in the neighborhood frying bacon for an early morning treat, may I suggest that you forego that pleasure and cook the bacon in a mixture with something else, like maybe baked beans?
The same would apply to any other pungent, drool-inducing foodstuffs. If you absolutely must have barbecue ribs, cook them the way the Hawaiians do, in a pit covered with leaves and dirt so that the smell can’t waft off on errant breezes bringing big-eyed, ill-kempt, neer-do-wells looking for a handout.
Next is cooking in a covered pot. Boiling your meat in a covered pot may not be your preferred way to cook that filet mignon that you have been saving for a special occasion, but it may well be the way to keep from sharing it with fifty of your best friends that you never knew you had.
In that line, cooking with a pressure cooker, even over a glowing bed of charcoal, will make that filet edible and emit far fewer fragrances of cooking meat on the errant breezes than even the pot of boiling water.
I would suggest you study up on Hawaiian pit cooking. I am sure the internet is filled with hundreds of videos and written recipes for cooking meat in a fire pit.
Secondly, do not overlook cooking in boiling water. Heat the water to a roiling boil. Drop the food you want to cook in the pot of boiling water and take it off the fire. Let the food sit for 20 or 30 minutes with a lid on the pot. No food odors will be emitted if you can keep from lifting the lid to check and then dishing out the food when it has sat in the hot water for a sufficient period of time.
I think a prime example is: If I boil oatmeal on the stove top, the delicious odor of oatmeal boiling wafts through the whole house. In an EOTW scenario, I feel confident that the oder, mild as it is will reach outside to be detected by a fellow who has not eaten a scrap in three weeks. On the other hand, If i prepare the oatmeal in a thermos, adding boiling water to the thermos with the oatmeal already in the thermos and let it sit overnight, there is no odor of oatmeal to attract vagrant oafs when I open the lid to the thermos in the morning. The minor odor of cooked oatmeal is short-lived in that method of preparation.
If the water cools to the extent you think it is no longer doing the job and you feel that rekindling the fire if it has died down too much to get the water boiling agin, heat rocks in the ashes and add them to the pot to extend the cooking time. It might help to start heating the rocks as soon or sooner than you take the food off the fire.
You can also use that method to cook in utensils that, perhaps, may not withstand being placed over open flame. The Indians here in the PDRK cooked in woven baskets. They couldn’t put them in the fire as whatever natural material they used would quickly burn up. Instead, they heated rocks gathered for that purpose and when they were hot, dropped them in the soup to heat the liquid. The container didn’t burn up and the food got hot and limited odors were emitted.
I can’t tell you how long you must wait but I would suggest that you wait at least a half hour. You do have a wind up clock as a back-up time-keeping device don’t you? If not, shame shame shame. Even if you don’t know what hour of the day it is, a wind up alarm clock will enable you to keep track of elapsed time for such mundane items as “How long has that filet been in the boiling water?”
Two such clocks will allow you to synchronize an attack on enemy forces with more accuracy than guessing if an hour has passed or “when the sun passes that pine tree, we attack.” Three clocks will allow attack from three directions, four, four directions etc etc etc. If you know it takes between 50 minutes and 70 minutes to reach the next town and you have been on the trail for 90 minutes, the wind-up clock will tell you that something is seriously wrong.
Or even, “Joe said he would be about an hour but it is three hours. Should we send someone to check?” scenarios are successfully monitored with a wind-up clock which will survive the most powerful EMT blast. You don’t even have to keep it wound. If you are at home and awake when the juice goes off, winding your clock as one of the first actions you take will enable you to keep fairly accurate time of day.
You can even use it for synchronizing time for everyone to get up if you have enough wind-up clocks. You decide arbitrarily that you want to arise just before the sun peeks over the hill. You set that time as 6:00 am. Setting the alarm for 6:00 am will ensure that you and your cohorts arise at the time the sun is just peeking over the hill for at least the next couple of days. It doesn’t matter that it is 5:30 or 6:20, you know that it is the time that the sun is at the position where you want to be moving and shaking.
You can wrap all kinds of foodstuffs in foil and lay them beside a bed of coals or actually put the foil-wrapped food in the bed of coals to cook it. It will not emit odors of cooking food until you unwrap it to eat it.
If you wait until the food has cooled to just barely warm but still edible, it will emit fewer food odors than piping hot food that you have to blow on to cool to eat.
