Preparedness for when

Frugalsod

Bedsit_Bob wrote: »

I notice Aldi have some 210 Litre Rainwater Butts in.

This got me thinking, could you drink rainwater collected in them, if you first put it through a filter?

I would say yes considering the quality of the water demonstrated by water filter manufacturers.

As to maintaining a 7 minute boil in a solar cooker it would be possible if you have no cloud cover, though I would not rely on a single cook system. If problems were to persist then fuel for ethanol or portable gas stoves would be very hard to get.

sabretoothtigger

Rainwater depends on the pollution which can depend on the weather systems. You wouldnt want to drink water after a storm from the sahara rained with sand in it

Generally I'd be more wary of how the water is stored after it rains but I guess good filter fixes all this. Best Ive seen was from USA, an osmosis system as they are generally more often off the grid there. Main drawback is it takes time otherwise it ends up superior to tap water

Frugalsod

sabretoothtigger wrote: »

Rainwater depends on the pollution which can depend on the weather systems. You wouldnt want to drink water after a storm from the sahara rained with sand in it

Generally I'd be more wary of how the water is stored after it rains but I guess good filter fixes all this. Best Ive seen was from USA, an osmosis system as they are generally more often off the grid there. Main drawback is it takes time otherwise it ends up superior to tap water

You could always use a simple paper coffee filter to filter out any big particles. Sand does not dissolve so should be easily filtered out. By using a paper filter for the big particles you will also extend the usefulness of any other filtration system.

Butterfly_Brain

Bedsit_Bob wrote: »

But a bit heavy on fuel.

Not in a kelly kettle or using a rocket stove

sorryImoved

Is it better to keep dehydrated tomatoes in a glass or plastic container? Just made a batch.

[Deleted User]

I always use glass jars with lids that screw on tightly for storing my dehydrated goods, then I keep them on a shelf out of direct sunlight and last years crop is still crisp and as dry as when it first went into the jars. Those look delicious!!!

GreyQueen

Morning all.

Been busy on the allotment and am so sore I can barely move. So will be going back in a couple of hours to do some more, working on the principle that it could hardly hurt worse than it does now, so might as well soldier on.:p

Isn't May a pretty month when the sun shines? I took a moment to look at the wild plum trees and they have immature green fruits, some of which have dropped. Don't know if this is a plum version of the 'June drop' that immature apples have or whether it might have something to do with the fact that these particular trees overhang a footpath and may have been swiped at by kids with sticks - I've seen this in previous years when the fruit is ripe and some of the youngsters knock it down and use it as missiles in their play. Such a waste as they're delicious.

thriftwizard, I can't remember the early 1600s cottage which my parents rented as newly-weds and where brother and I were born, but they talk about it, Ive visited it and been in the one next foor, and Dad walked me thru a neighbouring cottage which was for sale on the estate agent's * website and described what had been changed from our cottage (they'd formerly been identical, you see).

They were built from clay lump on a base of flintstone rubble, with the walls and ceilings re-inforced with re-purposed timbers. Lime plaster inside and rendering outside (you can't see the timbers outside). These timbers were already old in the first decade or two of the 1600s, can you imagine? Mum stripped them back to the bare oak as they'd been whitewashed over. They showed adze marks and shaping for holes where they'd been joined to other timbers. They were probably re-purposed from an old farm building. Wood was difficult and tiring to cut with pit saws and you wouldn't have wasted perfectly good beams.

The original cottage was one room downstairs with a large hearth, and a tightly curled stair at the opposite end from the fire over a larder, with two bedrooms above, the smaller leading on from the larger, with a ladder-stair going up into an attic which was full-height and had a window in the gable end. The chimney stack was at the opposite end and was shared with next door. These cottages were effectively early semis**.

