Preppers are ingenious people, and we can provide a lot of things for ourselves. Food? We can grow, hunt or forage it. Water? We might drill a well, set up a rainwater collection system or run a pipe to a nearby river and let the current bring it to our home.
Electricity? Solar panels, wind turbines or water wheels can produce that easily enough. Firewood? Cut it in the woods. Wool, crockery, iron, a bow and arrows, furniture, herbal remedies or charcoal? You’ll find plenty people in the prepper community ready to tell you how to make them yourself.
There’s one thing most of us have no chance of producing for ourselves, though, and that’s hydrocarbon fuels.
This is unfortunate, because while we can survive without hydrocarbon fuels life is a lot easier when we have access to them. If you want to operate a vehicle after the end of the world as we know it, you’re going to need a stockpile of gasoline or diesel to keep it going. The same goes for a generator, and that’s the option a lot of us have chosen for keeping the power on when the system collapses around us.
⇒ If You Have a Generator on Your Property, Do This Immediately
Propane stoves or refrigerators? The clue’s in the name – they need propane. All sorts of outdoor or survival equipment, from pressure stoves and lanterns to hurricane lamps and even the humble but reliable Zippo lighter, need some kind of oil-based fuel to run. If we want those things to keep working after the SHTF, we’re going to need to store fuel for them.
The problem is, all these fuels are dangerous. The safest of them, diesel, won’t explode but it will burn, and it stores a lot of energy. Once your diesel stockpile catches fire, good luck putting it out. Gasoline is even worse; it will burn, but the vapor will also explode.
As fuels get lighter – white gas for Zippos and Coleman stoves, butane, propane, hydrogen – it gets easier and easier for them to catch fire, and they tend to react more violently when they do. These fuels need to be carefully protected from any risk of ignition.
Fiery accidents aren’t the only way poorly stored fuel can kill you, either. As well as keeping them well away from people who play with matches, you also need to make sure your fuel store protects the fuel itself. Otherwise it can degrade, and when your life depends on it there’s a chance it will let you down. Here’s our handy guide to fuel storage.
Use Proper Containers
Gasoline, diesel, kerosene and other liquid fuels should only ever be stored in purpose, made, certified fuel containers. If you store them in anything else the fuel could become contaminated – or, worse, eat its way through the container, causing leaks and a huge risk of fire.
Related: What’s the Best Fuel to Stockpile for Survival?
Any gas station will sell plastic containers that will store liquid fuel safely. Military-style jerrycans are also good; they have a high capacity, stack well and they’re very robust.
Propane and other gas fuels are easier to store, because they already come in suitable containers. You still need to be careful, though. Make sure gas tanks or canisters are protected from heat and physical damage.
Keep the damp away from them, too; otherwise the canisters could rust over time, creating leaks – and gas leaks are extremely dangerous. Even the spark caused by flicking a light switch can cause an explosion.
Locate Your Store Safely
Where you put your fuel store can make the difference between a safe and effective survival resource and a disaster waiting to happen.
Some things are obvious; if you have a fire pit, don’t build a wooden shack next to it and fill it with gasoline canisters. Let’s assume nobody’s going to make that mistake.
Look for other hazards, though. Don’t put your fuel store where a drunk driver who swerves into your yard can hit it. Don’t put it where it could get flooded, either. Containers bumping around in a flooded store can get damaged – and if fuel starts escaping it will float and spread.
Protect Diesel From Contamination
A serious issue with long-term storage of diesel is water contamination. If there’s air inside a fuel container, there’s water in there too. Over time that moisture can condense out of the air and land in the fuel.
This is a big problem, because water in the fuel is going to end up in the engine – and water is very destructive.
It doesn’t compress, so if enough water gets into the engine and the engine tries to compress it, things will break. Water in fuel also promotes algae growth, and that can clog injectors. It can even start rust inside metal containers or fuel tanks.