5 days before the big storm they told us a week of snow was coming. Anybody who lives in Texas knows the cities shut down with 1/100th inch of snow or ice, so I was surprised nobody started getting ready. I have all my long term supplies but went out and stocked up on fresh food instead, ribeye, burger, chicken, pizza toppings and yeast, butter and half and half, whipped cream, bacon and eggs, a case of beer and four handles of Tito’s, surprised the rush on the stores didn’t start til the day before the storm. The 1st day was pretty, then it got down to O and the power went out. OMG! What do we do? I put 2 Big Buddy catalytic heaters in the great room, at medium they each run 2 1/2 days on a 20 lb propane tank and kept the kitchen and great room at 65. Broke out the LED lanterns at night. Alternative cooking was on the 2 burner camp stove, the little propane flat top, the oil less infrared turkey fryer, and the grill. Made a pretty good pizza in the dutch oven. Perishables in the varmint proof ice chests on the back porch. 100 gallons of bottled water in the garage, didn’t freeze, 5000 gallons of treatable water in the galvanized stock tanks . Opened the bathroom cabinets and kept my only wet wall from freezing with a small catalytic heater. It was only the snow hitting the fan but over a hundred died and millions suffered for weeks. Nobody is prepared for anything, it’s hard to believe how helpless everybody is.
Judge Holden: I contacted the manufacturers of the Mr Buddy Heaters. Only the 1# propane canisters are ok for indoor use. I asked them Why? They responded that the 1# canisters of propane are the ONLY ones that do NOT off gas when they get too warm. Any other propane tanks, like the 20# will, when they get too warm, off gas into the room, possibly causing death.
I guess you were quite lucky!
However, I love the heaters, I have 5 of them, including 1 for my jeep. Got them all on sale for about $60. each.
Did no one smell the cooking?
Anyone that has to boast that they are “Normal” shouldn’t be throwing stones >>> and for “Chuck” – that’s a cheaper meat cut and burrowing animal that rarely sees the lite of day – THAT fits a dirt clod like you perfectly …
if you want to prep ignorant to the obvious problems of what we will be faced in a chaos USA >>> that’s on you and any unfortunates that follow your poorly thinking “Chuck” brain …
Article is fine normal times and that early SHTF grace period – I’m prepped for all the cooking methods perfectly described >>> The question is why they can’t be refined and modified by even a “Chuck” to accommodate un-doubtable SHTF changes ? – don’t be buffuloed by the one-dimensional thinkers, dim half whits and especially the internet bullies that are a stolen vote away from being another senile Biden prez …
THINK – STUDY – EVOLVE – ADAPT – PREP INTELLIGENTLY >>> that will more likely get you and yours to the end – if you won’t – that’s between you and your Creator >> he/she might forgive you but the people you got dead won’t ….
I heat and cook on a rocket stove with an option pellet hopper. I also have a propane cook stove. Outside I have a home b ad d half barrel bbq I cook on with twigs and sticks. I have a charcoal Vulcan stove and cast iron pot. Room for a low or no smoke Dakota hole. There are many options. I have an old small solar oven made when I was teaching school. My grandmother who used a hay box. I used old worn out quilts to wrap a boiling pit of stew. It finished the cooking and held heat for hours. For church dinners I’ve kept food hot enough to measure a safe temperature hours after coming off a burner by wrapping heavy pots with worn towels in a cardboard box. None are perfect if you plan to stay undetectable. But getting food cooked isn’t terribly hard if you do some planning.
clergylady: I have never heard of the pellet hopper option for the rocket stove. I have the rocket stove in my preps, but where can I get the pellet hopper? Seems like a great option for in home use in power outages, in addition to my other forms of cooking, like you…
I didn’t read of a rocket stove
There are flameless cooking solutions like Barocook that you can use indoors. It’s a system that comes with 2 containers. You put a little water in the lower container and your meal to be heated in the other. When ready, you place a chemical pad in the water. Then you place the food pan on top and close the lid. The water activates the heating pad. It works. I used them in a hurricane. Flameless and wireless. No fire, electricity or gas is needed. It doesn’t generate smoke therefore, brings less attention and smells your way.
You can use a portable butane stove inside. A warning label may say for outdoor use only, but that’s a CYA thing. Asians do lots of indoor cooking with a butane burner, which is why Asian markets usually sell them, and that’s a good place to buy inexpensive ones. Also, cooking demos inside stores such as Costco may be using butane burners.
I haven’t seen barocook. Where do you find it?
I got mine from Amazon
Cool article
I love wood stoves
Nana not off topic. If you can handle the weight of concrete blocks also known as cinder blocks you could type in cinderblock rocket stoves into your search engine. I found several. Also related is cob rocket mass heater-cookstoves that you tube has a Vietnamese family building step by step using very few heavy or expensive materials.
