Preparedness for when

[Deleted User]

Perplexed_Pineapple wrote: »

Which I don't really understand given we all share DNA and one in 200 of us descends from Ghengis Khan :rotfl:

I wondered why I keep getting the urge, to slaughter some Merkits.

I don't have much confidence in USB sticks and hard drives can fail

How about copying to several SD Cards or USB sticks?

WH Smith are selling them very cheap right now.

lobbyludd

Frugalsod wrote: »

Yes but if you are poor you can also qualify for energy grants. If you rent you are at the mercy of the landlord. Though you can still qualify for grants. The problem is that there are plenty of sources of help, so if you still fail to get things done you are a fool. When I was living in a draughty rented house I refused to heat the place and lived in a sleeping bag. Those things that I could change such as my light bulbs and other appliances I changed. My electricity bill is as low as a small household that is out all day even though I am at home with two computers on all the time. I try and minimise the times I boil the kettle and use a flask to keep hot water for coffees and meals saving energy each time. if I left all the lights on it would only be 100W of power because all mine are LED. Yes the costs upfront can be high but the savings are also high. In the end people need to work out what will work for them and implement it.

I have a few devices running 24/7 but things like screens are on eco mode. Though my energy usage is stable through out the year.

leaving aside that you can be poor whilst earning enough to be outside of the reach of any grants, a large proportion of current housing stock is old, mine is victorian (like a lot of housing stock in most cities). This isn't lazy planning it was state of the art for the time it was built, in 100 short years technology, and the understanding of it's impact has changed out of recognition. In another hundred years they will roll their eyes at the way we build passive houses now. The cost of replacing this stock in economic and environmental terms is prohibitive so that means updating. However updating an old drafty house to fit modern environmental sensibilities is problematic. Much of the improvements to make more energy efficient over the years in victorian stock have turned out to be not the great idea they seemed to be at the time, and have damaged the fabric of the buildings making expensive (environmentally and financially) remedies necessary (see damp-proof courses and cavity wall insulation).

We have the house cold, because this house was built to work best cold, but we're young and healthy and that won't always be possible. If we weren't and we were still in this house the call between the environmental impact of using fuel to heat a leaky house and those of making the house less leaky is not stright forward.

Frugalsod

I am not complaining about victorian or pre war homes, my comments were more about much more about very recent new builds, especially those since the 80's when climate change was known about.

My concern is that this generation will leave the planet in such a poor shape that population collapse is inevitable. 58% of the UK food production lies within 5m of sea level. If the big icesheets melt, then this is inevitable. So how will we feed ourselves when 58% of our agricultural land is meters underwater?

GreyQueen

I have been to the allotmentino for the first time after work now that the clocks have gone forwards. And a police officer came by to discuss the bandity; our site got done over twice in 7 days, apparently. They think it's a traveller gang from

---

(50 miles away) but cannot prove it. Don't know what intel they have to get to that position as if it was simple prejudice against the travellers, there are ones about half a mile from the site, but they don't seem to think it's them.

Ach well, they'll step up patrols but its a big site, pitchy dark at night and they're unlikely to be in the right place at the right time. Sigh.

Interesting debate via insulation. My 1970s tower block is insulated within an inch of its life and, being very small, swelters for half the year. In cold snaps, we're laughing, as you can almost heat the place by breathing. But I have lived in early 17th century cottages, 1950s and 1960 council houses (anyone ever lived in a Airey house? Brrr!), plus rented part of a mid-Victorian townhouse in very poor repair which was perishing.

I agree that the standard of a lot of new builts is very poor. I've watched some of them go up, inc a 3 story apartment house whose apartments sold for top dollar. Having seen how it was built (clue; very like a shed) I wouldn't have paid to own anything in there. Plenty of stuff built in the past few years has appalling thermal insulation.

Re the old black and white cottages, one thing which was done in ye olden days with some of them was to pack the area between the timbers with walnut shells (minus the nuts) and this was supposed to help the insulation. And has anyone considered going really Old Style and moving into wall hangings? Might it be an option for some walls?