Minimize water contamination by filling containers to around 85% full; the less air in them, the less water – but they need some room for expansion, so don’t fill them 100%. Make sure caps are properly sealed to prevent more air being sucked in as pressure changes.
If diesel has been stored for a long time you can add a water dispersant additive to it, or buy a funnel that separates the water as fuel is poured through it. For vehicles you can even install a water separator in the fuel line.
Protect Gasoline From Time
Gasoline isn’t as badly affected by water as diesel – although you should still do all you can to keep water out of it – but it has a different problem. Unleaded gas goes stale quite quickly, sometimes in as little as a month.
It’ll still work as fuel for much longer than that, but it won’t be as efficient and it could damage the engine. To make it last longer buy ethanol-free gas, and add fuel stabilizer to slow its deterioration.
Fuel will be a valuable resource in a post-crisis world, but it can also be a danger. Apart from the obvious ones like fire, relying on contaminated or deteriorated fuel that wrecks the engine of your bug-out vehicle could be just as deadly. Storing your fuel properly will make a huge contribution to keeping you alive.
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Fuel is the source of life for most and either in transportation or production or in agricuraral or in heating and life safety
as with everything it goes bad, fails, decays and has a different use
for instance when fuel is produced it is filtered, and additives added ( extra ingredients )
good for about 6 months , and gums up the filters after that
even with additive s it will eventually go bad
filters in diesel keep the impuritive out
but when you take them away you get the same result dirty exaust
most survival vehicles will operate on most fuel sources once yu remove the state, feds mandated controls from the vehicle
basic principle of combustion , and mechanics
when you prep , you must prepare , steam, water, fuels that can be found where you are at
because the supply chains will be in failure mode and there will be only crime , mobs, thieves, and those who cannot figure out what to do and what is happening
stuck in the rut
they will go with the flow , do what ever told for a meal , or a fix for the next day
be ready
Wood , hay and stubble it all burns
waste products burn
go to the fire sciences pages and you will see the requirements for burn, fire, combustion
then decide how you will proceed
fix for today or 30 days or 6mths to a year
gov reports say up to 1 year in disaster , but look at history with in 3 months total decay and kaos as with other nation s with in 3 days
plan , prepare, be ready , for when this time come s you will have to know what to do
Good refresher article.
Today in Iowa the voters will brave the cold weather to vote.
Remember our American troops lead by George Washington braved the cold with bare feet or barely covered feet to fight the British in the early days of American independence.
This election is for the last gasp of American freedom versus the Bidenomics puppet regime influenced by Obama and the Chinese CCP.
Will you vote today in Iowa?
Most proir service military can see the Bidenomics as a plandemic to destroy America from within. They have Obama’s civilian military followers; Antifa, BLM and the active Palestinian protesters. Many of whom were let in by the OPEN SOUTHERN BORDER!
Why in the heck did we or the lame weak minded politicians sell our valuable American farmland to foriegn governments, especially our main enemy potential of Xi’s CCP?
These Chinese owned farmlands are not real farms, these are staging areas for an attack on our electrical grid, utilities and our Conus military bases.
Texas and other border States are wide open for the terrorist to invade by undercover, of being an asylum illegal. Fentanyl is part of the no firearms phase of killing many Americans.
Matter of fact or argument who decided to borrow money to help fund the Washington DC politicians spending of ludicrous projects.
Why did the Sanctuary States ever come into existence?
The average American voter is also responsible for voting these crisis in over the years by voting total party line Demoncrats. The Black voters are finally waking up to the Demoncratic party has always suppressed the Blacks since the Civil War.
May GOD Bless America in these next few months of Bidenomics stranglehold on freedom.
Yes China holds a major portion of the trillions of dollars in debt of America. Maybe that is why the Marxist politicians gave away our American farmlands to the Chinese Communist Party.
I don’t care for the Chinese nationals flooding our America, the military age males can be plotting serious attacks on our dilapidated electrical grid, scary!