Rocket stoves a few concrete blocks easy, a rocket mass heater more work but worth it.
Permies.com has lots of excellent rocket mass heaters ideas.
JUST Remember that it’s a rocket MASS heater. VERY HEAVY as in around a ton for a good design. Not a good idea to build on a standard wood framed floor. All the ones I’ve seen were on the concrete slab.
Your right about the weight of a rocket mass heater. They are tremendously heavy. I have a steel rocket stove with the optional set on pellet hopper. It has a 16″ heat collector drum behind the burn chamber. When I bought it they were more of a start up. They now have a small factory where it is produced. I believe they now have 2 models. They are UL approved.. Mine would be the smaller one. I set a heat activated fan on top or beside it to circulate the heat better. I can cook on top of the heat collector drum. I keep a filled tea kettle on top when I’m not cooking on there.
I heat using pellets. But it can burn wood chips with the hopper in place or remove the hopper and I can burn chunks of wood, 3′-4′ long sticks, piles of small twigs ect. It just has to fit in the feed tube and have a good fire established. The heater is advertised in Mother Earth magazine and at their fairs. Without the fan it will heat my livingroom to 90′ in a little while. It’s passive, radiant heat. Most pellet stoves depend on a fan and agur feed for the pellets. Mine uses no power. It depends on gravity. It wasnt cheap and it is quite heavy but not near the wright of a mass heater. It also must have a venting stove pipe. Mine is 4″ stove pipe that goes out a side wall then straight up past the highest part of the roof. Even a rocket mass heater must have that. There is a bit of smoke when its first lit, then little if any smoke when its burning efficiently. The heat collector is also a reburn chamber for wood gasses that would otherwise go up the chimney. It isn’t just a metal drum, is it thick metal to retain more heat and to burn the normally lost gasses. The burn basket for pellets is replace able. Mine needed replaced after 4 years. The New one is much heavier and improved. It should last a long time. You don’t need it when burning sticks or chunks of wood.
I pile up the trimmed branches every year and let them dry out for a few months. Then as I have time I break them up. Twigs are for starting fires, the rest can be burned for heat if cut to length. I usually cut some to burn in my homemade bbq and some for the heater. If I needed the ones cut for the BBQ I can still heat the house with them. I currently have enough dry branches in two piles to heat for most of a year. I do need to get them cut to length.
In the summer I usually cook on that homemade bbq. I have a propane cook stove with electronic ignition. There is no house power so I must light the burners. The oven is useless. I have a small camp oven I can use on the heat collector on the heater or over a fire.
I do have a solar oven and I plan to make a larger one. I made a parabolic reflector when I had the school here. It would boil water in a small container in 1 minute. It was simply a glued cardboard structure covered with aluminum foil. One of those early big satellite dishes would be great to make one.
I’m playing with the idea of a reflective surface to put more light on solar panels. The panels will be wall and ground mounted. Reflectors for areas of lesser light hours or cloudy days may improve efficency.. I’m almost ready to start assembling my new solar array. I need 4 more batteries. I’ll make the mounts. I’ll have enough power to have an electric stove or a freezer. Since I sun dry or can everything I’m more inclined to have an electric stove as back up for the heating stove. Or just a cook top. You might laugh but I can left over meats or vegetables for soups or casseroles later. I dry a lot of the garden harvest for future use. Some things are blanched then dried. Corn is often roasted in the husks then sundried without the husks. When dried its rubbed off of the cob to store in glass jars. Rehydrated it’s great as a side dish or in soups. Dry it’s good ground to make a precooked corn meal that can be used like regular corn meal or just add boiling water and its a ready to season and eat mush. Let the mush cool and its sliceable to fry. With the blue corn I make atholi. It more a thin gruel that can be drunk with either a bit of salt or butter and sugar as you’d prefer. On the reservation it’s the older folks breakfast. Younger folks have picked up cereal and milk or bacon, eggs and frozen hashbrowns. Athol is as easy a boiling water, stirring in the cornmeal and seasoning to taste.