Perhaps, for those who own homes with gardens, particularly in exposed situations, some considered planting of windbreak trees/ bushes, could slow the rate at which the wind strips the warmth from your home? It's been a while since I read Permaculture 1 and 2 but I'm sure there's stuff in there which is relevent. Must try getting them from the library.........

And never underestimate the value of lined curtains drawn snug at night and blankets to snuggle with.

I was speculating to myself what kind of home would be optimum in a post-SHTF world, and think that a cottage like the one which I grew up in would be pretty handy. It's been there since the early 1600s, although some of the timbers show adze marks and have obviously been repurposed from another building. It's plumbing was limited to a single cold water tap in the kitchen, which itself was a later addition under a catslide roof. Hot water was a kettle boiled on the Rayburn or heated in the copper in the corner of the kitchen.

The tin bath lived outside on a nail on the privy wall. Bath night involved taking down the bath and evicting the spiders. Bath in front of the fire, water bailed into the copper for heating then bailed out into the tin bath then reversed. Sprogs bathed in the sink (Si Clist, I am no stranger to a Belfast sink bath meself). This was the 1960s not the dark ages. There was a working pump nearby and Mum grew up in a cottage which was wired for electicity but had no running water; you had to cart it from the dairy. She chuckles how she never considered that odd as a child.

A cottage like that, only very minimally modified to modern plumbing and lighting, could very easily be reverted into outside privy-and-tin-bathdom. Whereas these barn conversions with their double-height ceilings, oh my goodness....!

Yup, I reckon my birthplace cottage, circa 400 years old, will still be standing, valued and used when these little boxes have been turned into so much landfill waste. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlSpc87Jfr0

elaine241

Well I feel safer thanks to Greyqueens post. My house dates from 1560 with bits being mediaeval! Hot water and heating can be provided by the wood burner, there are more thick curtains and blankets than is decently normal and light can come from oil lamps and candles. Cooking is on a LPG stove and water can come from the spring at the back of the house.

nuatha

Frugalsod wrote: »

Yes but if you are poor you can also qualify for energy grants. If you rent you are at the mercy of the landlord. Though you can still qualify for grants. The problem is that there are plenty of sources of help, so if you still fail to get things done you are a fool.

Actually one can be very poor and not qualify for any grants - most of these are based on benefits - but its quite possible to fall through the cracks in the safety net or just earn enough to take you out of the benefit system yet not enough to do more than survive day to day.

Perplexed_Pineapple wrote: »

...
nuatha, what's your thoughts on best long-term storage media please? I don't have much confidence in USB sticks and hard drives can fail, I'm thinking DVDs might be best but even they degrade and become unreadable over time. Of course you could argue that if you don'd need to access the information for that long it really can't be that important!

Two things to consider - the first is format. The more widespread a format is the more likely you are to be able to read it in the future. However going for the minimum tech format is even better. I used to use the worlds most popular word processing software Word Star, years later I moved to the new king of the heap, Wordperfect. The reason I can easily access files from those days is that I have copies saved as Ascii text and Rich Text Format. I have a preference for lossless formats, which admittedly take up a lot more space, in particular photographs and music.
I use USB sticks for their portability for short term storage. I carry important documents on USB sticks as part of my Every Day Carry. I've verified USB sticks at 5 year old with no data loss, I've put them through washing machines, tumble dryers and tested them in a metal box under EMP attack. They survive all that I've thrown at them, even 3 months salt water immersion.
Magnetic media (hard drives) need refreshing or they will start to loose data over time - At the 10 year mark I've lost less than 10% on some drives and 75% on others. Drives which were refreshed annually were still at 0% loss at the 10 year mark.
For long term storage I currently use single layer DVD-R, stored vertically in jewel cases - labelling is on the jewel case not the DVD. I have archive disks that are 15 years old that all read perfectly. (I also have spare drives in storage)
I have never tested Bluray - it never took off in a way that suggested any longevity to me.
The big problem is what ever format you choose now will become obsolete, so you will need to manage your archive. I remember long sessions of moving data from 5.25 inch floppy disks to 3.5inch disks (having abandoned data on 8 inch disks), archiving 3.5s onto CD ROM etc.
My big concern is that the trend is moving towards backing up in the cloud - perhaps its because I'm a control freak, I don't trust anything important to kit I don't control.
HTH