America needs to file for bankruptcy and reset our America dollars based on gold and silver, not digital currency. Crypto chain block currency is based on computers mining electronic nuggets in big server farms. These server farms are sucking lots of electricity an need air conditioning to keep from overheating.
Gold and silver have held value since Jesus walked on earth.
The globalist desire total control. Electronic assets can be erased in a microsecond, then where is your money, savings at?
Hard assets are always the way to go, not the globalist way.
Good article on fuel safety.
The article is based on whether we still are a oil drilling America or a Chinese asset of slaves to China.
Do we still have a petro dollar economy or useless digital currency America?
Time to value what is concrete physical assets then going towards digital currency of fluff.
Who running America, as we see it is not Biden or Harris, are they the indoctrinated millennials and Gen Z at the helm, telling Biden what to do?
Jack, from what I’ve found and some of this is speculation because records disappear, it seems to have all started with the Fabian’s sometime ~1897. The strategies used over the following century were publicized in their magazine the American Fabian prior to 1900s with them shutting down and going dark shortly thereafter. Within 7 years you have adoption of the prussian education model, and a crisis engineered to create the Fed. It rolled downhill thereafter, getting much worse in 1970; the plan has always been concentrate into the hands of the trusted few insiders, then nationalize, privately at first (bailouts), then publicly later. There are many organizations supporting these groups, and they use deceit and deception so its hard to pin them down. What’s important to know is, this isn’t a new issue. Its a very old issue that was ignored.
Mr. Carter – Don’t forget the roughly 7 million Muslims Obama and now Obama and Joey have brought in, despite the fact few of them work yet all of them have 3 or more kids each, also free. This was not accidental. Perhaps NWO Obama has a “job” for them to carry out?
Recall Trump TRIED to STOP the influx and importation of Muslims outside of the ones who actually helped our troops, but Dems wouldn’t let him. This was back when presidents obeyed the laws set forth, which is laughed at today by this current cabal of misfits.
That 7 million figure doesn’t include the hundreds of thousands who have simply walked across our borders the last 15 year, many with full backpacks full of what, exactly? It ain’t Christmas cards.
Stop drinking the koolaid.
You can drink my yang yellow river water anytime.
Lisa Blake is an operative for Michelle Obama they both hate America, like Hillary Clinton does!
Wow, someone’s had a little too much Fox news.
It’s ashame that you’re so scared of everything.
Your Jealousy unhappy because PBS and CNN feeds you the crumbs of Marxism rose colored glass news. Quit smoking the dope and get a job than have us taxpayers funding your welfare life.
*IT’S A SHAME (not ashame, maybe YOU need to use spellcheck?)
Lisa – you confuse scared with prepared.
More fear mongering.
TRUTH hurts but hopefully will help those who are blind-sided by the current regime to remove their heads from up their @$$ and WAKE UP!
Your a racist hating all the preppers who contribute useful information.
Climate change, vegetarianism, wind power, solar energy is just another way of enslavement to the UN backed by tip pot dictators and major player China. The unions and George Soros types use these useful idiots to control America then the rest of the Western world.
Lisa Blake is another useful idiot to protest and hate America.
The 2020 Summer of love is not the same as the 1969 Summer was.
The Jan 6th political prisoners did not burn, loot and murder people. The Antifa, BLM types destroyed billions of dollars in property, looted and killed people. Lisa Blake types did hurt the economy, neighborhoods are still rebuilding years after the protests.
Both sides play up their side of truth in the Floyd riots, we voters will never get the truth to what really happened. Floyd had heart disease, Covid and past drug use which all accumulate to that day. He resisted arrest and had previous run in with law enforcement.
Will 2024 be another Summer of love as in riots after the 2024 presidential election?