Boiling water however you do it can make edible food. My kids loved ramen with dried chicken and veggies. I’d put it together in a thermos with boiling water. It was ready to eat in a few minutes. I have 2 old steel thermoses that date back to well before my dad retired in 1971. I also have 2 widemouthed steel thermoses that are a couple of years old from Walmart. Both styles work fine. Salted boiling water works fine with most pasta but I prefer angel hair spaghetti. When aldente I drain any remaining water, pour in my sauce of choice, quickly stir in some parm and recluse to let it warm the sauce. The sitting time also brings out the flavor. Italian friends bake their sauced spaghetti. Wow, does that build up the flavor. Make a simple salad and you’d have a meal. Greens for salads will grow in of front of a window. Add some green onions or chives, tiny French carrots, radishes, and a cherry tomato. No one sees that garden. I have a big garden every year but herbs grow in a kitchen window year around. A plastic small animal cage bottom sits on my front porch with spinach, red lettuce, baby carrots, chives, garlic, a zucchini and baby boc choy all there along with marigolds, a few violets and panseys and one nasturtium. Everything is edible but the chickens get the marigold flowers as a treat. It’s pretty and all food for us. I can cut leaves, pull a radish or two, a green onion, a baby carrot or two and 2 or 3 tiny ripe tomatoes, a small zucchini and we have a great salad. As I use things I replant so it’s always full. Not package spacing. Actual need spacing. The zucchini is in a corner so it grows up and over the side. I found finger carrots and a round ball, shallow rooted, French carrot work best there. I could easily add a few sugar pod peas along an edge with a small trellis. Those containers are just 18″x30″x 7″ deep. I have two. But I haven’t planted the second one. It would fit on the top shelf where I start flats of seedlings for the garden infront of my large livingroom windows.
I don’t have a bright enough window for the solar oven to be used inside but I can start something on the front porch then in the afternoon move it to the back porch and that works ok. I’m figuring that once the solar array is up I can heat water quickly in an electric pot. Most power use has to be in daylight. Night use will be a refrigerator and some lighting. I use cheap solar path lights by windows for inside lighting. If SHTF is bad enough we won’t be using lights at night much anyway. I may just recharge the phone, recharge batteries, and use a laptop. I have blackout curtains for the livingroom and could add them to other rooms but we are quite used to living without electricity so the curtains aren’t a priority. I have oil lamps, a rechargable camp lantern, candles, flashlights that mostly have LED bulbs and take all AAA batteries. I have 50 rechargeable AAA batteries and plan to buy more and two more battery chargers. One standard 110v power and another solar charger as spares. They will go in my all metal storage box.
Since we have been without power for 16 months I think a lot about how to do things quietly and to not draw attention. Law here requires all residences to have electricity. I left the useless array up until I can put up a new one. It sits out in an open area across the entry driveway from my home. My new array will be here on and near the home. Less bright sunny hours but more panels and more batteries. I’m adding a tiny room for the batteries and equipment next to a new chicken coop along the side of my home. Each is small enough and freestanding so no building permits needed. All old recycled wood. An old metal credenza with a wood top and file drawers will hold the batteries. Extra supplies and specialized tools will go in the drawers. I want it closer and easier to work on. Owners are allowed to do their own electrical work except connections to commercial power. The power connection into the home will go down through the floor and under the home in conduit. Then up into the home walls in circuits from the room outside. The circuit breaker with mostly 20amp breakers will be in the control room. One circuit or possibly two will be directly 12v. That will be using reclaimed vehicle lighting and some new 12v strip lights for a reading area in a livingroom corner.
When we have power in the home I’ll set up growlights on the two metal shelf units where i start my garden seedlings. Without lights I just use three shelves to start plants. I could use the lower shelf with grow lights. Right now I can have 18 flats growing. Adding the lower shelf will add 6 more flats. With 18 flats and two larger deeper containers on the top we could grow food for us and our small critters year around. I have ducks, chickens, and rabbits. Add a coupIe of grow bags or a row of buckets with grow lights we could add potatoes, sweet potatoes and larger tomatoes. I have heirloom seed for smaller plants of melons and winter squash.
For now I’ll start seedlings inside because of our Altitude. One day I could just be living in my greenhouse. As for bugging out… it would take extreme circumstances now. We can neither one walk off into the mountain above us. Driving away is possible but with my husbands poor health and frequent need of showers to clean up..I’m not likely to be going anywhere.