Witless

Perplexed_Pineapple wrote: »

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10734073/Hull-Council-printing-its-own-money-by-paying-digital-cash-for-voluntary-work.html

Published a day early, methinks.:rotfl:

GreyQueen

elaine241 wrote: »

Well I feel safer thanks to Greyqueens post. My house dates from 1560 with bits being mediaeval! Hot water and heating can be provided by the wood burner, there are more thick curtains and blankets than is decently normal and light can come from oil lamps and candles. Cooking is on a LPG stove and water can come from the spring at the back of the house.

We're gonna come and move in with you, Elaine. Sounds snug.

A lot of modern architecture relies on imputting gas and electicity from the grids, it's in no way suitable for the self-sufficientish lifestyle. You need outbuildings. And larders. Somewhere to park a horse and cart, like my great-grands had in the 1930s. Muck heaps and veggie patches. A peasant holding rather than a sanitised parody of one with roses around the range rover, lol.

nuatha, I think a degree of control-freakery is no bad thing, but maybe this is because I have been accused of it myself and am biased. I feel there's a lot of unjustified faith in 'Them' as a benign source for salvation which is misplaced and may lead to sorry circumstances.

ETA; Hullcoin. Liking it. HMRC and DWP are probably sitting up all night working how to stop it being paid to benefit recipients and how to tax it. Heaven knows the fun HMRC had with LETS exchange schemes. It could work, it would be a good thing, but I can't see TPTB letting Hull Council get away with it. Barstewards.

ragz_2

Added a little mountain of food to the preps today. Mostly pasta and pineapple.
Loved that Hullcoin idea, no way will 'they' let it go to benefit claimants without screwing them in some way though...
Enjoying the reminiscing about baths in sinks, I am an 80s baby, but most of my early baths were in a large saucepan - we lived in caravans most of my childhood, most of which had no hot water and the last one no running water or electricity. We were there about 8 years, left when I was 15 (by that point I was borrowing baths from friends and neighbours!) and Mum used to have to carry water from the farm dairy across the road. So I am well prepared for having to do without both amenities, but equally very thankful for my taps and washing machine!

nuatha

Frugalsod wrote: »

I am not complaining about victorian or pre war homes, my comments were more about much more about very recent new builds, especially those since the 80's when climate change was known about.

According to the 2008 Housing Survey, 21% of housing stock was older than 1919, just 12% had been built since 1990.
Your comments did not address age of housing, they addressed the idiocy of those dwelling in houses. I suspect this was unintentional, but that is certainly the way I read it.

My concern is that this generation will leave the planet in such a poor shape that population collapse is inevitable. 58% of the UK food production lies within 5m of sea level. If the big icesheets melt, then this is inevitable. So how will we feed ourselves when 58% of our agricultural land is meters underwater?

The baby boomers, Generation X, Generation Y? some of us have been campaigning for a greener more sustainable way of living for quite some time.
Given that we produce 40% less food than we consume in the UK (and export £12 billion of that) loosing part of our agricultural land is likely to be problematic - though a chunk of it is already below sea level (50% of the Grade 1 agricultural land in the UK is the Fens which average as below mean sea level)
We will either be building better sea defences - see the Netherlands for how this can be done, or going hungry.

GreyQueen wrote: »

nuatha, I think a degree of control-freakery is no bad thing, but maybe this is because I have been accused of it myself and am biased. I feel there's a lot of unjustified faith in 'Them' as a benign source for salvation which is misplaced and may lead to sorry circumstances.

I describe myself as professionally paranoid - one of the skills I sell is disaster preparation, I've had clients flooded, burned out and burgled, they've all stayed in business and been back up and running within days. (though generally a bit longer to return to normality).
Reliance on outside concerns who do not have your best interests at heart is always likely to be problematic. I used to know a firm that relied on Megaupload.com to secure its backups and distribute files to its saleforce. Megaupload was taken out of business in January 2012.