Dont forget bidens 1st speach as he stole the presidency
you will own nothing and be happy
you need cold to achieve his goal
bankruptcy , failed job market place , and unemployment worst than the great depression
then you will accept the mark , his agenda , and they the invaders will subdue, take and finish the job for the UN alagarky
do the research , see the evidence , see what is really going on
no oil , no energy, just enough for control and keeping you locked down
15 min cities
cars that can be shut off at an instant
military forces from other countries coming in to conquer and defeet you and your countries
signs are all over the place , if you really open your eyes and dont listed to the propaganda machines of news, tv , inet liars networks
Why don’t ya use spell check and fix your comma placement?
UN alagarky? Spell check – UN Oligarchy!
You must watch Fox news?
Lisa, Why don’t you stop trolling this thread, and go back under your bridge where you belong?
You have never once contributed anything positive or meaningful here. You are always bashing, never offering anything useful. Jeez, get a life!
Its TRUMP 2024 OR this county is finished.
Do not accept this Digital dollar, un less you wont to give up your
American god given freedoms.
United we stand, or we will fail.
This is 2024.
The clean up of our country is underway,
To fully restore what Trump had started to but America First,
Keep the American flag flying,
Taking back our country,
Keeping our freedom’s .
Kick the Digital dollar in the ditch,.
Larry,
You are ranting and what you are saying is idiocy. You are naively mistaken in so many different ways that if I counted them up you’d have stopped listening before I finished.
What you say lacks any semblance of rational thought or basis in logical reasoning; both of which are requirements for us as a society to get to our current level of development.
As a child, you should have learned and been taught rational discernment, for both recognizing lies, and evaluating credibility. It doesn’t appear you have learned what you needed to know and instead are being played the fool.
When you fail at discernment, you end up being easily manipulated into pushing towards and promoting the exact outcomes that you yourself rail against. Just like a trapped animal that is willing to chew their own foot off to get free from a trap. You are wound up into an unthinking irrational haze and set loose to cause problems for other more capable people, and worse you believe the falsehoods that you were told and are parroting.
Please educate yourself, so that they can’t manipulate you and play you like a gullible fiddle. Any effective deceit will always have some small truths, mixed in with lies to become more convincing.
Irrational thought with obvious counter-examples and contradictions have no place in any discussion or decision on safety critical systems. Societal systems are safety-critical. You depend on them for your survival, as do we all.
It is important to know that those that are crazy very often do not survive long for a variety of reasons I won’t get into. Feel free to do some independent research in actuarial tables. You will find that the data supports this strongly.
Please get some help. You’ve pigeonholed yourself into an unthinking us vs them mentality (a false dichotomy, a fallacy) based on false assumptions that you were misled into agreeing to (thus fighting your own psychology, consistency principle) which were drawn across political party lines. You are just parroting what you’ve been told as if it were true without any real evaluation of credibility or accountability for your actions.
What’s important is what you say is not true, at least the most important parts. Both primary parties are pooled from the same underlying sources which you don’t have a choice about. This is a well known process called tweedism (i.e. its bottle-necking). Try looking that term up, Larry Lessig did a decent explanation.
There is no value in adding to noise, especially when its based in irrational crazy-making behavior. It does nothing to alter outcomes, and in fact worsens the likelihood of coming to valid solutions because you waste resources that could be put to better use.
Attention and time are a resource.
Your actions matter, and when you make the world a worse place (even if it is indirectly by contributing to a problem, increasing friction or other thing that interferes), you end up supporting evil, not some misguided notion of evil that the media depicts but real evil.
When that struggle against evil ceases both internally and externally, these weak people become evil’s plaything, subordinated by it, and become it; somehow justifying that what you are doing isn’t so bad, or its just my job, or I don’t have a choice so I’m not responsible; blinding yourself in the process and abdicating your will against such things. This is the same as accepting it into yourself. This is both an act of self-corruption, and self-violation. A very real, and true evil.
There is plenty of theological literature written in this subject matter, and quite a lot of it is not hyperbole, it has broad application to how we interact with reality even if you are not religious.