At some point in it's life, it had acquired an add-on kitchen under a catslide roof, with a stone sink and a cold tap and a copper *** built in to the corner. That was the sum and total of it's plumbing and its only other concession to 20th century life by the 1960s when we lived there, was that it was wired for electicity. There was a hollow-sounding spot in the back yard under the grass which they always reckoned was a filled-in well.

Like a lot of these old cottages, it has a very steeply pitched roof, the steepness betraying that it was originally thatched, although it's been pan-tiled for as long as anyone can remember.

In my grandparents' village, which is strung out along what would have been a coaching road to London (6 coaches a day in the 19th century!), there are a lot of cottages which are 600 or more years old. Some of them have the roof-timbers inside blackened with soot from Shakespeare's time as the chimney was a relatively-recent innovation in the16th century. It blows me away to think how well they've lasted.

Most of these old cottages have been 'improved' within an inch of their lives and would be much less suitable for a leccy-free future than they would have been when I was a nipper. Some may be retrofittable but the loss of a chimney isn't an easy or cheap thing to overcome.

English-English translation:

* estate agent = realtor.

** 'semi' in UK English is an abbreviation for 'semi-detached'. Meaning a style of house where one wall is shared with one other home, so they stand in pairs. This saves space as well as building materials. Not to be confused with a large truck.

*** A curved copper tank, set into a concrete or blockwork frame with a chimney of its own and a grate underneath. The copper had water added and subtracted by baling and was used for heating water in volume, to wash clothes, or to bail out into tin baths. Often built outside in a tacked on 'wash-house' ; my Nan's bungalow was built in the 1950s and it and all the neighbouring homes had wash-houses.

Bygorry, if the lights go out permanantly, and our lovely automatic washing machines squat silently in our kitchens, a home with a wash house will be very desirable indeed.

DawnW

MrsLurcherwalker wrote: »

I always use glass jars with lids that screw on tightly for storing my dehydrated goods, then I keep them on a shelf out of direct sunlight and last years crop is still crisp and as dry as when it first went into the jars. Those look delicious!!!

Another vote for glass jars with a well fitting screw on lids. Repurposed ones are fine. I still have some courgettes I dried last summer, and they have kept perfectly. I keep them on a shelf in my larder, away from sunlight and relatively cool.

[Deleted User]

Ironic isn't it that we're debating staying warm and it's this weather when all I'm thinking about is staying cool!!! I'm sat here with all the windows open on the sun side of the house but with the curtains drawn, it's an old fashioned dodge but does work. The temperature in the lounge is still 20.9 and hasn't budged a smidgen from 5.15am this morning when it was reading that at the time. So, comfy in here without a fan on, can't be bad. Those of you who make homemade beer/wine/cider it might be worth checking your bottles as we've had a couple of bottles break in the heat as the cider has become very volatile ( massively fizzy!!!) so having aquired a pressure barrel at the bootfair we went to earlier today he's going to try and transfer the cider from the glass bottles to the barrel to stop any more muffled thuds from the cupboard in the shed!!! I remember well when we made homemade wine that boom, thump, glugg,glugg,glugg noise of bottles popping corks and fountaining up walls and onto floors, not nice!!!

thriftwizard

Cool, we can do! Open the conservatory door and/or windows, and the loo window on the other side of the house, and we benefit from a lovely cool through-draft. Just as well, as this house, something over 100 years old, has a massive amount of solar gain, as all the main windows face south. Despite the original turn-of-the-previous-century drafts & leaks, it's not a cold house even in winter.

Had an interesting night's sleep; I've been overheating terribly under a 10.5 tog polyester duvet & my cheap & cheerful summer one fell apart when I washed it in about November. But I invested in a summer-weight wool duvet at Wonderwool, which I tried out for the first time last night. Brilliant! Absolutely comfortable, with a nice faint clean woolly smell. I can feel a project coming on over the summer, to make myself a winter-weight one from some of the tons of free fleece swilling around our fair county every summer. I have the know-how, I have the equipment; so, do I have the get-up-&-go to actually do it?