As long as the planned solar power works I can heat water. Basically that would cover most meals easily. A few things will require longer cooking. Rabbit cooks like chicken breast. Cut up small for stews or pot pie its very quick cooking. I usually make bone broth from the carcass and bones of chickens or rabbits. I haven yet tried it with duck but I don’t see why it wouldn’t be good. I can the broth along with any bits of meat and all the fat. The fat layer is great for cooking but quite good with herbs in it to spread on bread, season frying meats, make garlic bread, et. Duck fat is a favorite of cooks in parts of Europe. Here most use vegetable oils and margarine. I use real butter, olive and nut oils. But when I open a jar of bone broth – I use up that fat in cooking. I make my husband’s favorite garlic bread by quickly frying slices of French bread in chicken or turkey fat with garlic and parsley minced in it. In bad times that might have to be for indoor cooking. Cooked Pasta or cooked rice stirred with what’s left in the pan after the garlic bread is quite good too. At that point a quick stir fried rice with more vegetables and an egg or two is quick and easy to do.
I think quick meals when there is some clean burning fire in the heater wouldn’t be too bad. The stove burn box is usually open so smells would be drawn outward fair soon. At more than 15ft in the air with constant breezes here it would dissipate quickly.
All worth thinking about. I like articles that make me think and or create good discussions..
.
Watch this gal build 5 different primitive stoves
in the wilderness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xzf00LZkwU
She knows her stuff!
In the late seventies/ early eighties we were building sand cast ovens in Guatemala.
Light on firewood use, good thermal mass low smoke and cheap.
36 Lorena stove ideas |
pinterest.comhttps://www.pinterest.com/dosvalcanes/lorena-stove/
Lorena Stove Build by El Jardin de la Vida How to build a Lorena stove out of clay and sand. The stove should reduce the amount of wood used for cooking by 50% and improve the health of the family wit… El Jardin de la Vida
Did not read whole response thread, sorry if this has been mentioned.
I bought a solar oven: large box with glass door, built in thermometer & 4 reflector panels that send light/heat thru glass into oven. This heats the interior like a real oven & u put in food when it is the right temp. I’ve made things like cornbread & Chilli.
I also have a solar grill. This is a long glass tube with curved reflectors which protect the glass tube when closed & reflect light/heat into the tube to cook when.open. The big difference is that the grill tube must be loaded with food 1st & then heated. If u heat it then put in food, it can fracture. It’s good for small pcs or long food like hotdogs or hamburger rolled into a hotdog shape.
The importance with both are NO SMOKE.
There are also DIY versions on line to make with tinfoil but I’ve never tried them..
In the deep freeze of 2021 in Texas, my new 2017+ urban neighbor was without power for a week. Because our water was pumped up the hill (with electricity), we were without water, too.
I had prepared with my bathtub full of water. What I didn’t know was that the poorly installed tub drain leaked around the drain – very slowly but drained the tub in several days. I suggest doing a full tub “dry run” for several days before you depend on it. Thank goodness for lots of snow: but I was amazed how little water a bunch of snow produces.
Next, same plumbers installed my gas fireplace poorly, too, but that worked to my advantage: there was no pilot light (fireplace worked on a switch) and there was no safety gizmo (or faulty) so I was able to light my gas fireplace by flipping the switch and using a match. If you have a pilot light, be sure it’s lit before the storm.
Lastly, I usually have those puck under-counter LED lights (use 3 AA batteries) mounted in closets or in halls so I don’t have to switch on a big light for a quick look. They were little wonders during the storm.
Best to all…and thanks for all your input.
The op sec part of this post is why I hope and plan to have all of my prep meals already cooked and freeze dried, or canned so all I’ll need to do is boil water and mix. Shouldn’t be too much smell from that.
Lots of wonderfully great ideas in the comments, thank you all.
Use you kitchen cooking system if you can. If you do not have AC power set up a 12v or 5v fan to direct cooking odors through a greenhouse activated charcoal odor filter and then into the range hood. Or build a cooking system that incorporates these.
Remember that a Dakota Fire Hole is essentially a rocket stove built into the ground. You can get the same type of advantages if you have to cook outside by digging a pit slightly larger than you purchased rocket stove that places the top of the cooking surface at or just below the surface of the ground.
Alternatively, you can just build a rocket stove/Dakota Fire Hole as a permanent part of your outdoor cooking area. One of the many DIY rocket stoves made from concrete blocks or bricks can be done in the ground.
Also, rather than digging down, an earth Dakota Fire Hole can be made in a mound of earth instead. And a rocket stove installed or built the same way. The cooking surface can even be at counter-top height if you want while still hiding any open flame and getting the air flow of a Dakota Fire Hole or a rocket stove.
Just my opinion.
I love reading all the articles that are published on this site. Thank you for sharing such great information!
Pine Cones. Pine cones make great coals for a fire. They burn for a very long time with no flames. A layer on cones will give off a lot of heat also.