If you consider yourself a good person, I urge you to rationally re-evaluate your circumstances and examine your premises. When this evaluation is done properly, you will find there is no contradiction when you examine and properly evaluate the truth of your assumptions and premises. Any circular or Hegelian based principles are nearly always false; but you’d need to become a philosopher to correctly discern when they can be used appropriately.
You wrote a lot of words but really didn’t say anything of substance.
Cool !!
That is a no win scenario. Trump gets elected and the country goes totalitarian. Trump loses and there is a civil war. We are divided and we will fall. All so the politicians can make a buck. Prepare while you can.
screwball ….just like him .
Steam will be the way to go long term. Good luck finding a steam powered generator tho.
Steam is a lost art.
Propane will be the best hydrocarbon to store. It will run a gasoline engine with a few adapters. Save your Kerosene for lamps.
Good info to know. Thank you
You really haven’t said anything more than what the safety label on a container would have said.
You didn’t say anything about straight run gas verses the 10% ethanol gas for storage life.
Nor did you say anything about how bio diesel and ethanol are organic base and in time will grow enough bacteria to plug lines valves injectors or fuel pumps. What to add to bring them those organic forms in check. How long will straight run gas retain its octane verses one with a fuel additive such as Stable. All the engine repair shops that make money off of your small engine not running right after overwintering or oversummering (for the snowblowers). It sucks that they don’t tell you that those organic additives (the renewable food oops fuel source used for fuel) such as bio-diesel and ethanol will foul up those needle valves or ports that are relying on such close tolerances that you will pull you arm off trying to start them, after setting for a long time. Everyone has their own problems with small engines; and only takes a short question on the internet to read of all the diesel boat, truck or farm tractor engine disasters because of fuel issues.
We made straight run (stable) gas at our refinery of 106 octane. Or they would sell off spec mineral spirits to a gas station chain with their additives to bring it up to a regular octane of 87, but if you didn’t use it soon, the light ends would vent off and you were left with mineral spirits.
What your discussion should have is someone who has octane tests over time; on whether buying straight run gas for 5$ a gallon to keep within an octane of it’s sale declaration or buy a 93 octane (for .60$ more with ethanol used to boost it) that you added stable to and put in a non breathing container where it is kept from over expanding from heat or collapsing from cold and then expect the octane to drop, but be still of use a year later.
That would be research worth talking about.
E
Mo, the author did say to get ethanol free fuel.
D
I voted dem all my life till Trump came in to the pictures,
You must be a Dem.
You put out a lot of words , But you tolled me nothing,
I must be right or you would have not wrote so much. .
You can not cut down a tree with a dual axe .
Your time could have been well spent other places.
If you know of any,
But you have a right to your opinion.
I can respect that.
And I think many here don’t agree you.
We all have the right to speck our minds .
And so do you, Right or wrong..
There not taking a way our American FREEDOM’S
To mush blood has been spelt to protect them.
Do your history
You are a joke.
In my life as a paramedic and police officer, I’ve seen people seriously injured and killed by burns from gasoline accidents. Many were from incredibly stupid behavior on the part of the victim. Such as trying to see what the gasoline level is in a can or tank using a lighter or match. Using gasoline as a cleaning agent, especially in an enclosed space, then having a smoke. As a paramedic, I had exactly such a patient. He did survive, but barely. I suppose it was lucky for him that it was winter, with a lot of snow and drifts near his garage and he had the presence of mind to throw himself into a snow bank.
My oldest daughter told me about a patient they had at the Bagram Hospital in Afghanistan. An Army soldier used a lighter to check the level in a vehicle fuel tank at night. He was severely burned in the resulting explosion. His wife was deployed too and she was able to accompany him back to the States. He did not survive, dying a week or two later at the burn center in San Antonio.
Screwing around with volatile fuels is a recipe for disaster.